Antony Gormley’s ‘Event Horizon’ Installed at 204 Fifth

We have a new staffer here at our offices at 204 Fifth Avenue; he doesn’t say much, and spends most of his time up on the roof, gazing at the skyline. We are excited to be part of Event Horizon, the U.S. public art debut of the acclaimed British sculptor Antony Gormley. Presented by the Madison Square Park Conservancy as part of its Mad. Sq. Art series, Event Horizon is an installation of 31 life-size body forms of Gormley cast in iron and fiberglass that will inhabit the streets and rooftops around Madison Square Park from March 26 through August 15.

The figure on our building is the first to be installed and will be joined in the coming weeks by 26 others placed on rooftops and parapets as high as 55 stories up on landmarks including the Flatiron Building, the New York Life Building, the Clock Tower Building (formerly the MetLife Building), 200 Fifth Avenue (formerly the Toy Building) and the Empire State Building. Four more figures will be installed at ground level in the park. (Complete map of locations here.)

Antony Gormley originally created Event Horizon for his Blind Light exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2007. The sculptures were installed on bridges, rooftops and streets along the South Bank of the Thames, and the exhibition became one of the most popular installations of public art in the city’s history.

Madison Square Park hosts an impressive range of exhibitions, performances, festivals and food (hello, Shake Shack!), all right at our doorstep. We’ve been designing the graphics for the park and its programs since 2003.

Pics of the installation after the jump.

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DJ Stout Wins National Art Director Award

Austin partner DJ Stout will receive the 2010 Richard Gangel Art Director Award from the Society of Illustrators tomorrow evening at the Museum of American Illustration in New York City. Established in 2005, the Richard Gangel Award singles out one art director a year and honors them for their outstanding contributions in promoting and advancing the art of illustration. The award was named in honor of Richard Gangel, the award-winning art director for Sports Illustrated, who for 21 years—from 1960-1981—built an extraordinary collaboration with illustrators. Past recipients of the award have included Fred Woodward, Steve Heller, Rita Marshall, Patrick JB Flynn and Gail Anderson. “I’m honored to be mentioned in the same paragraph with these great art directors, design innovators and illustration lovers,” says Stout.

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Pentagram Wins at the Transform Awards

Pentagram partners Harry Pearce and Angus Hyland scooped seven awards between them at last night’s Transform Awards 2010, including the Grand Prix for excellence in rebranding for The Co-operative. The Awards are the UK’s only dedicated celebration of rebranding, brand transformation and reputational change.

In a ceremony hosted by the BBC’s arts editor Will Gompertz, Harry Pearce’s work for the Co-operative won a further two gold awards; for best brand architecture and best national rebrand. Angus Hyland’s AkzoNobel identity won two golds and a silver and his work for Grant Thornton received a gold.

The Transform Awards were established by Communicate magazine, the UK’s leading magazine for corporate communications and stakeholder relations.

New Work: Budgens

Harry Pearce and his team have been commissioned to redesign the complete own brand range for Budgens and Londis stores.

The own brand range has three levels, Good, Better, and Best, and many of the redesigned Good Value range have already hit the shelves with Pentagram’s designs for Good Value Jaffa Cakes and Good Value Assorted Crisps winning the Quality Food Awards 2009.

Now the first three varieties in the wines, beers and spirits range of Better products have been released with three sizes of bottle for the own brand whisky, gin and vodka. Each label takes a typographic approach with an individual letterform being adapted to capture the essence of the spirit inside. So the V of the vodka has a strong red constructivist feel with a silver foiled eagle set against it, the W of the whisky is foiled in gold against a faint thistle and the G of the gin is interlaced with a juniper branch replete with berries.

The text on each label adopts the same layout, which extends across all of Musgraves’ own brand products. It is expected that the whole redesign will take a year to roll out.

New Work: ‘William Kentridge: Five Themes’

In his drawings, prints, sculptures, books, films, installations and performances, the contemporary South African artist William Kentridge creates layered, complex narratives that connect the personal and the political. Abbott Miller has designed William Kentridge: Five Themes, a book that accompanies a major survey of the artist that debuted at SFMOMA last year and opens this week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Miller worked with Kentridge to develop different strategies to present this remarkably diverse body of work.

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Felt & Wire Launches New Design

Short of the paper cuts, the blog Felt & Wire captures the experience of all things paper: its endless varieties, uses and innovations, and the close personal associations we have with a material that is often right at our fingertips. The site was launched a year ago by our longtime client Mohawk Fine Papers to help foster a community of designers, artists, printers, papermakers, bookbinders and other craftspeople who are, as the site’s tagline puts it, “paper-obsessed.” The blog initially focused on paper-related topics like letterpress and written correspondence, but is now widening its focus to cover paper, print and design. To curate this expanded scope is newly appointed editor Tom Biederbeck, former editor in chief of STEP Inside Design and Dynamic Graphics magazines.

This week Felt & Wire launched an updated site design created by Michael Bierut and Katie Barcelona, who designed the original site last year. New features include a monthly Q&A column with Sean Adams, a forum for sustainability in design, and a monthly column called Studio Insider presenting the working spaces of leading artists and designers. The homepage now highlights reader comments and the site’s Twitter feed. One of the site’s most popular features is the Felt & Wire Shop, a curated marketplace introduced last fall that offers paper goods produced by designers and artists, including greeting cards, wrapping paper, books, posters and calendars. (Think Etsy for paper.) In addition to designing the site, Barcelona will be periodically contributing to the blog; her first column appears today.

And the name? Felt and wire are two materials used in the final stage of the papermaking process. Felt helps to absorb excess water and wire helps to structure the sheet as it forms. Representing the tactile and the technical, they’re also metaphors for the subjects that the site’s creators will continue to explore.

Awards: Type Directors Club 56

The Type Directors Club Annual has always been one of our favorite competitions, because we are type geeks at heart, of course, and we love the big beautiful book that the TDC continues to publish every year to showcase the winning work.

We are happy to announce that several of our projects have been selected for inclusion in the 56th Type Directors Club Annual Exhibition. In the Corporate Identity category, Paula Scher’s work for the Museum of Modern Art was honored, as were Michael Bierut’s identities for Guitar Hero and The Oak Room. Michael’s cover for Nabokov’s Speak, Memory was cited in the Book Jacket category, and his signage for the Harley Davidson Museum won in Environmental Graphics. Harry Pearce’s posters for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (above) and DJ Stout’s poster for Pentagram Austin’s Signs fundraiser were selected for the Poster category. And Lisa Strausfeld’s WNET online annual report was honored in Websites.

Thanks to all our designers, teams and clients who contributed their fantastic energy and vision to these projects.

New Work: ‘Cooking with Pomiane’

Edouard de Pomiane (1875-1964) was one of the first great modern food writers and culinary personalities, a biologist by training who invented the field he called “gastrotechnology,” or the science of cookery. He was also known for his great mustache. Justus Oehler and his team in Berlin have rendered de Pomiane’s personal trademark in simple ingredients for the cover of a reissue of the 1930 classic Cooking with Pomiane, out now from Serif.

De Pomiane worked as a physician at the Institut Pasteur in Paris and in his writings, recipes and radio broadcasts often attempted to demystify cooking by explaining the chemical processes at work. His recipes were remarkable for their “hard-boiled” tone—directly addressing you, the reader, about what you should be seeing and smelling as you follow them—and for his general disdain for “traditional” elaborate French cuisine. (His other popular title was French Cooking in Ten Minutes, hardly Julia Child.) A photograph of the real Pomiane and his ‘stache after the jump.

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New Work: Klein Caporn

The Slow Food movement promotes sustainable agriculture and encourages consumers to positively influence what is produced in their name around the world. Two ‘foodies’, operating under the company name Klein Caporn, have developed ‘Slow Food Fast’ a range of slow food quick sauces, initially for sale in Waitrose, the supermarket arm of the John Lewis Partnership. Domenic Lippa’s redesign of the identity and labeling for the three-product range improves on-shelf presence and legibility. The tortoise and hare identity has been refined so that it allows a more economic use of the limited pack space and a clearer hierarchy for the mark, the name and descriptor. A stylish black background, understated lower case lettering, and new fork and spoon icons that frame the information ‘meal’, further improve legibility and stand-out.

Project Team: Domenic Lippa, partner-in-charge; Beatrice Blumenthal, designer

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.

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