New at Pentagram
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?
Introducing the Black Book
Pentagram is pleased to announce the publication of the Black Book, a new 800-page overview of our recent work. The book is a compilation of over 400 projects from the last several years, arranged in alphabetical order, like a dictionary, and printed on Bible paper, like a Bible, complete with tabbed sections and ribbons for bookmarking. It covers pretty much everything we do, from architecture to graphics, buildings to websites, branding to signage, interiors, packaging, exhibitions, interfaces, furniture, products, brochures, magazines, and houses, all in simple picture-and-caption form.
CONTEST UPDATE: The Black Book giveaway contest is now closed. The 50 lucky winners will be contacted by email to confirm their information. We’ve had an overwhelming response—thanks to everyone for entering and for continuing to follow our work!
A look inside the Black Book after the jump.
Pentagram Papers 37: Forgotten Architects
In the 1920s and early 1930s, German Jewish architects created some of the greatest modern buildings in Germany, mainly in the capital Berlin. A law issued by the newly elected German National Socialist Government in 1933 banned all of them from practicing architecture in Germany. In the years after 1933, many of them managed to emigrate, while many others were deported or killed under Hitler’s regime. Pentagram Papers 37: Forgotten Architects is a survey of 43 of these architects and their groundbreaking work.
The paper is based on the extensive research of architect Myra Warhaftig, who sadly passed away last Tuesday, 4 March at age 78. Warhaftig spent twenty years investigating the fates of these architects and only recently published her findings in her book German Jewish Architects Before and After 1933: The Lexicon. An exhibition based on her work is set to open at the Jewish Museum Berlin later this year. David Sokol has written about Warhaftig and her project in an article published today in the Jewish culture blog Nextbook.
Forgotten Architects was designed by Justus Oehler and Christiane Weismüller in our Berlin office. We have adapted its content for a minisite here.
Pentagram 2008 Typography Calendar Now Available
Kit Hinrichs has designed Pentagram’s 2008 Classic Typographic Calendar using twelve typefaces designed by typographer Matthew Carter including Walker (originally designed in 1995 for the Walker Art Center), Snell Roundhand (a 1966 revival of 17th century English writing master Charles Snell) and Galliard (a 1978 anthology of Roman and Italian styles of French punch-cutter Robert Granjon). “I wanted to bring a new awareness of typographic design through this calendar,” said Hinrichs. “Typefaces are pervasive in our daily lives in everything we read and see around us and yet most people are oblivious of them or the circumstances in which they were created. We can gain a new perspective on our world by studying the origin of typefaces. I hope the calendar will encourage a new sensitivity to the importance of typeface usage and the work of Matthew Carter.”
The calendar is available in two sizes, a supersize 33-by-22 inch version suitable for wall hanging and a smaller 18-by-12 inch version appropriate for desk use. Both versions are available in the US and UK at kenknight.com. The price of the supersize calendar is $36 and the smaller desk and wall calendar is $22. (Prices do not include shipping.)
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.
‘Seventy-Nine Short Essays’ Very Short-Listed
Michael Bierut’s Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design has been recommended by Very Short List. “If your main exposure to the world of graphic design consists of swapping between Arial and Helvetica in Microsoft Word, then you need to read Michael Bierut,” says VSL.
Michael Bierut’s Book Is ‘New York’ Approved
Michael Bierut’s Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design charts on the Approval Matrix in this week’s issue of New York magazine, sharing space—somewhere between “Highbrow” and “Brilliant”—with David Lynch’s Inland Empire, a Malcolm Lowry compendium and videos of artists’ Moleskine sketchbooks.
Out Today: 'Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design'
Today marks the publication of Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, a collection of writings by Michael Bierut from Princeton Architectural Press.
The 272-page hardcover book brings together twenty years of essays on subjects that range from New York’s faulty “Push for Walk Signal” buttons, to the disappearance of the AT&T logo, to the implications of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire for interaction designers. Many of the pieces first appeared on Design Observer, the popular blog that Michael edits with Jessica Helfand and Bill Drenttel, including favorites like “Designing Under the Influence,” “I Hate ITC Garamond,” and “The Road to Hell: Now Paved with Innovation!” Seventy-nine Essays also includes pieces that appeared elsewhere and pieces that have never been published in other collections, like “Waiting for Permission,” “How to Become Famous” and “Ten Footnotes on a Manifesto.”
Michael’s writing is marked by its accessibility, its wit and its almost maniacal eclecticism. For instance, a survey of the entries under the letter “D” in the book’s index turns up, among others, Jacques Derrida, Stuart Davis, design by committee, Cameron Diaz, Walt Disney, Dr. Strangelove, Mort Drucker, Marguerite Duras and W.A. Dwiggins. If you seek a design book that navigates with aplomb between French semioticians, typographers, movie stars and Mad magazine cartoonists, Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design is the one for you.
While the book has no pictures, Abbott Miller’s design provides its own form of visual interest. Each essay is set in a different typeface, and readers can attempt to make real or imaginary connections between essay subject and font selection. We can guess why the essay on AT&T is set in C.H. Griffith’s Bell Gothic (it was designed in 1938 for the Bell Telephone Directory) or why the essay about Stanley Kubrick is set in Paul Renner’s Futura (it was reportedly the director’s favorite typeface); the rationale behind other selections may be a bit more obscure, or even completely nonexistent.
Michael points out that the list cover price of $24.95 works out to less than 32 cents per essay. “Design books are luxuries, especially for students,” he says. “I hope that this one provides something for everyone, at a price that anyone can afford.”
City ‘Papers’
The Pentagram Papers is featured in Metropolis.
Pentagram Papers 35: Tin Tabernacles
Pentagram Papers 35, “Tin Tabernacles and Other Buildings,” looks at the unusual corrugated-iron structures that served as expeditious architecture in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and that still dot the landscape in Britain, Australia and other parts of the world. The paper features the photography of Alasdair Ogilvie, who has been documenting the structures for 25 years. It was designed by David Hillman.
Check out a slideshow of the paper here.
‘Papers’ Chased
The Pentagram Papers has been recommended by Very Short List.
The Pentagram Papers Book
Since 1975 Pentagram has issued the Pentagram Papers, our limited edition series of booklets that examine “curious, entertaining, stimulating, provocative, and occasionally controversial points of view” related to design. Published once or twice a year, the Papers have been distributed exclusively to our friends and clients. Now, just in time for Pentagram’s 35th anniversary, the Papers have been collected and make their public debut in a new book, The Pentagram Papers, out now from Chronicle Books in the US and coming in February from Thames and Hudson in the UK.
Each Pentagram Paper explores a unique topic of interest—from the lights of London’s famed Savoy hotel to the pop architecture of Wildwood, New Jersey; from the mailboxes of rural Australia to the classroom aids of Mexico. The Pentagram Papers includes a detailed discussion of the series’ origins, reproductions of the 35 entries so far, and tucked in the back, a complete new paper, Marks of Africa, number 36 in the series.
Feedback Gets Around, Part 2
Feedback is “the ultimate guidebook,” says the Materialist.
Pentagram Papers 34: Monografías
(Click image for larger view)
Michael Bierut and his team have designed the latest Pentagram Paper, “Monografías: Information Design for the Mexican Schoolroom,” about the illustrated learning aids popular in Mexico. Armin Vit of Speak Up (and Pentagram) contributes an introduction about his own youthful monografía mania: “That evening, walking to the papelería with my mom I was about to discover monografías for the first time. I would then use them every year from third grade to high school and for every class from biology to world history—some I used so much, I had them memorized.”
Join us for a launch party for the paper tonight from 7 to 9 pm at Under the Volcano, 12 East 36th St., New York City.
More images after the jump.
Feedback Gets Around
Feedback, our irregularly published travel guide, is featured on Gridskipper, Gawker Media’s urban travel blog. “Sometimes you just need to know the best wine shop in Tallinn, Estonia, or how to find a set of appliances engraved with Snoopy’s visage in Tokyo,” writes Sarah Kaufman. Correction: The book is given out free to our friends and clients, and extra copies are sold for $20 to contributors. Globe-trotters everywhere remain desperate to get their hands on a copy.
Feedback also shows up on the trend reporting site psfk.com.
H&FJ Got Our Number(s)
Hoefler & Frere-Jones are now offering a collection of the original number fonts they created for this year's Pentagram Typography Calendar (designed by our SF office).
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