New MAD Store Pops Up for the Holidays

Get set for MAD shopping this holiday season at the Museum of Arts and Design’s new Pop-Up Store on New York’s Upper East Side. The shop, located at Kate’s Paperie at 1282 Third Avenue and 74th Street, celebrates its opening with a store warming this weekend and will be poppin’ through the holidays until January 15, 2010.

We designed an identity for the store using the MAD Face we created for the museum identity. This identity features on several groovy gifts, and the shop also offers apparel, books and unique products made by artists and designers. The 1200 sq ft space includes a window installation by Mia Pearlman, one of the artists featured in the museum’s current exhibition, Slash: Paper Under the Knife.

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Awards: Communication Arts 2009 Design Annual

From cycles to sweeteners, stars to stripes: Nine outstanding projects from our portfolio have been selected to appear in the Communication Arts 2009 Design Annual.

The work covers five categories within the competition. The Harley-Davidson Museum is represented twice in the environmental graphics category, for Abbott Miller’s permanent exhibitions and for Michael Bierut’s signage for the museum. Also honored in the category are Miller’s design for the exhibition Brno Echo: Ornament and Crime from Adolf Loos to Now at the Moravian Gallery and Kit Hinrichs’ exhibition Long May She Wave at the Nevada Museum.

Bierut’s identities for Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) and The Oak Room have been selected in the integrated branding category. Paula Scher’s work for Truvia sweetens the packaging category, where Bierut’s ream wrap for Strathmore Paper (with Marian Bantjes) is also highlighted. Michael Gericke’s design of “A Number of Numbers”, our 2008 holiday card, is a winner in the self-promotion category.

The Design Annual is due out at the end of the year in the November/December issue of Communication Arts. It is an honor to be recognized by CA and we are extremely proud of the brilliant work put forth by our teams.

Museum of Arts and Design Media Installations Win IDEA Award

The suite of dynamic informational and interpretive media installations at the Museum of Arts and Design.

Our program of dynamic informational and interpretive media for the Museum of Arts and Design in New York has won a Bronze in the Environments category of the prestigious International Design Excellence Awards, announced today. The awards are co-sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), BusinessWeek, Target and Autodesk.

The IDSA jury recognized the project for its use of dynamic and interactive technologies in a museum environment. Designed by Lisa Strausfeld and her team, the media were developed as an integral part of MAD’s new home at 2 Columbus Circle and include animated directory and wayfinding displays and interpretive installations that let visitors explore the museum’s permanent collection. The program was developed in conjunction with the identity we designed for the museum.

Abbott Miller’s exhibition design for the Harley-Davidson Museum was a Finalist in the Environments category of the awards.

Awards: 365: AIGA Annual Design Competition 30

Each year the long, cold winter of competition submissions pays off (hopefully) with a little winning in the warmer months. This year our US offices have had a lucky 13 projects selected in the 365: AIGA Annual Design Competition 30, announced today.

Pentagram has winners in all four categories, or “channels,” of 365. In Branding, our selections include the identities for the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), Bobby’s Burger Palace and The Oak Room, all designed by Michael Bierut; the identity for OLIN, designed by Abbott Miller; and the refresh of The Public Theater identity, designed by Paula Scher. Scher’s 2008 Shakespeare in the Park campaign was honored in the Promoting channel, as were Michael Bierut’s viewbook for Yale College and our very own Pentagram Papers 39: Signs, designed by DJ Stout, and holiday book, A Number of Numbers, designed by Michael Gericke. Abbott Miller’s False Start issue of 2wice was selected in the Entertaining category, and Kit Hinrich’s Long May She Wave: A Graphic History of the American Flag exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art was honored in Informing.

Our winners in the AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers section of the competition are Writings on Architecture, the collection of essays by Paul Rudolph, designed by Michael Bierut; and Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, the exhibition catalogue for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, designed by Abbott Miller.

The winning projects will be published in the annual AIGA: 365 Year in Design, out later this year.

New Work: Museum of Arts and Design

This weekend the Museum of Arts and Design opens the doors of its new home at 2 Columbus Circle following an extensive redesign of the building by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture. The museum’s new graphic identity can already be seen throughout the city, on the sides of buses, on street banners, in print ads and in the subways. The geometric-based mark reflects the circles and squares present in the building’s shape; its location, on Columbus Circle; and the building’s iconic “lollipop” columns retained in the redesign. After the jump Michael Bierut discusses creating a graphic identity for the one of New York’s most anticipated reinventions.

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Preview: Museum of Arts and Design Identity

This September, New York’s Museum of Arts and Design will relocate to 2 Columbus Circle, the former home of A&P heir Huntington Hartford’s Gallery of Modern Art. The 1964 building, originally designed by Edward Durell Stone, has received a bold renovation by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, featuring a new skin of glazed terra cotta tile, and slots outside and inside the building to permit light to filter through the museum’s galleries.

Pentagram has been working over the past year on a new identity, signage program, and media installations for the new building for its debut this fall. Above, a preview of the new MAD logo. “The new symbol is built out of circles and squares, a reference to the fact this squarish building sits on one of the most prominent circles in New York City,” says designer Michael Bierut, who is working on the project with partner Lisa Strausfeld. “The forms also refer in a subtle way to the building’s distinctive, some would say notorious, ‘lollipop’ columns, which will still be visible through the new façade.” An entire alphabet, extrapolated from the three letters in the logo, will be used selectively on MAD’s marketing materials.