Lighting Up for ‘Newsweek’

What would branding for legalized marijuana look like? Should Proposition 19 pass in California on November 2, designers could very well find themselves with some new “green” clients. Pentagram’s Eddie Opara was invited to imagine a brand of legalized pot for a feature in this week’s Newsweek.

Opara built his brand around Northern Lights, an existing, much loved strain of marijuana that is renowned for growing very easily and has won the Cannabis Cup three times. Users have reported feeling particularly humorous and crazy when under the influence of Northern Lights.

The imaginary Northern Lights brand features a friendly mascot, a docile moose named Onehit, who is enamored with a smoky graphic representation of the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. The campaign includes advertisements that promote Northern Lights’ efficacy; branded products like lighters, cookies, and spreadable cannabutter; and a cannabis recipe app for your new iPad. Because you can’t be spending all your money on weed.

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New Work: ‘Rosebud’

Following James Biber’s “Weeds”-inspired dining room, currently on view in New York, we continue our foray into “green” design with what may be the first “Hydroponic Growers Lifestyle” magazine ever published. Julie Savasky and DJ Stout in the Austin office have designed Rosebud, a new magazine from Advanced Nutrients that debuts with its October issue. Based in Vancouver, Advanced Nutrients manufactures and distributes over fifty super-fertilizers and growth enhancement products with evocative names like Big Bud, B-52, Wet Betty, Voodoo Juice, Tarantula, and Bud Candy for hydroponic gardeners and enthusiasts the world over.

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Weeds Dining Room in The New York Times

Quick Link: Weeds Dining Room in The New York Times

New Work: ‘Weeds’ Dining Room

“Weeds” is all about the sacred and the profane. Or maybe the sacred and the mundane.

In the Showtime series a California housewife played by Mary-Louise Parker turns to selling marijuana after the death of her husband. The darkly comic mix of suburbia, naïveté and family dynamics is portrayed against a background of drugs, death, deceit and personal demons. The amount of killing, death, pain and humiliation surpasses even recent mob-themed shows; and this is a comedy!

This year’s Metropolitan Home Showtime House consists of twin penthouses at the luxury Tribeca Summit loft condominiums. James Biber and his team at Pentagram Architects were one of 14 designer teams invited to create rooms inspired by the network’s original programming.

Biber and his team, working on their first showhouse design, referenced a comic climax from “Weeds” for their design of the dining room. For those not up on the show’s past seasons, the scene was an eye-rolling reveal of a stolen rooftop lighted cross lifted from a new local religion-based community’s church. The enormous crucifix finally appears, lashed to the ceiling of a hastily assembled “grow house.” The stolen cross has become a lighting fixture over a bed of marijuana plants!

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