New at Pentagram
Michael Bierut, Michael Gericke and Paula Scher at the Museum of the City of New York
As part of its Spotlight on Design series, the Museum of the City of New York will host a discussion with Michael Bierut, Michael Gericke and Paula Scher about what it takes to design for institutions and corporations in one of the most visually competitive cities in the world. Museum curator Donald Albrecht moderates. Wednesday, 16 April from 6:30 pm at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street. Tickets and information here.
Pentagram Honored for Leadership in Pro Bono Service
Pentagram’s New York office was honored last night by the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation for its work for nonprofit organizations. Paula Scher and Jim Biber were on hand to accept the honor during a ceremony held at the Harvard Club. Pentagram received the first annual “DNA” award for “its exceptional incorporation of pro bono service into its business culture.” Recent Pentagram pro bono projects include work for the Robin Hood Foundation, the Madison Square Park Conservancy, the Public Theater and the One Laptop Per Child initiative.
The award ceremony is part of a two-day Pro Bono Summit that has brought together 150 top corporate, government and nonprofit leaders to launch a multi-year campaign to dramatically increase the amount of skilled volunteering and pro bono service employees give to nonprofits and their communities. The leaders are discussing strategies for making the idea of “pro bono” as common in marketing, finance, technology, HR, logistics and other professions as it is in the legal field.
Speaking about the business advantages of doing pro bono work Scher stated: “A lot of the work we’ve done is outside, public, it’s very visible, and so clients will call us because they’ve seen the design. I can’t tell you how many jobs I’ve gotten through [pro bono work with] the Public Theater. We’re connected to virtually every cultural institution in the city. We are rewarded in recommendations; we’re included in groups where we find out information about things—it’s all very good business.”
Pro bono work has been part of the culture at Pentagram for decades as the partners and their teams donate their talents and time to enhance the design programs of cultural institutions and nonprofit organizations all over the city. “Pentagram Design is setting a powerful example of corporate citizenship that we hope other companies will follow,” said Jean Case, Chair of the Council. “Embracing a pro bono approach is good for employees, the community and the bottom line. America’s businesses have an extraordinary pool of skilled talent, and engaging corporate volunteers on a large scale could make a profound difference in the well-being of our communities and our country.”
The Council’s Pro Bono Award is given annually to six companies who are considered to be setting the standards of excellence in offering pro bono corporate skills to solve social challenges. This year’s other awardees are the Advertising Council; General Electric; Harvard Business School Community Partners; McKinsey & Company; and the Monitor Group.
Giants Win Super Bowl at Arizona Cardinals Stadium
Although our true loyalties lie with their crosstown rivals, Pentagram’s New York office was cheering on the New York Giants in their victory against the New England Patriots in Sunday’s Super Bowl XLII. The game was the first Super Bowl to be played at the NFL’s newest stadium (now named University of Phoenix Stadium), opened in 2006 and for which Michael Gericke designed the environmental graphics and James Biber the interiors program. The structure was named by BusinessWeek magazine to be one of the most innovative sporting structures in the world and will be the home of future Super Bowls. Gericke was in attendance at the game, as was associate Don Bilodeau.
Snapshots from the event and a peek at a permanent tribute by Pentagram after the jump.
Continue reading "Giants Win Super Bowl at Arizona Cardinals Stadium"
Unbeige Visits Arizona Cardinals Stadium
Steve Delahoyde of Unbeige checks out our environmental graphics for Cardinals Stadium during a trip home to Glendale, AZ.
Give One XO Laptop, Get One
Through 31 December, One Laptop Per Child is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. Donate a XO laptop to a child in a developing country and receive one for the child in your life. Originally a two-week campaign that began in mid-November, the extended Give One Get One offer is the first time the laptop has been made available to the general public.
Lisa Strausfeld and her team have designed a temporary website for the promotion that educates donors about the organization’s mission, while it takes cues from consumer websites through the use of detailed product shots and overviews of the software. The site also provides a walk through of Sugar, the user interface developed by Pentagram with Red Hat and OLPC.
Website design by Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt and Asad Pervaiz in collaboration with OLPC and Eleven. Identity design by Michael Gericke. Site development by Nurun.
One Laptop Per Child Wins INDEX: Award
INDEX, a non-profit organization based in Copenhagen whose mission is to support design that substantially improves human life, has presented One Laptop Per Child with a prestigious INDEX: Award. Every two years, one award is given in each of five categories: Body, Home, Work, Play and Community. OLPC won in the Community category, as the jury surmised: “Without a computer-literate population, developing countries will continue to struggle to compete in a rapidly evolving, global information economy.” Pentagram developed the laptop’s interface and designed the organization’s identity and website.
Opening Day for ‘The Glory Days’
Exhibition poster designed by Pentagram.
Fifteen hundred people were at the Museum of the City of New York last night for the opening of The Glory Days: New York Baseball 1947-1957 exhibition designed by Michael Gericke and his team. The show celebrates the remarkable achievements, personalities and spirit of baseball in New York between 1947 and 1957 when the city was home to three major league teams: the Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. For eleven seasons, these teams dominated the sport playing in ten World Series, seven of which were Subway Series, with rosters that included Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.
The exhibition relates the history of this heyday through archival photographs, film footage, memorabilia and ephemera from the Museum of the City of New York, the Baseball Hall of Fame and private collections. Many of the objects in the exhibition have never before been publicly displayed. The exhibition highlights this plethora of memorabilia, as well as exhibition text and interactive displays, through three different kinds of large custom-designed vitrines. Evoking the spirit of the game, the floor of the main exhibition room has been painted with a scaled drawing of a major league baseball field that creates the impression of walking on a baseball diamond and the surrounding walls have been covered in a wallpaper of fourteen-foot archival photographs. The exhibition opens today to the public and remains on view through December 31.
After the jump, a video about the show’s design. Exhibition images coming soon!
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.
Arizona Cardinals Stadium Opens
The Cardinals’ new home in Glendale, AZ
The new Cardinals Stadium opens this weekend with environmental graphics and interiors by Pentagram. Michael Gericke and his team (in collaboration with Entro) designed the building’s overall graphic program, including identification, wayfinding, large-scale thematic elements, sponsor graphics, scoreboards and end zone treatments. Jim Biber and his team designed interiors for the locker rooms, club lounges, corporate lofts, and AZone team store. The stadium was designed by Peter Eisenman and HOK Sport. The first preseason game—the Cardinals play the Steelers—is tomorrow; the regular season begins on September 10.
Updates: Press conference with the designers, including Michael Gericke. The new stadium scores with fans: AP wire. Red is the color for Unbeige.
First pics after the jump.
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.
Syndication feed