Tantrum, a new retail concept aimed at teenage girls, has launched its flagship store at Westfield Stratford in London. Pentagram partners William Russell and Domenic Lippa collaborated to develop the interior store design, brand identity and graphic language.
The logotype, designed by Lippa was based around Din rounded, with some characters re-drawn to give the identity personality. In addition, Lippa and his team decided that the identity could be moved, overlapped, made into outlines and played with to keep it fresh.
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Stern (“Star”) is Germany’s most widely read magazine and one of the world’s best newsweeklies, balancing in-depth journalism about current events with arts, entertainment and lifestyle reporting, all accompanied by extraordinary photography. Pentagram’s Luke Hayman and team have collaborated with Stern on a redesign that updates the look and feel of the magazine for a modern audience. Hayman worked closely with the magazine’s editor-in-chief Dominik Wichmann and art director Johannes Erler to develop the format.
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Issue number one of the men’s lifestyle magazine Road Book has just been published in Thailand and Singapore and is currently being rolled out across Asia. Road Book, a product of INDICIUM (also branded by Pentagram), is a luxury publication featuring contemporary and classic cars, timepieces, boats and yachts, aeroplanes, hotels, clothing, and accessories, fragrances and technology. Angus Hyland and his team have rebranded and designed the magazine, aimed at high net worth individuals.
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Pecha Kucha, which roughly translates to “chit-chat” in Japanese, is a creative speaking event that originated in Tokyo. The unique format, a kind of speed-dating version of a TED talk, requires each of 10 guest speakers to develop their presentations within the strict parameters of 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide. The slides are set on a timer out of the control of the presenters, so the cumulative effect of 10 short presentations, just over six minutes each, leads to a fast and furious evening of entertainment and creative inspiration.
Pecha Kucha was originally brought to Austin by Herman Dyal and Carla Fraser, and Pentagram Austin partner DJ Stout and Lana McGilvray became the directors in 2011. Three or four of the events are organized every year, and to date there have been 16 Pecha Kucha evenings in Austin, with number 17 on the way this Thursday, April 18th. McGilvray and Stout took the helm at PK 10 and for that program Stout and designer Stu Taylor designed a poster that was given away at the event. The two Pentagrammers continued to design posters for every Pecha Kucha evening after that and have now created a series of eight collectible posters. All of the posters have been silkscreen printed by Tony Diaz of Industry Print Shop, who just happens to be one of the 10 guest speakers at the upcoming PK 17.
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Harry Pearce and his team have designed the logo for a new YouTube channel, Human Rights, a collaboration between WITNESS, a human rights organisation and Storyful, a content verifier. The Human Rights channel features user-generated content, curated by WITNESS showing some of the most effecting footage from around the world.
Pearce and his team also created the above ident to be used at the beginning of every video that is uploaded to the channel. Because all footage uploaded is user-generated, the purpose of the ident is to give all the disparate footage unity, context and an identity.
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Spring is finally here, and New Yorkers are happily turning down their thermostats after an especially long, cold winter that saw an increase in energy bills. An alternative to costly, conventional energy sources, geothermal heat pumps (GHP) offer a cheaper, cleaner and more efficient way to heat and cool buildings. GHP systems take advantage of the relatively constant temperature of the earth’s interior, using it as a source or sink for heat. For cooling, heat is extracted from the building and dissipated into the ground; for warmth, heat is extracted from the earth and pumped into the building.
The New York City Department of Design and Construction (DDC) has identified GHP as an important strategy for developing sustainable energy in the city, especially for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Working with the DDC, Pentagram’s Eddie Opara and team have designed Geothermal Heat Pump Manual: A Design and Installation Guide for New York City. The book is the companion volume to the DDC’s Water Matters: A Design Manual for Water Conservation in Buildings, designed by Opara by 2011. GHP systems are part of PlaNYC 2030, the city’s official plan for sustainability, and the manual’s guidelines will be the subject of a special roundtable presented by the Urban Green Council on April 10.
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Last night at 11 Downing Street, the UK’s Chancellor George Osborne presented Magnus Carlsen with the medal for his victory at the World Chess Candidate’s tournament in London.
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Quick Link: Daniel Weil Reinvents the Baby Bottle for Mothercare
Saint Mary’s of California, a Catholic liberal arts college nestled in the picturesque Moraga Valley twenty miles east of San Francisco, wanted its alumni magazine completely overhauled, so the magazine’s staff decided to call a couple of Texans. When Pentagram Austin partner DJ Stout, a fifth generation Texan, and designer Carla Delgado, an Austin native and University of Texas Longhorn, rode into town (actually they flew), they found one of the oldest, most beautiful campuses on the West Coast, an institution rooted in the life and work of Saint John Baptist de La Salle, founder of the Christian Brothers and the patron saint of teachers.
The statue of La Salle, one of the most recognizable icons of the college (next to its championship basketball team), graces the cover of the redesign launch issue, which hit mailboxes earlier this month. But the traditional printed book La Salle is normally holding has been updated with a more modern book—a MacBook Air, to be exact. The juxtaposition of the Old World bronze statue and the sleek laptop computer is symbolic of the alumni magazine’s transformation to a thoughtful new contemporary design developed by Pentagram. It also reflects the primary theme of the issue—the national debate over the value of higher education in today’s fast and furious, high-tech world. It’s a thorny subject for a liberal arts college to discuss at all, much less feature on the cover of its primary piece of print communication, but the launch issue addresses the theme in multiple ways.
“The folks at Saint Mary’s told us the school’s guiding ethos was based on open dialogue and debate,” says Stout. “I’ve heard that before, but to their credit the magazine’s staff actually embraced our suggestions to put those lofty ideals to the test in the all important debut of the redesign.”
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Launched by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in 2009 to spotlight New York as a global hub for technology and creativity, NYC BigApps is an annual competition that invites software developers and members of the public to create web or mobile applications that address major issues facing New York City residents, using official city data made accessible through the NYC Open Data initiative. The competition is co-sponsored by the NYC Economic Development Corporation and the NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, and is powered by CollabFinder, an online platform that allows users to post project ideas and team up to build apps. In its first three editions, BigApps has helped create nearly 240 useful apps, including WayFinder NYC, Taxihack, Sportaneous, and Parking Finder.
Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and Jesse Reed have designed a new identity for BigApps, introduced with this year’s competition. The name “BigApps” is a play on “Big Apple,” and the new identity suggests the form and colors of an apple, as well as a pie chart, emphasizing the competition’s roots in information.
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