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Pentagram turns 40 this year—the company was founded on June 12, 1972—and to celebrate the occasion we’ve created a short film. The film tells the story of a boy born on the day Pentagram opened and how his life has been tracked (and kerned) by four decades of Pentagram design.

Written by Naresh Ramchandani and Tom Edmonds
Directed by Christian Carlsson
Additional animation by Simone Nunziato

Voiceover by Daniel Lapaine
Sound design by Iain Grant and Wam London
Music by Graeme Miller
Titles by John Rushworth

Design by Pentagram

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Pentagram has been honored by the Art Directors Club with several winners in the ADC 91st Annual Awards, presented last week at a gala in New York.

Three of our projects from the past year received Bronze Cubes: Michael Gericke’s centennial exhibition for the New York Public Library, “Celebrating 100 Years,” received the prize in the Environmental Design category; Angus Hyland’s packaging for Cass Art Own Brand took the award in Package Design; and Domenic Lippa’s design for Circular 17 was selected in Editorial Design.

Last but certainly not least, Pentagram would like to congratulate our good friend Marion Deuchars and longtime client Laurence King Publishing on winning coveted Gold and Silver Cubes for Let’s Make Some Great Art. The Gold was awarded in the Illustration, General Book category, and Deuchars also won a Silver in the Book Design category for her design of the book. Angus Hyland currently serves as Consultant Art Director for Laurence King.

Thanks to all our designers, teams and clients for their great work!

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Pentagram’s Eddie Opara has been named to Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business, an annual list that celebrates “business innovators who dare to think differently.” The list, published in the magazine’s June issue, out next week, recognizes a wide-ranging group of leaders from the fields of design, technology, advertising, business and entertainment, and Eddie is ranked alongside other innovators including Wes Anderson, Björk and CeeLo Green.

For the issue, Eddie was invited to create an infographic illustrating his process for creating an infographic. The image playfully shows how he turns data into art. “(The illustration) is a library of infographics,” he tells Fast Company. “Too often, people start with a pie or bar chart, but you have to understand the content and patterns in data before throwing images on paper.” Several members of the Pentagram team appear in the infographic, analyzing data and helping the process along. View details after the jump.

Infographic: Eddie Opara, partner-in-charge and designer; Verena Michelitsch, designer.

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Michael Gericke and his team have designed a new campaign for Top of the Rock, the observation deck at Rockefeller Center.

New York City never looks better than it does from Top of the Rock©, the observation deck at the summit of the landmark 70-story skyscraper 30 Rockefeller Center© in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. The spectacular unobstructed views from Top of the Rock stretch from New York harbor to the south, to Central Park to the north, from the Hudson River to the outer boroughs and beyond.

Pentagram’s Michael Gericke and his team have designed a bold and elegant new advertising campaign and graphic program for Top of the Rock that highlights the amazing one-of-a-kind vistas seen from the deck. The campaign, which will run throughout the year, appears in print advertisements, promotions and websites, and on posters, digital kiosks, banners and buses throughout New York. The campaign is especially visible at Rockefeller Center itself, where the colorful graphics build awareness for the millions of visitors who pass through the center.

The campaign assembles views taken from Top of the Rock throughout the day and in different seasons.

The campaign captures the spectacular all-around vistas seen from Top of the Rock.

Gericke worked closely on the campaign with Tishman Speyer, who own and manage Rockefeller Center. Top of the Rock reopened in 2005 following a $75 million renovation and has since become one of the city’s most visited tourist attractions. 30 Rockefeller Center is the heart of the bustling complex of offices, shops, theaters and public plaza at Rockefeller Center, and is also known as the GE Building, home of NBC Studios and its signature programs “The Today Show” and “Saturday Night Live,” (as well as “30 Rock,” actually filmed in Queens). Built in 1933, the building is an Art Deco masterpiece, and the three-tiered observation deck at Top of the Rock was originally built to resemble the deck of an ocean liner. The views are ranked by many as the best in the city, surpassing the observatory at the Empire State Building, 15 blocks to the south.

To capture the unique Top of the Rock experience, Gericke and his team have developed an unusual treatment of the skyline that transcends familiar images of the city. The views at Top of the Rock change continuously throughout the days and seasons, and the campaign pieces together a panoramic assemblage of images taken from the observation deck from day to night. Specific views—looking north, looking south, and so on—are assembled from multiple images, showcasing the spectacular all-around vista from deck, as well as suggesting the many points of view available to visitors.

The iconic photographic treatment has been paired with a memorable tagline, “Any Point of View,” also developed by Pentagram. An integral element of the campaign, the tagline highlights the unobstructed views and has an embedded double meaning. The “NY” in “Any” has been set in bold to provide another read—“A NY Point of View”—that emphasizes Top of the Rock as a one-of-a-kind New York experience.

Project Team: Michael Gericke, partner-in-charge and designer; Don Bilodeau, Tony Lee, Matt McInerney, Jed Skillins and Kelly Sung, designers.

The campaign appears in advertisements and promotions in major media, at Rockefeller Center and throughout New York.

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Working in different eras, the Italian designers Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada both subvert contemporary ideals of femininity, beauty and taste in their designs. Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, the spring 2012 exhibition at The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, examines the affinities between the two iconic designers. Opening this week, the exhibition is timed to tonight’s 2012 Costume Institute Gala Benefit, the Met’s biggest event of the year. The show opens to the public on Thursday and remains on view through August 19, 2012.

Pentagram’s Abbott Miller has designed a catalogue for the exhibition that uniquely captures and extends the show’s juxtaposition of the two designers. The book presents over 200 archival and newly photographed images of the designers’ work, and includes a smaller “book within a book” that features the “impossible conversations” between the two women. Schiaparelli and Prada both share a love of Surrealism and surprise, and the book itself has been conceived as an unusual object that constructs a playful dialogue of images and commentary between two designers who never actually met.

Miller worked closely with Costume Institute curators Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda to develop a book that reflects the inventiveness of the two designers. Schiaparelli, practicing from the late 1920s to the early 1950s, and Prada, from the late 1980s to present, both have an active interest in art––Schiaparelli famously collaborated with Dalí and Cocteau, and Prada leads the Fondazione Prada, an arts foundation and exhibition space. In their work both designers have referenced uniforms and girlish dresses to subvert expectations of femininity; explored the influence of antiquity and Eastern cultures; and made use of Surrealistic practices like playing with scale, displacement and blurring the natural and artificial, reality and illusion. (The exhibition’s subtitle is inspired by Miguel Covarrubias’s “Impossible Interviews” for Vanity Fair in the 1930s, which once featured Schiaparelli in an imagined dialogue with Stalin.)

The book’s innovative structure functions on two levels. On one level, the book is a traditional picture book; there is a dialogue constructed between the images, and many spreads present facing photographs of works by Schiaparelli and Prada, inviting comparisons. On another level, the smaller “book within the book” bound within the larger images hosts the imaginary conversation between the two women, assembled of quotes from each on various subjects that tie into the exhibition themes (“Ugly Chic,” “Hard Chic,” “The Surreal Body,” etc.) The book’s table of contents appears on these smaller pages, introducing the reader to the format woven into the book.

The presentation is understated, but has a subversive, deconstructed quality that ties into Schiaparelli and Prada’s work. Each spread stages its own dialogue, between the facing images and the inner book, which presents a running commentary and narrative by Schiaparelli and Prada, as well as images of alternate views, details or historical reference. In some spreads, all three frames are engaged––the two facing pages and the inner little book––in a “triangle” of conversation.

As a physical object the catalogue also has a Surrealist quality and is highly interactive. The book is presented in an unique size that is accessible and convenient––smaller than a typical museum catalogue, with a literary scale, like a novel––but large enough to feature lush, exquisite images. At the same time, the book is tactile and easy to handle, almost like a clutch. The cloth cover pictures a Prada pattern of surrealistic lips, with a smaller inset image that acts as the “cover” of the book-within-book. A cloth spine wrapped over the book’s true spine suggests the construction techniques of the fashion designers. The typeface used throughout the book is Neutra Slab.

Miller previously designed the catalogue for The Costume Institute exhibition Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy.

Project Team: Abbott Miller, partner-in-charge and designer; Krista Reeder, Kristen Spilman and Kim Walker, designers.

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This summer a new kind of hero will appear on the New York cityscape: Meet Wendy, a big, blue, star-shaped superstructure treated with smog-eating, air-cleansing titania nanoparticles. Designed by the architects HWKN (Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner, who also founded Architizer), Wendy is this year’s winner of the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program and will be installed in the courtyard of PS1 in Long Island City, Queens, where it will be used for the museum’s popular Warm Up! summer series of dance parties and performances. Once in place, Wendy will help scrub the air of particulates and pollution—projected to be the equivalent of taking 260 cars off the road during the installation’s three-month run.

Pentagram’s Natasha Jen was one of three designers invited by HWKN to create tote bags and t-shirts to help Wendy’s cause. Like Wendy, the products have been treated with titania nanoparticles that absorb pollutants from the air. All profits from sales of the totes and t-shirts will go to helping build and maintain Wendy at PS1 this summer. 2×4 and Bruce Mau Design also contributed designs to the series.

For the tote bag graphics, Wendy’s ambiguous shape and resemblance to a speech bubble inspired Jen and Pentagram designer Jin Kwang Kim to create a short graphic novel—a mystery. In the panels, Wendy’s form can be read as an object, the protaganist, or as speech bubbles formed by an unknown entity. In the t-shirt version, Wendy’s silhouette expands and explodes beyond a single frame, sending out good vibrations.

Get your Wendy tote bags and t-shirts here.

Project Team: Natasha Jen, partner-in-charge and designer; Jin Kwang Kim, designer.