Pentagram’s DJ Stout and his team at the Austin office rebranded Maudie’s Tex-Mex three years ago and have continued working with the iconic local restaurant chain ever since. Maudie’s, which began as a tiny Mexican food cafe in a strip-mall shopping center not far from the Austin office, has now expanded to six locations. Tex-Mex is an original Texas invention, a close cousin to the traditional cuisine of the Lone Star State’s neighbor to the south, but a truly unique culinary art all its own. Maudie’s has continued the Tex-Mex tradition but with a very “Austin” twist: It is the only all-natural Tex-Mex restaurant in the region. Unlike its Mexican brethren, Maudie’s uses all-natural beef and chicken and organic eggs. Maudie’s has mastered the art of Tex-Mex, and Pentagram has mastered the art of Maudie’s.
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The 2013 Luminato Festival opened in Toronto this past weekend for the start of a 10-day celebration of music, theater, dance, visual arts, literature and film. Launched in 2007, Luminato has grown into one of the largest arts festivals in North America; in its short six years, the event has commissioned 66 new works of art and featured 7,500 artists from 40 countries, highlighting Toronto as a cultural capital. Luminaries scheduled to appear at this year’s festival include the musicians Joni Mitchell and Laurie Anderson, performance artist Marina Abramovic, choreographer Mark Morris, architects Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, and filmmaker Atom Egoyan, among many others.
Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and Hamish Smyth have designed a colorful new identity for Luminato that captures the vibrancy of the festival and its programming. The designers worked closely with Luminato Artistic Director Jorn Weisbrodt, CEO Janice Price, and Mary Ann Farrell, Senior Director, Marketing and Communications, on the project. To implement the identity, Pentagram collaborated with a group of Toronto-based creative partners that included Cosmic Design, who produced all the final artwork for advertising, brochures and other promotions, and Lunch, who designed and built the new Luminato website.
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William Russell was approached by Maria Lemos, founder of Rainbowwave Showroom, to develop the in-store experience for her new concept store, Mouki. Located on up-and-coming Chiltern street in the Marylebone area of London, the boutique houses hand-picked fashion, accessories, beauty and lifestyle goods from around the world.
The interior of the store was of great importance to Maria – she wanted a space that was quiet and minimal to reflect the nature of the collections.
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Pentagram’s Paula Scher has designed her 19th season campaign for Shakespeare in the Park. After almost two decades, we’re allowed to make a few mistakes. Introducing The Comedy of srorrE Errors and evoL Love’s Labour Lost.
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When Hurricane Sandy hit New York last October, the city’s 14 miles of beaches took the brunt of the storm, with boardwalk structures destroyed and millions of tons of sand displaced. Following an extraordinary effort by the Mayor’s Office, the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, and the NYC Department of Design and Construction, the city’s eight public swimming beaches were reopened on Memorial Day, only seven months after being devastated by the storm.
As part of the restoration, Pentagram’s Paula Scher has created a program of signage and environmental graphics that welcome New Yorkers back to their beaches. Pentagram has worked on the project in collaboration with a team of architects and designers that includes McLaren Engineering Group, Garrison Architects, Sage and Coombe Architects, LTL Architects and Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects.
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The second edition of luxury men’s magazine Road Book has just been published in locations across Asia. Pentagram’s Angus Hyland and his team have rebranded and redesigned the magazine, relaunching the title with the first issue in April. The bi-monthly magazine is aimed at high net worth individuals and features classic and contemporary cars, timepieces, fashion and more.
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Predating both Central Park and Prospect Park, Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn was one of the most important landscapes of the 19th century, ultimately influencing the rise of public parks and green space in the US. Pentagram’s Abbott Miller has designed A Beautiful Way to Go: New York’s Green-Wood Cemetery, a new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York that commemorates the 175th anniversary of this national historic landmark. The show opens this week and remains on view through September 15.
Established in 1838 in what was then a rural area of the city, Green-Wood is a bucolic 478-acre landscape of rolling hills, gentle ponds, meandering paths and striking Gothic Revival architecture that was for a time the most popular tourist attraction in the country. Visitors enjoyed the beautiful natural setting and saw the cemetery as a place of repose and relaxation. Green-Wood eventually inspired the design of Central Park and Prospect Park, as well as the creation of the first suburb, Llewelyn Park in New Jersey.
Miller’s exhibition design creates a continuous environmental surface from historic maps of the cemetery. Museum visitors navigate the exhibition encountering objects and stories of Green-Wood’s most famous “residents” that are positioned according to their location within the landscape.
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The 83rd International Geneva Motor Show was a landmark event for Rolls Royce, with the launch of their new Wraith, which the carmaker calls the “most potent and technologically advanced” in its history. Justus Oehler and his team designed the customer experience for their exhibition space, building on his work with the company over the last two years and creating a narrative and a monolithic expression for the brand, encapsulating style and elegance.
The space was multifaceted, featuring a large lounge with a seating and bar area, an atelier, a sales area and glass cabinets with after-sales items. All areas were gathered around a Rolls-Royce car, a focal point in the space. Oehler designed the atelier shelves, with all its original pieces sourced from the Rolls-Royce workshops and factory. He also designed the information graphics and selected the materials needed to develop the overall look and feel of the space, collaborating with Puchner P3 architects based in Munich.
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The searchlights of Twentieth Century Fox are one of the most recognized icons in the world. Pentagram’s Michael Gericke and Emily Oberman have drawn on this rich heritage and Fox’s contemporary innovations in media to create the logo and develop the name for 21st Century Fox. The new media and entertainment company will be established following the proposed separation of News Corporation into two companies. 21st Century Fox will serve as the umbrella company for Twentieth Century Fox and the rest of the group’s entertainment and media properties, all of which will retain their existing well-known names and logos.
Pentagram worked closely with the 21st Century Fox team on the development of the identity, which is designed to honor the creative legacy of Twentieth Century Fox and celebrate the company’s vital future. The name and symbol distill the elements of Fox’s familiar searchlights-and-monument logo into a dynamic new identity. The 21st Century Fox logo features a pair of sweeping searchlights that suggest entertainment, broadcasting and limitless possibilities within a circle shape inspired by a lens. Iconic and distinctive, the symbol is accompanied by a wordmark set in strong, stacked lettering that is derived from the typographic pedestal of the Twentieth Century Fox logo and Fox Broadcasting’s wordmark.
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Partner DJ Stout and designer Carla Delgado in Pentagram’s Austin office have recently completed a new identity and a rebranding of Oklahoma City University (OCU). The private urban college, located in the Uptown District of its namesake city, is affiliated with the United Methodist Church and offers a wide variety of degrees in the liberal arts, fine arts, science and business. The only Oklahoma institution listed in the top tier of the regional, master’s-level university category by U.S. News and World Report, OCU is also listed in Forbes’ “Best Christian Colleges” and “100 Best College Buys.”
Oklahoma City University is also known for its top-notch dance, music and theater programs and its impressive track-record of placing graduates in Broadway musicals and theatrical productions, most notably in the lineups of the Radio City Rockettes. In addition to its performing arts prowess OCU is renowned for its many beauty pageant contestants, contributing $2.2 million in educational scholarships to more than 340 pageant contestants over the last 55 years. Fondly dubbed “Miss America U” for its tradition of winning pageants, OCU boasts 24 Miss Oklahomas and holds the record for Miss America winners. A larger than life-size bronze statue portraying the school’s three former Miss Americas—Jane Jayroe, Susan Powell and Shawntel Smith—stands guard at the entrance to the campus.
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