New Work: John Lewis Design Collective
Harry Pearce and his team at Pentagram have designed the identity for the John Lewis Design Collective. The Design Collective showcases the best design talent from the UK and beyond and highlights John Lewis’s commitment to sourcing the highest quality of design for its customers.
Designers who form the collective include Bethan Gray, Sebastian Conran, Matthew Hilton and Timorous Beasties.
The mark created in collaboration with John Lewis Brand Creative is a reversed out ‘D’ in a solid ‘C’ and is being applied to promotional material as well as being used in publications, point of sale and in store promotions.
Marina Willer Joins Pentagram’s London Office
Pentagram announces its newest partner, Marina Willer.
Marina, who is originally from Brazil, will join the firm’s London office in April, taking the total number of partners worldwide to 18.
Continue reading "Marina Willer Joins Pentagram's London Office"
New Work: World Book Day
Today, 1 March, is World Book Day and sees the launch of a new mark designed by Angus Hyland and his team. For the last 15 years children of all ages in the UK and Ireland have been celebrating books and reading on this day by each being given a £1 book token. More than 14 million tokens have been sent to schools and nurseries across the country and many children have gone to school today dressed as their favourite literary character—Angus’s two boys chose to dress as the boy reporter Tintin.
The Story Behind the New Microsoft Windows 8 Logo
Quick Link: The Story Behind the New Microsoft Windows 8 Logo
New Work: Berlinale Retrospective
The 62nd Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale, wrapped this week following a program of over 400 films, many of them premieres. Each year the Berlinale also presents the Retrospective, a showcase of historical film that runs alongside the main festival and is curated in cooperation with the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen. This year the Museum asked Justus Oehler and his team in Pentagram’s Berlin office to create the graphics for the Retrospective. Oehler previously designed the identity for the Museum in 2006 and has since created numerous posters and campaigns for the institution and its exhibitions.
The Retrospective is always dedicated to an important but lesser-known director or period of film history and helps bring German and international film back to the big screen, often in restored prints. Titled Die Traumfabrik (The Red Dream Factory), the Retrospective program of the 2012 Berlinale has rediscovered the legendary German-Russian film studio Mezhrabpom-Film and its German branch, Prometheus, which operated from 1922 to 1936. The graphics designed by Oehler make use of an iconic black-and-white still of the Soviet movie Okraina (directed by Boris Barnet in 1933), combined with large, distinctive typography inspired by the Museum für Film und Fernsehen identity.
The Red Dream Factory program will travel to the Museum of Modern Art in New York this April in a new partnership between the Berlinale Retrospective and MoMA.
New Work: Microsoft Windows 8
Animation of the new identity demonstrating its capacity for transparency and motion. Transparent, it can become an actual window.
As Microsoft prepares for the launch of Windows 8, the new version of its operating system, it has announced a bold new identity that takes the iconic Windows logo back to its roots—as a window. Designed by Pentagram’s Paula Scher, the logo re-imagines the familiar four-color symbol as a modern geometric shape that introduces a new perspective on the Microsoft brand.
Meeting with Microsoft early in the development process, Scher asked: “Your name is Windows. Why are you a flag?”
The answer is the brand started as a window, but over the years, as computing systems grew more powerful and graphics more complex, evolved into a flag. Scher made the assumption that the waving flag was probably a result of typical industry comments that a plain window looked too static, and that straight lines were too severe.
“I think the waving flag was meant to be a flag in perspective,” says Scher. “All of the clichés of technology design are based on the idea that icons should look dimensional like product design that tech designers call ‘chrome’––look at the iPhone interface where everything has gradation and drop shadows.”
New Work: Lucy’s Fried Chicken
Pentagram’s DJ Stout and his team in Austin do chicken right. They rebranded Popeye’s in 2008, changing the name from Popeye’s Chicken & Biscuits to Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen. The new identity they created for the national chain, known for its spicy New Orleans style chicken and red beans and rice, was included in the Graphic Design: Now in Production exhibition that opened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis last fall. Then in 2009 they created a new identity for Chicken Now, a fast food chain that sells chicken strips and chicken fingers primarily in malls.
Now Stout and designer Barrett Fry have created the logo, identity, menus, T-shirts, website and even a neon sign for a new self-proclaimed “Rock and Roll Fried Chicken joint” in Austin called Lucy’s Fried Chicken. The new restaurant/bar, located at the far end of ultra-hip South Congress Avenue, is owned by James and Cristina Holmes, who named the place after James’s grandmother who taught him how to cook fried chicken. They also have a daughter named Lucy and own another, more upscale restaurant in Austin, Olivia, named after their other young daughter. James started cooking fried chicken for his Sunday brunch at Olivia and it was a big hit with his customers. Then he started selling it from a food trailer during the Austin City Limits Festival, which generated long lines across Zilker Park, where the festival is held annually. He realized that he had something special and that fried chicken, which had fallen out of favor over the years, was making a big comeback.
New Work: Sundance Film Festival
This week filmmakers, studio executives and film fans will make their annual pilgrimage to Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival, the largest independent film festival in the United States and one of the premier showcases for film in the world. Established in 1978, the festival is produced by the non-profit Sundance Institute, founded by the actor and director Robert Redford to discover and support independent film and artists. Noteworthy recent films like “Marcy Martha May Marlene,” “Like Crazy,” “Being Elmo” and “Another Earth” were all honored with awards at last year’s festival, and Sundance has been instrumental in launching the careers of directors like Steven Soderbergh, Darren Aronofsky and Quentin Tarantino. This year’s 10-day festival runs from January 19 through 29 in Park City and nearby Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah.
Pentagram’s Paula Scher and her team created the bold graphic identity for this year’s festival, organized around the theme “Look Again.” Each year Sundance invites filmmakers to alter perceptions with their films, and Redford and the marketing team at Sundance developed the “Look Again” tagline after being inspired by a quote by Henry Miller: “One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of seeing things.” The theme captures the mission of Sundance and the spirit of independent film.
New Work: National Academy
Established in 1825, the National Academy Museum and School has a mission to “promote the fine arts in America through instruction and exhibition.” Founded by a group of artists that included Thomas Cole, Asher Durand and Samuel F.B. Morse, it is the only institution of its kind to integrate a museum, art school and honorary association. It is modeled after the Royal Academy in London and is guided by a membership of esteemed artists and architects elected by peers. Members have included Jacob Lawrence, Frederic Edwin Church, Chuck Close, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Louise Bourgeois, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Cesar Pelli, Frank Gehry, Robert A.M. Stern and Maya Lin, among many others.
The National Academy is housed in a 1901 Beaux Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, sited between the Guggenheim and the Cooper-Hewitt on New York’s Museum Mile. This fall the Academy completed an ambitious $3.5 million renovation designed to raise its profile and create a better visitor experience. Timed to the renovation, Pentagram’s Abbott Miller has refreshed the Academy’s identity and developed a new program of environmental graphics for the institution, including a striking typographic installation of members’ names on the ceiling of the museum’s foyer.
Quick Links
- Harry Pearce to Speak at Designer Breakfast
- Harry Pearce and Naresh Ramchandani's Identity for Hong Kong Luxury Destination Launches
- Meet Marina Willer, Pentagram's Newest Partner
- Inside Pentagram's Archive
- Michael Bierut to Speak at TYPO San Francisco
- "Today I'm Feeling Turquoise" Featured on New York Magazine's Approval Matrix
- The Story Behind the New Microsoft Windows 8 Logo