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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.

Among Green-Wood’s 560,000 burials are figures central to the social, political and cultural life of New York City, including Leonard Bernstein, Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Boss Tweed, Henry Steinway, and F.A.O. Schwarz. The cemetery grounds are a museum of monuments and statuary by leading architects and artists including Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Stanford White and Richard Upjohn, and the iconic Gothic chapel at the main gate was designed by Warren & Wetmore, creators of Grand Central Terminal.

The exhibition design gathers artifacts within a range of lantern-like vitrines, conjuring an impression of the park at twilight. A series of maps that document the distinctive, twisting paths and roads of the park are spliced together on the floor, creating a miniaturized landscape. Significant burial plots and the artifacts and images associated with them are arranged according to their position on the map. These objects include a peacock headdress for Louis Tiffany, a pencil for Eberhard Faber, a photographic portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and gold, onyx and diamond cuff links for Boss Tweed.

The story of the cemetery itself is told through historic documents; sculptures, drawings and paintings (by Asher Brown Durand, of the Hudson River School); and photographs, including eight large images of the park in different seasons by Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao. Vintage guidebooks, prints and souvenirs capture Green-Wood’s days as a tourist attraction.

Project Team: Abbott Miller, partner-in-charge and designer; Jesse Kidwell and Chris Adamick, designers. Photographs by Bilyana Dimitrova.

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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.

The exhibition space also had an interactive element, with information plinths fitted with internal illumination. When switched off, the plinths appeared completely black; when switched on, they pulsated, revealing type synchronised with the launch video.

Oehler and his team are now working on the next show, the IAA in Frankfurt.

Project team: Justus Oehler, partner-in-charge and designer; Sonja Scharrer, project manager and David Steingrüber, designer.

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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.

The new name is inspired by Twentieth Century Fox, the legendary film studio that News Corporation acquired in 1984 in its first foray into entertainment. The new name draws upon the rich creative heritage of Twentieth Century Fox, while also speaking to the innovation and dynamism that will define each of the group’s businesses through the 21st Century.

Project Team: Michael Gericke and Emily Oberman, partners-in-charge and designers; Jonathan Correira and Jed Skillins, senior designers.

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Pentagram is thrilled to announce that our partner Paula Scher has been selected to receive the 2013 National Design Award for Communication Design. The National Design Awards celebrate outstanding achievement and innovation in design and are sponsored by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. First Lady Michelle Obama serves as the Honorary Patron for this year’s awards, and the recipients will be honored at a gala on October 17 in New York, in conjunction with National Design Week.

Scher has been at the forefront of graphic design for over four decades. Bold, smart and accessible, her images have entered the American vernacular. She has created identity and branding systems, environmental graphics, packaging and publication designs for clients that include Bloomberg, Citibank, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Bausch + Lomb, the Museum of Modern Art, the Public Theater, the High Line, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, the New York Philharmonic, and Jazz at Lincoln Center, among many, many others. She was previously a Finalist in the Communication Design category in 2005 and 2007.

Congratulations, Paula!

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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.

Before Stout and Delgado redesigned it, OCU’s primary logo featured a silhouetted likeness of the university’s iconic Gold Star Tower, a 286-foot red brick tower built in 1953 to honor Methodists who died in World War II. The tower, an Oklahoma City landmark located prominently in the center of campus, is topped off with a 200-pound star positioned at the end of a long pole like a star on a Christmas tree. “OCU’s sports teams are called The Stars after the Gold Star Tower, and many of the university’s celebrity alumni, like the Tony Award-winning Kristin Chenoweth, are singers and dancers and ‘stars’ of the stage,” says Stout. “So it only seemed natural to turn their static star into a dancing star, with just a hint of the long pole it’s attached to at the top of that building.”

There are are other stars at OCU as well– star faculty and researchers, stars in the classroom, on the basketball court and star alumni in business, law and medicine. “The rebranding committee we assembled told me that the student body was made up of overachievers.” Says Stout, “That lead us to the notion of the rising star logo and to the simple tagline ‘Rise.’ to replace the more limiting ‘Where you’re a name, not a number’ tagline.”

The Pentagram team also updated OCU’s caps-and-small-caps wordmark with a contemporary Roman typeface called Romain, set in a more approachable upper- and lowercase, and downplayed the word “University” in a smaller sized sans-serif face, called Houschka Pro, in all caps.

“Oklahoma City is experiencing a bit of a Renaissance at the moment,” Says Stout, “Downtown is steadily getting refurbished, there’s a new Olympic rowing center and now they’ve got a championship NBA basketball team. OCU is the only university named after the state’s vibrant capitol, the largest city in Oklahoma, so we emphasized the name ‘Oklahoma City’, reduced the size of the word ‘University’ in the logotype and encouraged the school to hitch their wagon to the city’s newfound momentum whenever possible. Now the city, it’s namesake university and the high-kicking Rockettes can all rise up together.”

Project Team: DJ Stout, partner-in-charge and designer; Carla Delgado, designer.

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Punk’s iconoclastic aesthetic was originally rooted in street culture, but its subversive style has had an enduring influence on high fashion. This impact is explored in PUNK: Chaos to Couture, the spring 2013 exhibition at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The show juxtaposes original punk garments from the mid-1970s with more recent fashion to illustrate how haute couture and ready-to-wear have borrowed punk’s visual symbols, and how designers continue to extend the visual language of punk by merging social realism with artistic expression. Pentagram’s Abbott Miller has designed a catalogue for the exhibition that captures the immediacy of the subject in a format inspired by the 12” LP cover.

The exhibition, one of the most highly anticipated of the season, will be celebrated at next Monday’s 2013 Costume Institute Gala Benefit, the Met’s biggest event of the year. (Joining Vogue’s Anna Wintour as co-chairs this year are Beyoncé, Givenchy “New Goth” designer Riccardo Tisci, and “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and recent Pentagram actor Rooney Mara.) The show opens to the public on May 9 and will be on view through August 14, 2013.

PUNK opens with galleries devoted to the origins of the two historic “schools” of punk, the seminal CBGB club in New York and Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s legendary Seditionaries boutique in London. Other sections look at the link between punk’s “do-it-yourself” attitude and haute couture’s “made-to-measure” sensibility, including the customization of garments with embellishments like studs, spikes, chains, zippers, safety pins and razor blades, as well as text, images and graffiti; the use of unexpected materials recycled from trash and consumer culture, like plastic bags and newspaper; and the use of techniques like ripping, shredding and tearing, associated with deconstructionism. Designers featured in the exhibition include Vivienne Westwood, Zandra Rhodes, Malcolm McLaren, Stephen Sprouse, Katharine Hamnett, Ann Demeulemeester, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Hussein Chalayan, Gareth Pugh, Hedi Slimane, Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo, Miguel Adrover, Helmut Lang, Miuccia Prada, and Kate and Laura Mulleavy (Rodarte), among many others.

Miller collaborated with Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton on the development of the catalogue and created a design for the book that conveys the aggressive, confrontational and elemental nature of punk’s D.I.Y. aesthetic. The 12”-square format recreates the size and scale of an LP cover, and the book has been printed on an uncoated paper stock that gives it a raw, tactile quality. Large-scale black-and-white typography is set in New Rail, a revival of the British Rail alphabet that is visually associated with London.

The catalogue opens with essays by the punk musicians Richard Hell and John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols), as well as a cultural history by the music journalist Jon Savage. Throughout the book, large-format photography recreates the juxtapositions of the exhibition, placing historical photos of the punk movement side by side with their fashion descendants. The cover of the book incorporates the exhibition logo created by Peter Saville with the exhibition’s designer, Nick Knight.

Miller previously designed the catalogues for two of the Costume Institute’s spring shows, Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy (2008) and Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations (2012).

Project Team: Abbott Miller, partner-in-charge and designer; Yoon-Young Chai, designer.