Pentagram’s Justus Oehler and his team in Berlin have designed a new series of typographic posters for the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, or OPL, the national orchestra of Luxembourg. The posters accompany the brand identity Oehler created for the orchestra last year.
Each poster is for a single concert, and the OPL presents up to 40 performances a year. The all-type posters create a fresh, distinctive look that promotes the OPL brand while also being flexible, inexpensive and easily produced. In the posters, lines of type emanate like waves of sound, in curves echoing the OPL identity. The colors are taken from the mark, which consists of four overlapping translucent color rings. The font is Walbaum.
Oehler also previously designed the identity for the Philharmonie Luxembourg, the concert hall where the OPL is based.
In “The Alphabet of Nations,” They Might Be Giants—the Brooklyn-based duo of John Flansburgh and John Linnell—help kids learn geography and the alphabet in a catchy singalong that turns the ABC’s into a list of names of countries around the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The band has recorded a special version of the song for the 10th anniversary deluxe reissue of their beloved first children’s album, “No!” (2002). To celebrate the rerelease, Pentagram’s Emily Oberman and team have collaborated with TMBG to create a new video for “The Alphabet of Nations” that features images crowdsourced from fans around the globe.
For the band and the designers, the project represented the opportunity to do something that was not only for fun, but also for good. The video was made in collaboration with and to benefit the Global Fund for Children, the international children’s charity organization. GFC invests in innovative grassroots groups around the world that serve children in need. To help raise money for the Global Fund, TMBG and Oberman have also created limited edition posters and t-shirts based on the video graphics. All profits go to support the Global Fund for Children. Get yours here!
Over different locations around the Olympic Park in Stratford London rest ten rings suspended in trees, forged from phosphored bronze and stainless steel. Similar to the way natural trees rings show history and age, these rings tell the story of the Olympic site over the past few centuries.
Artists Ackroyd & Harvey were commissioned by the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) to create a permanent reminder of the games. Ackroyd and Harvey collaborated with Harry Pearce and Naresh Ramchandani at Pentagram to design the concept and build the rings, each 15 meters in diameter.
Since its publication five years ago, Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design by Pentagram’s Michael Bierut has become a popular classic of design writing that The Atlantic has called “a graphic extravaganza” and Very Short List has said is “an excellent introduction to a world where almost everything can be seen in terms of design.” This spring the book has been reissued by Princeton Architectural Press in a new paperback edition. The volume collects 20 years of Bierut’s wide-ranging writings on subjects related to design, from Nabokov’s Pale Fire to paper architecture, from Stanley Kubrick to the vileness of ITC Garamond, from Twyla Tharp to falling off a treadmill. Many of the essays first appeared on Design Observer, the blog Bierut edits with Bill Drenttel and Jessica Helfand, as well as in other design publications.
The new paperback version preserves Abbott Miller’s original design for Seventy-nine Short Essays, with each essay set in a different typeface; the cover is now a cool blue that complements the marigold yellow of the hardcover. The book is also available for the first time as an e-book for Kindle and Nook.
“Why Designers Can’t Think,” an essay from the book, has recently been excerpted on Fast Company’sCo.Design blog.
This weekend Big Ten team Ohio State will face off against Kansas in the Final Four of the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship. Just in time for March Madness, Pentagram’s logo for the Big Ten Conference has been honored in TDC 58, the annual competition of the Type Directors Club that honors the best typographic design in the world. Designed by Michael Gericke and his team in Pentagram’s New York office, the iconic identity embeds the numeral “10” in the word “BIG,” allowing fans to see “BIG” and “10” in a single word. Go Buckeyes!
Domenic Lippa and his team at Pentagram London also placed two projects in TDC 58: Circular 17, the recent issue of the Typographic Circle magazine (designed without any editorial type), and the 1882 identity for the ceramicist and designer Emily Johnson.
The projects will be featured alongside other winners in Typography 33, the annual for this year’s competition, to be designed by Pentagram’s own Paula Scher utilizing the graphic identity she created for TDC 58.
Thanks to all our designers, teams and clients for their fantastic work!
“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.
