This weekend the Yale School of Architecture presents the symposium “George Nelson—Designs for Living: American Mid-Century Design and Its Legacy Today”, about the legendary product designer and his lasting influence on contemporary design. The event coincides with the exhibition George Nelson: Architect, Writer, Designer, Teacher, opening this week at Yale.
For the symposium, Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and Laitsz Ho have created a poster that translates the form of Nelson’s iconic Ball Clock (1948) into the color palette of all Bierut’s posters for Yale—black and white—with the clock’s hands appearing in gray. Nelson’s twelve-letter name, set in Poster Bodoni Italic, fills the clock’s hours.
Pentagram has a long association with George Nelson. When Pentagram co-founder Colin Forbes first moved to New York in the late seventies to establish an office there, he shared space with Nelson, and the two discussed the possibility of Nelson joining the Pentagram partnership. The relationship was never made formal, although there are news releases that have survived from the period that refer to Nelson as a Pentagram partner. Forbes designed the jacket for Nelson’s classic 1978 book George Nelson On Design, the first project produced by Pentagram New York.
Continue reading “New Work: ‘George Nelson’ at Yale Architecture”
Michael Bierut’s posters for the Yale School of Architecture follow simple design parameters: one size, one color (black), all type (in hundreds of different fonts since the series began in 1998). The poster announcing the school’s fall 2012 calendar of events adds another graphic system to the mix. The poster uses only News Gothic—the one typeface that has appeared in all the school’s posters—with every word set at the same point size, the size that’s been used for small text on the posters since the series began nearly 15 years ago. Each event or block of content is constrained to one or more lines and fully justified. Once all the lines were set, the leading was adjusted to do the same vertically.
The result is a study in restraint, with emphasis provided only with underlines and the use of bold and light type weights. “This more or less breaks every rule I’ve ever known in poster design,” admits Bierut. “No scale, no contrast, nothing to be seen from a distance except the texture of information.” With the poster series so well established with Yale’s audience, Bierut felt the risk was worth taking.
Continue reading “New Work: Yale Architecture Fall 2012″
“Is drawing dead?” A provocative question, but you are probably reading this at your computer, and perhaps the only pencil at hand is the one you chew on for comfort. Since the Renaissance, drawing has been the architect’s primary tool of expression and investigation. Now the use of digital technologies like parametric modeling and computational design have changed the way architects define and depict space. This February the Yale School of Architecture will host “Is Drawing Dead?,” a symposium that considers the present and future role of drawing in the architectural profession.
Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and Yve Ludwig have designed a poster for the event using the simple design parameters of the series of posters we’ve designed for Yale since 1998: black, white and type. Here, a broken pencil takes the form of a “Y.” And yes, the poster was originally conceived with a hand-drawn sketch.
Continue reading “New Work: ‘Is Drawing Dead?’”
It happens every winter: Just about the time the ice begins to thaw, the results of our favorite annual design competitions start to trickle in, getting us ready for a spring of great design. (Too soon? It is warm and sunny today in New York, and we are optimistic sorts.)
We are currently celebrating news of our winners in this year’s Type Directors Club TDC57 Typography competition. Both Justus Oehler and Harry Pearce’s posters for Helping Haiti were honored, with Justus’ poster receiving the added distinction of being selected as Judge’s Choice. Other Pentagram projects chosen for the annual include Angus Hyland’s catalogue for “The Surreal House”, the Barbican exhibition; and three winners from Team Michael Bierut: the “Emotional Spell-check” animation for The New York Times Magazine’s Year in Ideas issue; Saks Fifth Avenue’s I’m Going to Saks campaign; and the poster for Yale School of Architecture’s 2011 J. Irwin Miller Symposium, “Thinking Big: Diagrams, Mediascapes and Megastructures.”
Thanks to all our designers, teams and clients for the great work!
Update: Additional winners announced February 15: Paula Scher’s Queens and Metropolitan Avenue murals for Queens Metropolitan Campus, and poster for the 2nd Chicago International Poster Biennial; and Lisa Strausfeld’s Home Appliance Energy Use Calculator for GE.
Thanks to Diddy, our posters for the Yale School of Architecture have been in the spotlight. Michael Bierut and his team have been designing the series of posters—over 70 to date—for the past dozen years. The latest, issued earlier this month, was created for Yale Architecture’s symposium “Structure of Light: Richard Kelly and the Illumination of Modern Architecture.” Kelly was a lighting designer known for his collaborations with modernist architects including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Louis I. Kahn and Philip Johnson. The poster uses the series’ simple design parameters—black, white and type—to make the symposium title, set in Hoefler & Frere-Jones’s Tungsten, look like architecture emerging from the dark.
Michael Bierut’s original sketch for the poster after the jump.
Continue reading “New Work: ‘Structure of Light’ for Yale Architecture”
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662488/did-sean-john-blatantly-rip-off-pentagram-s-poster-for-yale-architecture-school
The new fall season brings a new series of events to the Yale School of Architecture and a new typographic poster by Michael Bierut. The poster uses 58 different kinds of arrows to point the way to fall programming that includes lectures by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, a symposium on the lighting designer Richard Kelly and exhibitions on Kelly and the architect James Stirling.
Download the poster here. Bierut has designed the Yale Architecture posters since 1998—see more here and here.
Project Team: Michael Bierut, partner-in-charge and designer; Britt Cobb, designer.
http://creativity-online.com/news/retrospective-pentagram-and-yale-school-of-architecture/141799
In 1968, the architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown took a group of their students from the Yale School of Architecture on an expedition to Las Vegas to study the realities of contemporary American architecture. What they discovered, and documented, was spontaneous, messy, and commercial, built for cars and big signs. The resulting manifesto, Learning From Las Vegas, written with Steven Izenour and published in 1972, helped shift the focus of American architectural thought away from rigid Modernism to more varied points of view. Tonight Venturi and Scott Brown will present the keynote address at “Architecture After Las Vegas,” a major symposium on the legacy of this seminal work. The conference coincides with the exhibition What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Venturi Scott Brown & Associates, on view at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery through 5 February. “We may need these two architects as much now as ever,” declared New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff in his review of the show.
Michael Bierut and Yve Ludwig extend Pentagram’s series of posters for Yale Architecture, now in its twelfth year, with one that, like all the others, is primarily typographic and entirely black and white—but with a Rat Pack twist. Download a copy here.
The Seduction symposium poster designed by Michael Bierut and Marian Bantjes for the Yale School of Architecture is currently on view at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum as part of its Rococo: The Continuing Curve 1730–2008 exhibition. The show examines the lasting impact of the Rococo period in design of the last four centuries; the poster, with the sinuous lines of Bantjes’ calligraphy, is one of twelve objects chosen to represent the 2000s. The exhibition remains on view through 6 July 2008.
