New at Pentagram
James Biber Remakes Starbucks for ‘Architect’
The July issue of Architect magazine asked five architects, including James Biber, to redesign Starbucks in light of the company’s recent downturn. (Shares have fallen by 42% in the last year, and the company has announced its plan to shutter 600 stores.) Biber, who is featured on the cover caffeinating in New York’s City Bakery, proposed an environment that caters to a range of experiences—from fast to slow, from social to private—within a setting redesigned to be simple, efficient and universal. The approach even includes a new name for the chain: *$.
Biber’s complete proposal after the jump.
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Sugar UI Wins IDSA Award
The 2008 International Design Excellence Awards were announced today and Sugar, the user interface designed by Lisa Strausfeld and her team for One Laptop per Child, won a Silver in the Interactive Product Experiences category, one of four awards that went to OLPC in this year’s competition. The IDEAs are sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America and BusinessWeek magazine; full coverage here.
Green Machines
On July 4th, more than sixty buses hit the streets of Cleveland encouraging “Green Patriotism” with posters designed by native son Michael Bierut. The posters, which are visible on buses across the city throughout July, promote the use of mass transit and valorize buses as sound for the environment as well as for the vitality of Cleveland. Interior bus ads promote the development of green jobs in the manufacturing sector.
Bierut says, “Back in the 30s and 40s, folksinger Woody Guthrie had a slogan on his guitar: ‘This machine kills fascists.’ I was looking for a similar kind of statement to turn every bus ride into a blow for the environment.”
The project was organized in conjunction with The Canary Project: Landscapes of Climate Change, an exhibition on display through 10 August at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Bierut worked with Canary’s Ed Morris and Dmitri Siegel. Canary is using the project to inaugurate a nationwide program with posters from a wide range of designers.
Pentagram also developed the program’s emblem, a green silhouette of a Revolutionary War Minuteman. More pictures from the campaign after the jump.
New Work: Popeyes
Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits’ President and CEO Cheryl Bachelder announced the launch of a new name and look for the international fast-food chain this week. The refreshed brand identity developed by DJ Stout and Associate Julie Savasky in the Austin office is part of an overall effort to update the restaurant’s image and to make it more appealing to a younger generation. Popeyes, which is known for its spicy Cajun-style fried chicken and red beans and rice, has a rabidly enthusiastic following, but the brand was beginning to look generic and tired to the fast-food loving target audience of 18- to 24-year-olds. “I’ve done a lot of logos,” says Stout, “but nothing I’ve done over the years has gotten my 18- and 22-year-old sons more excited than this. They love this chicken.”
New Work: Spark Awards
Kit Hinrichs and his team in San Francisco have designed the identity and communications program for the second annual SparkAwards. The interdisciplinary design competition is unique for its diverse array of categories and its multi-level judging structure, similar to a sports playoff, that serves to lower the initial cost of entry. Jurors, who evaluate entries on environmental and functional merits as well as aesthetics, include Hinrichs, editorial and curatorial design consultant Chee Perelman and Chris Riley from Apple’s graphic design group. This call for entries goes out to designers, art directors, architects, design firms, manufacturers, institutions, ad agencies, students and novices.
Spark aims to raise design awareness of the general population, support new ways for people to experience and participate in design, and encourage designers and manufacturers to create products that make a difference.
New Work: Harley-Davidson Museum
Listen closely this weekend and you may hear a rumble coming from Milwaukee, where the Harley-Davidson Museum opens on Saturday. Designed by Pentagram Architects' James Biber with his team and associate Michael Zweck-Bronner, the $75 million, 130,000-square-foot museum complex showcases the history, culture and engineering of this American icon.
The museum sits on a twenty-acre reclaimed industrial site directly across the Menomonee River from downtown Milwaukee and has been conceived as an urban factory ready-made for spontaneous motorcycle rallies. The three-building campus includes space for permanent and temporary exhibitions, the company's archives, a restaurant and café, and a retail shop, as well as a generous amount of event and waterfront recreational space. The museum's indoor and outdoor components were inspired by the spirit of Harley rallies in towns like Sturgis and Laconia, where thousands of riders congregate every year.
Creating a museum for an icon is an enormous challenge, and Pentagram conducted a massive amount of research to gain a thorough understanding of the complex cultural phenomena that revolve around the company. We even became Harley riders ourselves. The story of how we designed this major new museum after the jump.
Preview: matter
Pentagram has named and created the identity for matter, a new multi-million pound London music venue from the team behind the renowned club fabric.
A cross-disciplinary team led by architect William Russell and graphic designer Angus Hyland is also developing the venue’s interior architecture, which will consist of a three-storey, 2,600 person capacity venue underneath the domed roof of The O2 arena in North Greenwich.
D&AD Forum Series: Self Publishing
Pentagram’s London office played host to the latest discussion in the D&AD’s Member’s Forum series on the evening of Wednesday, 2 July. The sell-out event brought together Jonathan Ellery of Browns and Damon Murray from Fuel to discuss the difficulties and rewards of publishing their own self-initiated book projects.
‘Thoughts on Democracy’ Opens at the Wolfsonian
Today, the Wolfsonian museum of art and design at Florida International University opens Thoughts on Democracy, an exhibition of posters contributed by 60 artists and designers, including Paula Scher and Kit Hinrichs. Each participant was asked to design a visual response to the classic Four Freedoms poster series created by Norman Rockwell in 1943. Each of the four original posters represents an essential American freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
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New Work: MillerCoors
Pentagram has designed the identity for MillerCoors, the new joint venture between brewing giants SABMiller and Molson Coors for the U.S. market. Officially launching today, the combined operation includes eight major U.S. breweries and over 30 brands including Coors, Coors Light, Miller Genuine Draft, Miller High Life, Miller Lite, Molson Canadian, Foster’s, Grolsch, Peroni, Pilsner Urquell, Killian’s Irish Red and Olde English.
The joint venture will be most used for business-to-business communications, and largely invisible to typical consumers. The familiar cursive logos of the two brewing companies will be unchanged. “The leadership at MillerCoors was positive about two things,” said Michael Bierut, who led the design effort. “One was that the value of the company is all about the power of the consumer brands. And the second is that no matter what happens in the future, the new company is going to remain focused on one thing: making beer.”
The new MillerCoors symbol, based on a view of a glass of beer from above, is at once neutral enough to combine with the rich heritage of the existing brands, forward-looking, and unequivocally about beer.
Project team: Michael Bierut, Katie Repine, Ben King. Logo animation by Favorite Color.
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