New Work: Art Directors Club Annual 90

Oscars, Emmys, Grammys… In our humble opinion, the best-designed—and named—award may be the Cube, the signature trophy of the Art Directors Club Annual Awards. Now in its 90th year, the ADC competition honors the best work of the year in design and advertising. For the 90th anniversary, the ADC invited Pentagram’s Paula Scher, a laureate of the ADC Hall of Fame, to design the Art Directors Club Annual 90, out now.

For the annual, Scher created playful illustrations of the iconic ADC Cube to introduce the various competition sections throughout the book’s standard format. Each section is opened by an interpretation of the category: rolling cubes for the lifetime achievement Hall of Fame award, a pattern for the Design section, a pixel-like network of cubes for Photography, monitor-like cubes for Advertising. A hand-drawn pattern of cubes appears as endpapers and debossed on the book’s cover. The annual also contains a portfolio of the 90th Cube Project, in which the ADC asked past award winners for their own interpretations of the Cube.

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New Work: Saks Fifth Avenue Holiday Windows

Terron Schaefer, group senior vice president for sales and marketing at Saks Fifth Avenue, approached Pentagram to design the holiday window displays at the store’s New York flagship. The idea needed to connect snowflakes and bubbles—motifs which had been used previously—and give the store a way to display its merchandise.

Pentagram’s Harry Pearce and Naresh Ramchandani and their teams came up with a concept that divided the Saks store into two worlds, the subterranean world of the bubble makers and the imaginary world of the snow makers who inhabit the roof of the building. Connecting the two is a curious little girl called Holly who whilst shopping in Saks on Christmas Eve with her parents finds a door which allows her into both worlds. First she visits the cave full of fantastic machines operated by ‘beautiful people in beautiful gowns’. She then rides a bubble produced by the machines, which takes her to the roof where she meets the yetis that make the snow.

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Awards: AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers

The AIGA’s annual “50 Books/50 Covers” competition showcases the best-designed books of the year, Kindles be damned. Pentagram is pleased to announce three of our books made the cut in the “50 Books” half of this year’s competition: Water Matters: A Design Manual for Water Conservation in Buildings, designed by Eddie Opara and team for the New York City Department of Design and Construction; Team Michael Bierut’s Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes; and Mah Jongg: Krak Bam Dot!, designed by Abbott Miller to accompany the exhibition “Project Mah Jongg at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.

The winning selections can be seen online in the AIGA Design Archives, and at an exhibition that opens today at the AIGA National Design Center in New York. (Check out the accompanying survey, What the Book.) The winning books will join the AIGA archives at the Denver Art Museum and Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at the Butler Library.

Congratulations to our designers, teams and clients for all the great work!

Angus Hyland’s Virginia Woolf Covers Featured in Fast Company

Quick Link: Angus Hyland’s Virginia Woolf Covers Featured in Fast Company

New Work: ‘Material Change’

Founded by the designer Eve Blossom, Lulan Artisans is a pioneering for-profit social venture that designs, produces and markets contemporary textiles made by over 650 weavers, dyers, spinners and finishers in small workshops in Cambodia, India, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Lulan provides workers with fair wages and benefits, creates jobs, preserves artisanal skills and promotes economic stability. The company is built on a sustainable business model that has the potential to change the world.

Pentagram’s Paula Scher and her team have designed Material Change: Design Thinking and the Social Entrepreneurship Movement, a new book by Blossom out now from Metropolis Books. In the book, Blossom chronicles the development of Lulan Artisans, describing her travels to weaving communities in Southeast Asia, how she came to know the artisans and their designs, and how she built a thriving partnership with local co-operatives. At the same time, she describes Lulan as a holistic design solution with a grassroots, bottom-up approach that can be applied to other culturally sustainable enterprises, and introduces other pioneers of social entrepreneurship, including Muna AbuSulayman, Patrick Awuah and Joi Ito. The designer Yves Behar contributes the book’s foreword.

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New Work: Virginia Woolf for Penguin

Penguin commissioned Angus Hyland and his team to design a new series of five of Virginia Woolf’s major works in hardback editions. The designs reference authentic period elements but do so in an entirely contemporary manner.

The dust jackets feature abstract compositions in the spirit of the textile designs of the Omega Workshop. The Workshop was founded by members of the Bloomsbury Group who included Woolf herself, her sister Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant.

The typography utilises Albertus, designed by Berthold Wolpe, and Gill Sans, designed by Eric Gill, both of whom were British typographers of the period.

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New Work: ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’

On May 25, 2011, Oprah Winfrey ended the incredible 25-year run of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” the television program that inspired millions of people around the world and made her a cultural icon. Pentagram’s Eddie Opara and team have designed The Oprah Winfrey Show: Reflections on an American Legacy, a new commemorative book that celebrates the show and its impact. Published by Abrams, the book is out this week.

Opara and his team designed the book to function as both elegant homage and pop-culture keepsake. The book combines a compelling narrative of the program’s history with 150 archival photographs and essays, testimonials and remembrances by notable personalities about the importance of Winfrey’s work in various social issues. Contributors to the book include Nelson Mandela, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Elie Wiesel, Bono, Ellen DeGeneres and Julia Roberts; alongside figures from Winfrey’s talk show, such as Dr. Phil McGraw and Dr. Mehmet Oz. The design deftly weaves all these elements together with a grace and clarity of composition that reflects one the most influential and beloved figures of our time.

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New Work: ‘From Uncertain to Blue’

Pentagram’s DJ Stout has designed hundreds of books over the years, especially photography books, but in 1987 he designed his very first photography monograph, called From Uncertain to Blue. The book was also the first by the photographer, the now-famous Keith Carter, and has become a classic and a collector’s item over time. Now, nearly a quarter century later, Stout, with designer Barrett Fry in Pentagram’s Austin office, has redesigned and completely re-imagined the book for a reissue by the University of Texas Press this fall.

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New Work: D&AD Annual

Pentagram’s Harry Pearce was asked by Sanky from AllofUs, last year’s D&AD President, to design the 2011 D&AD Annual.

The heart of Pearce’s idea for the Annual stems from wanting to celebrate the wonderful graphic illusion and quality of the original D&AD mark, which was designed in 1962 by Fletcher Forbes Gill, the studio that later became Pentagram.

The D&AD mark is shown at scale on the Annual’s cover to allow, through a brilliantly intriguing photograph by Richard Foster, an exploration of the unreality of the planes, the spaces and perspectives that lie within the mark’s form. For protection during shipping, the book is encased in an outer carton that also features the mark.

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Pentagram Projects Featured in ‘Graphic Design: Now in Production’

Pentagram is thrilled to have several of our works featured in the major exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production, currently on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Organized by Andrew Blauvelt of the Walker and Ellen Lupton of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (where the show travels next summer), Graphic Design: Now in Production looks at the growing reach of graphic design over the past decade—“expanding from a specialized profession to a widely deployed tool,” in the words of the curators—and the changing role of the designer to producer, author and entrepreneur. The show is the first major U.S. exhibition to focus on graphic design in 15 years, following Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture at the Cooper-Hewitt in 1996 and the Walker’s landmark exhibition Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History in 1989.

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