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The Pentagram Papers in Wallpaper

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Helping Haiti

    
Posters designed by Harry Pearce, left, and Justus Oehler, right, for the Haiti Poster Project.

Harry Pearce and Justus Oehler have designed posters for The Haiti Poster Project, which are on sale now in aid of Doctors Without Borders. The overall goal is to reach a donation level of $1 million (USD). Designers around the world were approached to create limited edition posters in quantities of 25 to 100. Apart from the money donated the goal of increasing social awareness and to highlight the role design can play in conveying important messages.

Pearce describes his work as simply trying to capture the weight of the sadness. “A city as a body beneath a sheet. It’s still, silent and the plain facts say it all.” The image of the lettering beneath the sheet was photographed by Richard Foster and the printing was kindly donated by Gavin Martin.

Oehler based his design on seismographs. Just as Haiti was suddenly shaken by the tremors, the word Haiti is also disrupted. “I used my fountain pen to write the word Haiti disturbed by fierce seismographic squiggles.” The simple text beneath the disruption encourages the viewer to ‘Help Rebuild Haiti!’.

The signed posters are available for sale through The Haiti Poster Project and all proceeds will go to Doctors Without Borders.

Harry’s poster also features on the cover of DAMn magazine and Justus’ on the Fast Company website.

Justus Oehler and Pentagram Berlin in Eye Magazine

Quick Link: Justus Oehler and Pentagram Berlin in Eye Magazine

Pentagram on Fast Company’s List of the 10 Most Innovative Design Companies

Quick Link: Pentagram on Fast Company’s List of the 10 Most Innovative Design Companies

New Work: ‘Cooking with Pomiane’

Edouard de Pomiane (1875-1964) was one of the first great modern food writers and culinary personalities, a biologist by training who invented the field he called “gastrotechnology,” or the science of cookery. He was also known for his great mustache. Justus Oehler and his team in Berlin have rendered de Pomiane’s personal trademark in simple ingredients for the cover of a reissue of the 1930 classic Cooking with Pomiane, out now from Serif.

De Pomiane worked as a physician at the Institut Pasteur in Paris and in his writings, recipes and radio broadcasts often attempted to demystify cooking by explaining the chemical processes at work. His recipes were remarkable for their “hard-boiled” tone—directly addressing you, the reader, about what you should be seeing and smelling as you follow them—and for his general disdain for “traditional” elaborate French cuisine. (His other popular title was French Cooking in Ten Minutes, hardly Julia Child.) A photograph of the real Pomiane and his ‘stache after the jump.

35 Years of Holiday Greetings from Pentagram

Every Christmas since 1971, Pentagram has designed and published a small annual greetings booklet and sent it to our friends, colleagues and clients. Usually designed around a game or activity, these small books are intended to provide a diversion during the hectic holiday period. The partners take turns researching and designing the books, which traditionally avoid any direct reference to the season, adopting a strong graphic vocabulary in order to set them apart from the myriad of cards received at this time of year.

Wallpaper has put together a gallery of the books from Christmases past, 1974-2008, published together for the first time. The 2009 card, currently in the mail, tweaks the format. (More on this soon.) Happy holidays!

Justus Oehler at the Face to Face Conference

Justus Oehler and Katrin Kahlefeld, Head of Public Relations for the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, will be speaking together at this year’s Face to Face design and business conference in Ludwigsburg, Germany. The pair will be discussing Pentagram’s work for the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen, an ongoing collaboration since Oehler designed the museum’s identity in 2006. Following their talk, Oehler will be joining a panel discussion titled “Peculiarities that accompany the design process.” (We know about those!)

Established in 2001, “Face to Face” is the only design conference in the world dedicated to bringing designers and their clients together on stage with the goal of illuminating the design process. The German conference has a different partner country every year; this year it is France. The conference runs from 12 to 14 November. Registration information can be found here.

Justus Oehler’s DRK Kliniken Triannual Report on FPO

Quick Link: Justus Oehler’s DRK Kliniken Triannual Report on FPO

New Work: DRK Kliniken

Justus Oehler and his team at Pentagram Berlin have designed the Triennial Report for the DRK Kliniken (Hospital Group of the German Red Cross) in Berlin. This is the second time Pentagram has designed the report for the group, which is a non-profit network of five hospitals in the city that provide specialized, high-quality care.

While reports of this kind for organizations in the health market are usually “dry” and factual, the DRK report offers something new with the unusual theme of “Kopf und Herz,” or “Head and Heart.” This juxtaposition of Facts and Figures vs. Feelings and Emotions has been used to enliven the report with sections titled “Innovation & Tradition,” “Old & Young,” “Giving & Taking,” “Man & Machine,” etc.

The designers decided on a visual system that would echo this dichotomy. The cover illustration is a human brain superimposed with a spot-varnished and embossed red heart. Each of the 15 chapters that make up the core of the 50-page report have been arranged as single spreads, with text on the left, and illustrations, created by Pentagram, on the right, all printed in red, grey and black.

A look inside after the jump.

New Work: Philharmonie Luxembourg

Justus Oehler and his team in Berlin have designed the first annual report for the Philharmonie Luxembourg, the national concert hall of Luxembourg. The 140-page book describes the history and activities of the Philharmonie, which was launched in 2005 and is home to the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, Solistes Européens, the Orchestre de Chambre du Luxembourg, and other musical groups.

The designers used reportage-style black and white photography of staff in action to separate the individual sections of the report. The overarching colour theme is based on the Philharmonie’s rainbow-hued identity, also designed by Pentagram Berlin. The identity references the hall’s distinctive architecture by the Pritzker Prize-winning French architect Christian de Portzamparc. The logo shows the name set in black and complemented by a configuration of vertical lines in the colours of a rainbow. The typography recalls the slender columns of the main hall, while the rainbow of lines suggests both the curved wave of the building’s glass façade and the rich, colourful nature of music.