Pentagram has been honored by the Art Directors Club with several winners in the ADC 92nd Annual Awards, presented last week at the ADC Festival in Miami Beach.
Our new identity for Mohawk, designed by Michael Bierut and team, took home the Silver Cube for Corporate Design. Paula Scher’s work on the revitalization of The Public Theater was was honored in two categories: the environmental graphics of the renovated lobby received a Bronze Cube in the Environmental Design category, while the “Open Public” campaign timed to the theater’s reopening was recognized with a Merit in Poster Design. Last but not least, the Nuts.com identity designed by Michael Bierut and team was honored with a Merit in Package Design. Pentagram’s own Eddie Opara served on the Design Jury of this year’s competition.
Thanks to all our designers, teams and clients for the fantastic work!
Continue reading “Awards: Art Directors Club 92nd Annual”
Fifty years ago this summer Joseph Papp, the founder of the Public Theater and New York Shakespeare Festival, took his free performances of Shakespeare “into the woods” of Central Park to the Delacorte, the Public’s amphitheater in the park. The Delacorte first opened on June 18, 1962, and over the past five decades over 5 million people have enjoyed more than 100 productions presented at the theater.
To celebrate the anniversary, the Public is mounting two forest-oriented productions for this year’s Shakespeare in the Park: “As You Like It,” Shakespeare’s romantic comedy that takes place in enchanted Forest of Arden, and “Into the Woods,” a new staging of Stephen Sondheim’s classic 1986 musical starring Amy Adams, Denis O’Hare and Donna Murphy. Pentagram’s Paula Scher has designed the festival campaign, which launched this past weekend with a full-page ad in The New York Times and will be seen in posters going up this week in the streets, subways and buses of New York, along with a program of signage at the Delacorte.
Scher started designing the posters for Shakespeare in the Park in 1994, and her 18th campaign represents a departure from the graphic language of past seasons. This year’s campaign, designed with Kirstin Huber, the Public’s in-house graphic designer, has a looser feel than past posters—it’s fun, celebratory, and purely about the park. The tagline of “Shakespeare and Sondheim in the Park” appears in a large swath of verdant green with a rough edge that evokes trees and greenery. Smaller typographic elements diagram a kind of journey through the woods, with bits of information pointing out a path through the green.
Continue reading “New Work: Shakespeare in the Park 2012″
The streets meet the sheets in Paula Scher’s 2011 campaign for Shakespeare in the Park, set to launch this week.
This year’s productions, to be presented in repertory starting June 6, are All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. Both plays contain elements of bedroom farce, and “Shakespeare in bed” is the campaign’s frisky tagline. In the 3-sheet version of the poster, the play titles, set in Knockout, canoodle with the sinuous curves of an outsize ampersand on a photographic image of a bed. (A pair of pillows is pictured on the horizontal-format posters for buses and the subway.) The campaign will also be seen in magazines and newspapers.
Continue reading “New Work: Shakespeare in the Park 2011″
Last night’s opening performance was unfortunately rained out, but this year’s season of Shakespeare in the Park is set to present powerful productions of The Winter’s Tale and The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino as Shylock. Paula Scher has designed the festival’s promotional campaign, currently going up on buses and in subways and train stations all over the city. Unlike recent past seasons, which featured a pair of plays staged separately in the early and late summer, this year’s plays are being presented in repertory throughout the season. Scher’s campaign focuses on the evocative language in both plays, pulling lines from each to meet in a dimensional explosion of words and typography.
This is Scher’s 16th year designing the campaign; she designed her first poster for Shakespeare in the Park in 1994.
More images from this year’s campaign after the jump.
Continue reading “New Work: Shakespeare in the Park 2010″
New York City streets are once again dressed in a new campaign for Shakespeare in the Park, the annual free performances presented by The Public Theater at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. This year’s plays include a raucous production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night starring Anne Hathaway, opening tonight, and Euripides’s tragedy The Bacchae, with a score by Philip Glass, coming in August.
As usual the two plays are largely unrelated, but one thing they have in common this year is transvestism: lead characters in both plays don drag, hence the campaign tagline “Cross-Dressing in the Park.” The posters feature a Greek sculpture accessorized with a Shakespearean rose and mustachioed with a fine calligraphic line. Designed by Paula Scher and Lisa Kitschenberg, the campaign uses elements of the Public’s refreshed identity and complements our campaign for last summer’s productions of Hamlet and Hair.
More from the campaign after the jump.
Continue reading “New Work: Shakespeare in the Park”
Fifteen years of our work for the Public Theater in 45 seconds.
Last night at its annual gala, the Art Directors Club honored our work for the Public Theater with the ADC Design Sphere Cube, a new award that recognizes a longstanding collaboration between designer and client on a brand identity that has been consistently and energetically expressed and that has excited the public’s imagination along the way.
In 1994, Paula Scher was commissioned to create a new identity and promotional graphics system for The Public Theater, a program that would become a landmark of identity design, eventually influencing much of the graphic design created for theatrical promotion and for cultural institutions in general. Scher has worked closely with George C. Wolfe, the Public’s producer from 1993 to 2005, and with Oskar Eustis, its current artistic director, on the development of posters, ads and distinct identities for each new season and its major productions. Applications have ranged from signage to mailers, from tickets to billboards, and Scher’s Shakespeare in the Park campaigns have become a seasonal tradition in the city. The identity has evolved through two redesigns, in 2005 and 2008.
We were asked to put together a brief (less than one minute) video for the awards ceremony, and we managed to squeeze 15 years of work, in all its varied incarnations, into a mere 45 seconds. Seen are over 300 pieces, and there is more to come—this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park campaign launches in a few short weeks, and the Public Theater has just announced the renovation of its building, for which Scher will be designing the environmental graphics.
More news of additional ADC winners coming soon!
Previously: The Public Theater Identity
Fourteen summers ago Paula Scher designed a poster for the New York Shakespeare Festival that introduced a new identity for the Public Theater, a program that would eventually influence much of the graphic design created for theatrical promotion and for cultural institutions in general. Now, with the campaign for the 2008 Shakespeare in the Park productions (Hamlet and Hair), Scher introduces a refreshed identity for the institution.
Continue reading “New Work: The Public Theater”
Paula Scher and Lenny Naar spread some love in the posters for the 2007 New York Shakespeare Festival. The campaign promoting this year’s productions, “Romeo and Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” to be performed alfresco in Central Park, starts going up this week.
Multiple positions after the jump.
Continue reading “‘Free Love’ in the Park”
