New at Pentagram
New Work: Neue Galerie
One of the few museums devoted to early 20th century Austrian and German art and design, the Neue Galerie New York presents its collection in an exquisite setting. Opened in 2001, the museum is housed in a landmark Beaux-Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile that was built in 1914 and fully restored by the architect Annabelle Selldorf. The museum includes works by Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, Kandinsky, Klee and Grosz, presented in an environment redolent of Vienna at the turn of the century. Abbott Miller has designed a website for the Neue Galerie that extends the museum’s unique atmosphere and beauty to its online presence.
New Work: North Carolina Museum of Art
Often, museum graphics err on the side of anonymity, assuming that art needs a recessive frame to shine. Not so at the North Carolina Museum of Art, which will be dramatically transformed this year. An expansion building designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners opening in April will add 127,000 square feet of exhibition space to the museum’s original 1983 building by Edward Durell Stone. Adjacent to the these buildings is a 449-seat open-air amphitheater; the entire complex is set within a 164-acre park filled with sculpture and walking trails.
Pentagram was asked to create a new signage and wayfinding program as well as a new graphic identity that would reflect the boldness of the museum’s transformation.
Five Ways the iPad Will Change Magazine Design
The new iPad from Apple, presented in typical Steve Jobs fashion as game-changing, will, in fact, revolutionize the way we read magazines. Combining the rich visual content of a print publication, the ever-changing immediacy of a website, and the portability of an e-book reader, the iPad is something new.
Pentagram’s Luke Hayman, designer of, among others, Time, New York, and Travel + Leisure, was asked how this new format would change the world of magazines and came up with five ways off the top of his head.
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New Work: ‘Dress Codes’
The triennial of the International Center of Photography is the only major American survey of contemporary photography and video. The ICP triennial’s third edition, Dress Codes, recently on view at the Museum at ICP in New York, closed out a year of fashion-related programming at the museum and explored ideas of identity, production and consumption through the lens of fashion, style and image. The exhibition featured the work of 34 photographers including Cindy Sherman, Stan Douglas, Barbara Kruger, Lorna Simpson, Mikalene Thomas and Thorsten Brinkmann. Abbott Miller designed the show working with ICP curators Kristen Lubben, Christopher Phillips, Carol Squiers and ICP adjunct curator Vince Aletti.
Viva ‘Las Vegas’
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.
New Work: Circular 16
Issue 16 of Circular, the magazine of the Typographic Circle, designed by Domenic Lippa is out now.
This issue features articles on Spin, Bibliothèque, Fernando Gutiérrez, the late Ken Dickinson, Design Project and a piece by Jeremy Leslie charting the development of editorial design from The New Yorker of 1925 through Nova to Re- and Carl*s Cars. Also featured are Pentagram’s own Harry Pearce and Domenic Lippa.
Lippa has designed the last nine issues of Circular and delights in creating each from scratch. In this issue the close up of the title on the cover through the contents pages and dividers indicates a desire to focus on the detail of the work. The use of Courier as the default font set without justification is designed to act in contrast to the typographic perfection of the featured work.
War Memorial for the London Science Museum Short-Listed
Harry Pearce’s War Memorial for the London Science Museum has been nominated in the graphics category of the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year.
The annual exhibition and awards held at the Design Museum showcase 100 projects from seven design disciplines, architecture, fashion, furniture, graphics, interactive, product and transport. Artist Antony Gormley will chair the jury.
The exhibition will run from 17 February to 6 June and the winner will be revealed at the awards dinner on 16 March.
Resetting the Doomsday Clock
This morning, the Board of Directors and the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock would be moved one minute back from five to six minutes to midnight. The group, which contains 18 Nobel laureates, cited “a more hopeful state of world affairs” in their decision to indicate the world is metaphorically one step further away from annihilation. “We are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons.”
To mark this event, which was followed by an worldwide audience online and through global media outlets, Pentagram created a simple tabloid information piece virtually overnight. Printed on inexpensive newsprint, it explains the purpose of the Bulletin and the Doomsday Clock in clear language and blunt, unadorned graphics. The Clock, which was created in 1947, had since become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and emerging technologies in the life sciences. It is the focus of the Bulletin’s graphic communications effort.
This is the 19th time the Clock has been reset. The last time, in 2007, Pentagram recommended the group adopt the Clock as its symbol, and created standards for its use. In the three years since, the Bulletin community has grown considerably. This publication’s clear statement of purpose is a indication of the group’s maturity and confidence as it moves into its second 50 years, and an invitation to join the global effort to turn back the Clock.
A look inside the piece after the jump.
New Work: ‘Lincoln Center: Celebrating 50 Years’
In the five decades since it broke ground in 1959, Lincoln Center has become a model for cultural centers in cities around the world, a home to 12 constituent organizations that host 5 million visitors annually and reach millions more through broadcasts, programs, productions and educational activities. To commemorate Lincoln Center’s amazing half century, Michael Gericke and his team at Pentagram have designed Lincoln Center: Celebrating 50 Years, a major exhibition that focuses on the evolution and influence of this remarkable institution. The show is on view at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ Oenslager Gallery on Lincoln Center’s new North Plaza.
The exhibition was developed in collaboration with curator Thomas Mellins and includes an extensive collection of some 400 historic and contemporary objects including photographs, ephemera, costumes, set pieces and props. The show includes special areas for the viewing of films about the building of the center and video recordings of performances.
Pentagram has designed identities for several of Lincoln Center’s resident organizations, including The Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, New York Philharmonic and Jazz at Lincoln Center, and is currently designing environmental graphics for the renovated David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, formerly known as the Harmony Atrium.
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What Type Are You?
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.
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