“Today I’m Feeling Turquoise” is an attempt to do something that should have been done a long time ago: pairing up colours with their respective moods.
Because everyone knows that red means anger, green envy, and blue misery. But who knew that olive was the colour of deja-vu, brown the colour of indifference, or pink of laughing on the outside, crying on the inside?
The booklet is made up of double-page spreads of coloured paper sealed with a perforated edge. The reader selects a colour and tears open the perforations to reveal the mood it represents.
“Today I’m Feeling Turquoise” was produced by Pentagram as our 2011/12 holiday card—but it’s much more than that. It’s the first step on a journey to finally matching all the colours in the world with their corresponding moods.
Continue reading “New Work: ‘Today I’m Feeling Turquoise’”
Quick Link: “Today I’m Feeling Turquoise” Featured on New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix
Quick Link: ‘See Opposite’ Holiday Book Featured on FPO
An antigram is a rare type of anagram. If you take a word or phrase, and using all the same letters, make another word or phrase with the opposite meaning, or antonym, then the new word or phrase is called the “antigram” of the original. For instance, the antigram of “united” is “untied”—same letters, opposite meaning.
Every year Pentagram designs and publishes a small greeting booklet, usually designed around a game or activity, that we send to our friends, clients and colleagues. This year’s edition is See Opposite: Twelve Antigrams, designed by Angus Hyland and his team in our London office. The book contains twelve antigrams, with clues on the facing pages (“see opposite”). We have adapted the puzzles for an online version here.
Go to See Opposite: Twelve Antigrams
See if you can figure out the antigrams. For each, the subject word or phrase is given at the top of the page. You can then work out the antigram with the help of the clue and the illustration.
A gallery of our previous holiday books, from 1971 to 2008, was featured in Wallpaper; last year’s greeting was our popular What Type are You typography test.
Project Team: Angus Hyland, partner-in-charge and designer; Fabian Herrmann, Zara Moore, Alex Johns, designers. Writer: David Gibbs. Website development by Niko Skourtis.
Why did Brian Wilson use Cooper Black on the cover of Pet Sounds? Why did Obama use Gotham for his election propaganda? It has long been apparent that typefaces reflect the character of the person using them, and that type choice, as well as the words that are typed, is a powerful conveyor of meaning.
At Pentagram, we wanted people to be able to understand that meaning properly and use it more consciously. Hence our ‘What Type Are You’ application. Researched over seven years with a team of 23 academics across Eastern Europe, ‘What Type Are You’ asks the four key character questions of our day, analyses your responses in exceptional detail and recommends one of 16 typefaces as a result.
The recommendation is sometimes controversial but always unerringly true. Said one respondent, “At first I felt angry when I was told my type is Pistilli Roman but two weeks later, I was completely reconciled to it. Now I wonder why I ever thought I was a Gill Sans.”
Go to the ‘What Type Are You’ test. Password: character.
Project Team: John Rushworth, partner-in-charge and designer; Kirsty Whittaker, designer. Written by Naresh Ramchandani. Produced by The Brown Studio. Web development by Nerv Interactive.
Quick Link: What Type Are You? on Fast Company
http://www.veryshortlist.com/vsl/daily.cfm/review/1444/Website/front-of-knowledge/
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!
The Number of Numbers site designed by Michael Gericke and his team is today’s recommendation from Very Short List: Science. “This clever, beautifully designed slide show and quiz…takes us through seven early tallying systems and poses a single, simple question on each page. How many moons orbit Mars? How many lives does a Felis catus have? The answers are right in front of you—but written in ancient numeral systems you must decode.”
Each year Pentagram issues a small holiday book as a greeting to its friends, clients and colleagues. The partners take turns researching and designing these books, which usually contain some kind of game or activity. This year’s book, A Number of Numbers, has been designed by Michael Gericke and his team. Numbers are an especially timely subject, given their importance in recent world events and for the ways they connect us now more than ever. The book features seven numerical systems, from simple tallying to the Burmese system, seen above.
We have adapted the book’s content online and are pleased to present the minisite here. Do you have a head for numbers?
Go to the A Number of Numbers site
