New at Pentagram
‘American Symbols’ Opens at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art
Kit Hinrichs has spent over forty years collecting American ephemera and 75 pieces from his remarkable collection are now on display at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco. The exhibition American Symbols: From Lady Liberty to the Stars and Stripes features representations of the American flag, the Bald Eagle, Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty, amongst others, that Kit says “evoke immediate recognition, emotional power and universal meaning” as well as trace the graphic history of the country.
Kit will discuss the art of collecting and sign copies of his latest book, 100 American Flags: A Unique Collection of Old Glory Memorabilia at the museum on Saturday 12 July at 2pm.
The exhibition opened to the public last Friday and will be on view through August 3, 2008. Photos from Thursday night’s opening party after the jump.
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New Work: Detroit Institute of Arts
The suite of interactive interpretive installations created by Pentagram for the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Founded in 1885, the Detroit Institute of Arts recently underwent an extensive six year, $158 million renovation that sought, among other things, to rethink the display of the museum’s permanent collection. As part of the renovation, Lisa Strausfeld and her team worked with the museum's education and interpretation department to develop a suite of permanent media-based interactive exhibitions that would help make the collection more accessible through the use of technology.
New Work: Alexander McQueen
William Russell has designed the new Alexander McQueen store in Los Angeles. The flagship shop is located on Melrose Avenue on the corner of Melrose Place and is the latest in a recent expansion by McQueen, which has seen Russell designed stores opening in Las Vegas, Moscow, Bahrain, Osaka and Vilnius.
The stores employ the interior design language created by Russell and McQueen for the original three flagship stores in London, Milan and New York, creating a branded spatial experience full of drama and intrigue.
Michael Bierut Wins National Design Award
Michael Bierut has won the Design Mind Award in this year’s National Design Awards presented by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
“The Design Mind Award recognizes a visionary who has affected a paradigm shift in design thinking or practice through writing, research and scholarship,” states the NDA release. “Bierut’s ability to articulate and deconstruct the design process has raised the consciousness of an entire field and sparked a national dialogue.” Bierut is a cofounder of Design Observer and his book Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design was published last year by Princeton Architectural Press. (And he deejayed the NDA After-Party in 2006.)
Bierut’s fellow 2008 NDA laureates include Scott Stowell for communications design, Antenna for product design, Tom Kundig for architecture design, Ralph Rucci for fashion design, Rockwell Group for interior design, Olin Partnership for landscape design, Google for corporate achievement and Charles Harrison for lifetime achievement. Bruce Nussbaum and Michael Sorkin were finalists in the Design Mind category. The National Design Awards program “seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation and lasting achievement.” The award will be presented in a ceremony at the NDA gala on 23 October.
Announcement coverage: The New York Times, Design Observer
Decipher: Fourteen Cryptograms
Each year Pentagram issues a small holiday book as a greeting to its friends and colleagues. The partners take turns researching and designing these books, which usually contain some kind of game or activity. The most recent edition is Decipher, designed by Harry Pearce, who chose as its subject cryptography, the science of writing, or encrypting—and breaking, or decrypting—secret code.
The book features 14 cryptograms of varying methodologies and difficulty that conceal short phrases; through symbols, numbers, patterns and simple letterspacing, the cyptograms challenge the reader to decipher their meaning. “It’s astonishing how much you can hide in type,” says Pearce.
Now we have adapted the book’s content online and are pleased to present the 14 cryptograms in a minisite here. Can you break the code?
New Work: ‘Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy’
Summer equals superheroes, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art has its own summer blockbuster this year in Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, presented by The Costume Institute. The exhibition explores the symbolic and metaphysical associations between fictional comic book characters and fashion and features popular icons such as Superman, Spider-Man, Hulk, Wonder Woman, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano and Jean-Paul Gaultier. The show will be celebrated tonight at the Institute’s spring gala—co-chaired by George Clooney, of Batman & Robin nippled Batsuit infamy—before opening to the public on Wednesday, 7 May. It remains on view through 1 September.
Abbott Miller’s design for the exhibition catalogue affirms the alliance between fantasy and fashion through the juxtaposition of fashion imagery, comic book details and film and TV stills of superheroes in a comic book frame format. These images have been closely cropped and break the frames to heighten the sense of interconnection. “Comics pioneered the fragmentation of time and space with multiple-frame compositions,” says Miller. “Our design uses this comics strategy to show multiple details and perspectives of a single garment.” The catalogue also features a pressed tin front and back cover that adds a tactile, three-dimensional element to the design, and of course doubles as a kind of armor or chest plate (think Iron Man).
Although nostalgic—the tin cover is reminiscent of a superheroes lunch box—the catalogue avoids a profusion of obvious comic book mimicry. There are no speech bubbles, allowing the images to speak for themselves, and instead of newsprint, the pages have a high-gloss acrylic coating that make the colors pop from the page. In an effort to differentiate the introductory essay by Michael Chabon (Secret Skin: An Essay in Unitard Theory) from the rest of the catalogue, the commentary has been designed as a book within a book and printed with a silver border as opposed to white.
Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy is published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.
A look inside the book after the jump.
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New Work: Grant Thornton
Angus Hyland and his team have designed the new identity system for Grant Thornton international, a major global organisation of accounting and consulting firms with member and correspondent firms in over 100 countries worldwide.
The identity creates a unified international brand for the organisation’s network of independently owned and managed firms. Hyland has created a completely new logo, along with comprehensive print and website systems based around a bold illustration-led graphic approach.
United Seating Wins ‘Condé Nast Traveller’ Innovation and Design Award
United’s First (top) and Business class (bottom) airline seats recline into completely flat, 180° beds
and are now in service on international flights. Click on the images for enlargements.
United’s new First and Business class cabin environments, developed by Pentagram partner Daniel Weil and B/E Aerospace, have won first prize in the aviation category of the Condé Nast Traveller Innovation and Design Awards 2008.
The United seating was shortlisted for the award by a panel of travel experts and commentators, before being put to the public vote alongside the other finalists. Readers of Condé Nast Traveller voted online for the winners, who also included David Chipperfield in the Culture category for his Museum of Modern Literature in Germany; Ross Lovegrove in the Sustainable category for his Solar Tree street lighting system and Heston Blumenthal in the Gourmet category.
Daniel Weil said of the award: “This is a great opportunity to celebrate the success of the collaboration between United, B/E Aerospace and ourselves. I see this award as the product of a unique combination of talent, expertise and commitment that every member of the team has contributed to.”
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‘Creative Review’ Names Pentagram Design Studio of the Year
Pentagram has been named Design Studio of the Year by Creative Review. The award is announced in the Creative Review Annual 2008, which represents the magazine’s choice of the highlights of the past year in visual communication. The Design Studio of the Year Award is given to the studio with the most work accepted into the annual.
Five Pentagram projects were selected by the judging panel for inclusion in the annual; images and links after the jump.
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This Monday: Abbott Miller at Central Saint Martins
Abbott Miller will present a free lecture on Monday night at Central Saint Martins. He will discuss recent projects as well as give a preview of work in progress, including his exhibition design for the Harley-Davidson Museum, his catalogue design for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s summer exhibition Superheroes: From Fashion to Fantasy and his Brno Echo exhibition for the Brno Biennale. Abbott’s introduction will be provided by Alice Rawsthorn, design critic of the International Herald Tribune and columnist for the New York Times Magazine. Monday, 28 April from 6:30 pm at the Cochrane Theatre, Southampton Row, London. Tickets are free and available from the Cochrane Theatre Box Office.
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