New at Pentagram
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.
New Work: New York City Ballet
Paula Scher has designed a new identity and promotional campaign for the New York City Ballet, one of the largest and most prominent dance companies in the world. The campaign, developed with Pentagram’s Lisa Kitschenberg and Luis Bravo of the NYCB, launches this week with the opening of the company’s winter season.
Mike Likes SAM
NYC Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg shows off the new Seattle Art Museum identity during a visit to the museum giftshop. (Via Gothamist).
New Work: Ruby Tuesday
DJ Stout and his Austin design team have collaborated with Ruby Tuesday to create an entirely new visual identity for the international chain of over 900 bar and grill restaurants. The new logotype and identity system is part of the chain’s effort to upgrade its brand by creating a healthier and higher quality casual dining experience and has been applied across the board to menus, take-out bags, cups, napkins, uniforms, signage, architecture, advertising, website and even a race car.
Slovenia: It’s S’lovely!
Condé Nast Traveler asked six designers to each rebrand a country of his or her choice for its September issue, and Paula Scher selected Slovenia for her effort. “I’ve been to Slovenia twice and loved it. But most Americans don’t know what or where it is, which is something I wanted to address” says Scher. By highlighting Slovenia’s proximity to Italy, she made the country appear both physically accessible and “like it has great skiing and great food, which it in fact does.” Although, as she commented in the article, “I don’t think countries should have logos. Logos are for corporations.”
A few taglines after the jump.
New Work: 100% Design
Angus Hyland, with design assistant Fabian Herrmann, has designed the identity and brand structure for 100% Design, Reed Exhibitions’ international series of shows for the professional architecture and design audience. Hyland also produced the print and campaign for one of the component shows, 100% Design London, the UK’s largest trade show of its kind. Held between 20 and 23 September, 100% Design London filled the Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre with a showcase of the best contemporary design based around five component shows: 100% Design, 100% Detail, 100% Light, 100% Futures and 100% Materials.
Marian Bantjes Wanted for Saks ‘Want It!’ Campaign
For Saks Fifth Avenue’s fall campaign, Pentagram asked the designer and typographer Marian Bantjes to create a special promotional treatment of the store’s “Want It!” theme, and to extend that treatment to 19 unlikely illustrations of fashion trends that Saks has identified for fall.
Marian was in town the week before last to help celebrate the campaign’s launch and to check out the campaign’s over-the-top installations at Saks’s flagship store. Her entertainingly exhaustive visual diary appears on her blog.
Pentagram’s art direction of the Want It! campaign extends the work that began with the launch of the new Saks identity at the beginning of this year.
New Work: The London Design Festival
One of Domenic Lippa’s typographic opening sequences for The London Design Festival website. Click on the links to see all the animations in a new window: one, two, three. Flash design by Andrew Heaps.
Domenic Lippa, with senior designer Paul Skerm and design assistant Ali Esen, has designed the identity for The London Design Festival, the umbrella organisation that promotes the annual season of design-related events that take over the city each September. Lippa and his team also designed every element of the festival’s city-wide graphic presence including brochures, signage, guidebooks, promotional material, environmental graphics and the look and feel of the website as well as the first London Design Medal, which was awarded to Zaha Hadid for her outstanding contribution to design.
Designing London Design Week
Monday night saw the opening of The London Design Festival at the Royal Festival Hall. The ceremony marked the beginning of one of the world’s great design events which, between the 17th and the 23rd of September, fills London with exhibitions, workshops, talks and private views. With branding and identity designed by Domenic Lippa, The London Design Festival’s organising committee is just one of the places you can see work by Pentagram partners during London’s celebration of design.
Angus Hyland has designed the identity and brand architecture for 100% Design London, the UK’s largest trade fair for the design and architecture profession and one of the longest running events in the festival calendar.
Harry Pearce has designed a poster with John Simmons as of part of 26 Posters, an installation for the festival organised by the writer’s advocacy organisation 26, which aims to demonstrate the power of language in design. The posters will be displayed at London’s Old Street and Elephant and Castle roundabouts, as well as on billboard sites in Birmingham, Glasgow and Manchester.
Pentagram will be holding an exhibition of posters from throughout the firm’s 35-year history on Thursday, 20 September at our London office in Notting Hill. Contact Leah Speakman for further enquiries.
Justus Oehler Designs for the Deutsche Kinemathek
Justus Oehler and his team have designed posters, invitations, flyers and advertising for four recent exhibitions at the Deutsche Kinemathek Museum für Film und Fernsehen (the German Film and Television Museum) including the current exhibition about German filmmaker and photographer Ulrike Ottinger. Oehler also designed the museum’s identity and its bi-annual journal, Recherche Film und Fernsehen (RFF).
Ulrike Ottinger is internationally known as an experimental female filmmaker whose work is characterized by surrealistic-theatrical and stylized-artificial elements as well as by ethnological depictions of foreign places and people taken from her many travels through Europe, North America and particularly China and Mongolia. The exhibition is the first in a series that will highlight extraordinary German speaking filmmakers.
Street Fashion by Pentagram
New York Fashion Week tent graphics designed by Pentagram.
Wrapping up in New York’s Bryant Park: Pentagram’s graphics for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. Using a classic axonometric map of Manhattan, Michael Bierut and Jennifer Kinon created invitations, t-shirts, banners and, of course, graphics for the event’s signature tents.
New Work: vivo
Justus Oehler and his Berlin design team have created a new tableware brand called vivo for the German porcelain company Villeroy & Boch. Oehler named, created an identity for and designed the new brand that includes ceramic, glass and cutlery products. Designed to appeal to a young audience, the tableware is contemporary in aesthetic, multifunctional, durable and will sell at a lower price than the company’s other, more traditional, lines.
Brandspanking Gets Moving
Andy Foulds’ animations of Angus Hyland’s Brandspanking logo. Click here to see them in a new window.
Interactive designer Andy Foulds’ studio has produced a series of Flash animations based on Angus Hyland’s logo design for Brandspanking, a London-based media production company that specialises in branded content. The animations play during the introduction to their website, also designed by Foulds.
Angus Hyland designed the Brandspanking identity in 2007 with design assistant Zara Moore.
Paula Scher on ‘Brand America’
In a video interview with Monocle, Paula Scher talks to editor-in-chief Tyler Brûlé about the brand identity of the United States. “We were in a face off with the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and we didn’t change our rhetoric once we didn’t have a big global power confronting us, so we talk to everybody like we’re talking to big global superpowers all the time and we really have to tone down the volume,” says Scher. In the wide-ranging discussion, she touches on the graphic beauty of the Stars and Stripes, the enduring image of the Statue of Liberty (“The nice lady holding up the torch—what could be more welcoming and comforting?”), the future of the media, and why she’d love to redesign the experience of air travel.
The interview complements an essay by Scher that appears in the magazine’s current issue.
Paula Scher Designs Templates for Download from HP
Today Hewlett-Packard launches a new website featuring Paula Scher, Jake Burton and Gwen Stefani as part of its $300 million Print 2.0 campaign designed to inspire and empower customers with free customizable, printable content. For her part, Scher designed five business templates, including letterhead, envelopes, business cards and notecards, that provide users with a complete graphics package. Named Bold, Modern, Edgy, Elegant and Friendly, the templates were designed to appeal to a diverse array of businesses and personality types. Two templates, Friendly and Modern, are available for download today, with the others being added over the next few weeks.
The site also features an interview with Scher in which she speaks about how to build a successful brand identity. “The characteristic that matters for every good brand is that you look like you made your decisions based on who you are for specific reasons, not that they were accidental,” she says. “A small business should ask itself who its customer is, who are they talking to. They should think about how to present themselves and what their tone of voice should be.” Shot in Pentagram’s New York office, the interview is accompanied by commentary about some of her most celebrated designs.
“No template is a substitute for hiring a professional designer,” warns Scher, and indeed at Scher’s suggestion the HP site includes a prominent link to the AIGA designer directory. “But at the very least, I hope we can stop a few innocent people out there from using Comic Sans.”
Rounding out the site’s content, Jake Burton offers advice on how to produce a successful marketing campaign and the importance of a strong visual brand, while Gwen Stefani offers customizable Harajuku-inspired paper dolls, party invites and CD covers.
Views of the templates in action after the jump.
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New Work: 166 Perry Street
Launching this month: the opening volleys of Pentagram’s campaign for 166 Perry Street, a new luxury condominium designed by Hani Rashid and Lise Ann Couture at Asymptote Architecture.
The building’s unique facade is designed to take advantage of the light, air and space of New York’s West Village, transforming dramatically throughout the course of the day and in the changing seasons. Pentagram’s look and feel for 166 Perry exploits this characteristic, and carries it into the building’s website, designed by Flat. The campaign will also include direct mail pieces, brochures, advertising and a sales office. The 166 logo is based on a modified version of Peter Bilak’s beautiful typeface Fedra Sans.
New Work: EAT Seasonal
Angus Hyland has designed the graphic identity for EAT’s new range of seasonal food as part of a wider-reaching brand evolution strategy.
New Work: Glass House Visitors Center and Identity
The exhibition wall of the Glass House Visitors Center features 24 monitors.
The much-anticipated public opening of Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, takes place this week. James Biber and his team designed the off-site Visitors Center for this acclaimed addition to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s family of sites. Michael Bierut and his team designed the project’s identity, promotional graphics and website .
All tours of the Glass House site, sold out until 2008, begin and end at the Visitors Center in downtown New Canaan. The center, a renovated 2,000-square-foot former truck loading dock conveniently located across from the town train station, accommodates an exhibition, on-site ticketing and a museum shop. Through the exhibition, visitors learn about Philip Johnson and the Glass House site before they take a short shuttle ride to the site where they embark on a 90-minute guided tour. After the tour, visitors return to the center where they can re-experience the exhibition with new insight.
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New Work: P.O.V.
Different standardized “O” patterns create flexibility within the identity.
Paula Scher and Julia Hoffmann have designed a new graphic identity for P.O.V., the award-winning documentary film series on PBS. The launch of the new identity is timed to the program’s twentieth anniversary season that begins on June 19.
Humboldt Identity Short Listed for Designpreis
Identity designed for the Wilhelm von Humboldt Stiftung.
The identity designed by Justus Oehler and his team for the Wilhelm von Humboldt Stiftung (Wilhelm von Humboldt Foundation) in Berlin has been short listed for the prestigious Designpreis, the 2008 Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany, the official design award of the German government. The identity already received the MFG Award of the Federal Association of Print and Media in Germany.
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New Work: Seattle Art Museum
The new SAM identity designed by Pentagram.
Abbott Miller and his team have designed the new identity and program of environmental graphics for the Seattle Art Museum that reopens to the public this weekend after a 95,000 square foot expansion designed by Allied Works Architecture. The identity helps to integrate the expansion into the existing building designed by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates and the museum with its two sister locations in the city.
Philip Johnson’s Glass House Opens
Homepage for the Glass House website designed by Pentagram.
Philip Johnson’s Glass House opens to the public for previews today for the first time. The iconic 1949 house and its 48-acre grounds in New Canaan, Connecticut, were bequeathed to the National Trust for Historic Preservation upon Johnson’s death in 2005.
Pentagram has designed an identity, promotional graphics, and a simple website for the project. A visitors center, also by Pentagram, will be ready in time for the site’s official opening on June 23.
New Work: Sardegna
Identity designed for the popular Italian destination.
Just in time for summer: Justus Oehler has designed an identity for the Italian island of Sardegna (Sardinia). The identity is based on a carefully modified version of the typeface Eurostile, designed in 1962 by Aldo Novarese. The colors are derived from the richly embroidered traditional Sardinian costumes.
The modern shape of the letters, combined with the patchwork of warm colors, reflects the two sides of Sardinia: history and tradition on the one hand, modernity and openness on the other. “We wanted to create a symbol which would not depict sun and sea—like most of the other Mediterranean countries’ identities do, but which would look grown-up and confident, yet at the same time playful and warm,” says Oehler.
Lippa to Design Identity for London Design Festival
Poster for this month’s press launch for the London Design Festival.
Domenic Lippa has been appointed to design the graphic identity for this year’s London Design Festival, taking place 15-25 September. He will be responsible for the development and art direction of all graphics to promote the festival, from books, brochures and signage, to posters and the festival website. The event will take place throughout the city at over 150 venues and is expected to attract an estimated 300,000 visitors. The first designs were introduced at the press launch for the festival earlier this month.
Additional pieces from the launch after the jump. Stay tuned for more work in the coming months.
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Saks in the TIME Design 100
Our identity for Saks Fifth Avenue has been chosen by TIME magazine for its Style & Design 100.
New Work: MICA
MICA’s new identity is set in the Giza typeface, based on slab serif lettering popular around the time of the school’s founding in 1826.
Abbott Miller has designed a new identity for MICA, the Maryland Institute College of Art, that launched on 1 April at the school’s annual Admission Open House. Miller, a faculty member at MICA, worked with his senior designer Kristen Spilman, a MICA graduate, to develop the identity based on research performed by graphic design graduate students at the College.
New Work: Essenziale
High-end lingerie store Essenziale in Mayfair, London
Lorenzo Apicella and John Rushworth recently completed a retail space and branding campaign for Essenziale, a new upscale London lingerie and beachwear boutique that caters to both women and men. The goal of the project was to “create an enviroment and identity that is about intimacy, privacy and elegance” said Essenziale owner Lina Barbara. While at the same time, the interiors and graphics were designed to potentially serve as the basis for a small exclusive retail chain.
Moving to the Big Citi
Original sketch of Citi logo, 1998
Citigroup has announced that it will be uniting its businesses under one name, “Citi,” adopting the now-familiar red arc design recommended by Pentagram nearly nine years ago. “Our unified brand represents the promise to serve our clients as one company, as one Citi,” Citi Chairman and CEO Charles Prince said in a statement endorsing the change. “Our extensive global research and analysis also confirmed Citi is a highly effective brand across many languages, markets and technology platforms. It is how most of our clients think about us already.”
The story of how Pentagram designed the Citi logo follows after the jump.
New Work: Dorchester Collection
The Dorchester Collection launch at the Dorchester, London
The Dorchester Collection of luxury hotels—The Dorchester in London, The Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, Le Meurice and the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris, and the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan—celebrated the launch of its new identity, designed by John Rushworth, with a series of one-off launch events, designed by Lorenzo Apicella.
Saks Change
Alice Rawsthorn spotlights the new Saks identity in an article about mutable corporate identities, in the International Herald Tribune. “‘Fragmenting the logo gave it energy and bravura,‘ said Michael Bierut, the Pentagram partner who led the Saks project. ‘And now we can create numerous permutations of the logo.’” (With slide show.)
New Work: One Laptop Per Child
Pentagram has designed the identity and website for One Laptop per Child, the non-profit organization with the goal of providing laptop computers to all children in developing nations.
The identity is a hieroglyph, designed to be universally understood, that utilizes the icons of the OLPC laptop interface, also developed by Pentagram. The website design employs these symbols as the basis for navigation. Each icon leads to a corresponding section of information: the laptop to a section about hardware and software, the arrow to a section about participation, and so on. The site launched in English but is currently being translated into many languages.
Identity design by Michael Gericke and Dimitris Stefanidis; website design by Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt, Nina Boesch and Takaaki Okada. Site development by Nurun.
New Work: Deutsche Kinemathek
Justus Oehler and his team have designed the new identity for the Deutsche Kinemathek — Museum für Film und Fernsehen (German Museum of Film and Television) in Berlin. Located in the Potsdamer Platz, in the heart of the city, the museum celebrates Germany’s contribution to world cinema and is comparable to institutions like the British Film Institute in London and the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. Holdings from Marlene Dietrich’s estate form the core of the permanent collection.
The museum was formerly named the Filmmuseum Berlin, but relaunched recently with a parallel focus on television. It needed an identity that would reflect both media, and the new logo features two screens intersecting to form a silvery-grey letter “M.” The program includes the design of posters, brochures and promotional collateral, signage, merchandising, and eventually, the website.
An application after the jump.
New Work: Saks Fifth Avenue
A new identity designed by Pentagram for iconic New York retailer Saks Fifth Avenue launches on January 2, 2007. After the jump, partner Michael Bierut describes the process behind the development of an identity with more variations than there are electrons in the known universe.
New Saks Identity Announced
The new Saks Fifth Avenue identity designed by Michael Bierut is announced in WWD (subscription required) and The Daily. The complete program launches in January.
New Work: The Metropolitan Opera
Paula Scher and Julia Hoffmann have designed the new identity for The Metropolitan Opera, the venerable New York institution. The rebranding is an initiative of the Met’s new general manager, Peter Gelb. The identity is set in Baskerville and Avenir and the new campaign features performance photography of Anthony Minghella’s production of “Madama Butterfly,” the show that kicks off the season on 25 September.
The print ad campaign launched 20 August, and according to Thomas Michel, the Met’s marketing director, resulted in the largest sales day in the history of the organization. The street campaign—the first for the Met in 30 years—goes up next week. (Official release here.)
The campaign is noted in The New York Times and The New York Sun.
More applications after the jump.
New Work: The Criterion Collection
Paula Scher and Julia Hoffmann have designed a new identity for The Criterion Collection, the top publisher of premium editions of classic and contemporary films on DVD. The program includes a monogram and a signature logotype and will appear on Criterion’s packaging starting with a new Eric Rohmer box set this August. Criterion logo animation here.
The new identity will be complemented by a sub-brand named Eclipse, a line of B-movies by important directors, which launches this fall. Eclipse logo animation here.
New Work: 7 WTC
Michael Gericke and his team have designed the identity, environmental graphics and marketing materials for 7 World Trade Center, the first new tower to be constructed at ground zero in Lower Manhattan. The 52-story, parallelogram-shaped building was developed by Silverstein Properties and designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. It officially opened yesterday.
Sales book after the jump; signage images coming soon.
New Work: San Francisco Opera
Click on the logo to see the animated version!
Brian Jacobs and his team have created a new identity for the San Francisco Opera. The redesign coincides with the arrival this year of the opera’s new general director, David Gockley. The symbol is a graphic interpretation of the sunburst chandelier in the historic War Memorial Opera House, but is also, as the opera’s press release puts it, “open to a broader interpretation, including that of the sound waves emanating from a human voice and a sense of explosive excitement.”
New Work: Alliance for a Healthier Generation
Meet Hugo, face of the Alliance for a Healthier Generation
Michael Bierut and Armin Vit have designed the brand identity for the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a joint venture of the William J. Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association that was established to combat childhood obesity. The identity features an icon named Hugo, a smiley face that combines the letters H and G and is designed to appeal to kids.
Hugo explained here in an Alliance e-mail announcement designed and written by Armin.
The identity made its media debut yesterday at Bill Clinton’s press conference about the agreement the Alliance has brokered with beverage makers to get healthier drinks into schools.
More Hugo after the jump.
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New Work: The Morgan Library & Museum
Identity on glass at the new Madison Ave. entrance
Michael Bierut and his team have designed the identity, exhibition graphics and signage for the renamed Morgan Library & Museum, the New York institution that reopens tomorrow with a dramatic expansion by celebrated architect Renzo Piano. The new identity utilizes a single font called Dante, a serif typeface that is customarily used for books.
More images coming soon. Complete press release at the jump.
Update: The Morgan identity is noted on Unbeige.
New Work: Sigmund Freud Foundation
Abbott Miller and his team have designed the identity for Freud Jahr 2006, the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud. Coming soon: “The Couch: Thinking in Repose,” the special exhibition designed by Abbott for the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna.
New Work: Vilcek Foundation
Abbott Miller and his team have designed the identity and website of the Vilcek Foundation, a philanthropic organization that honors foreign-born artists and scholars who have made lasting contributions to American society. The prize includes a trophy designed by Stefan Sagmeister.
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