New Work: Tomorrow’s Answers Animated

Pentagram has created a series of short animated films for AkzoNobel that highlight various products and initiatives of the company.

As part of the online version of AkzoNobel’s Annual Report 2011, Pentagram have created four short animated films to illustrate a cross-section of AkzoNobel’s initiatives and innovations with paints, chemicals and specialty coatings across the year.

Produced by Naresh Ramchandani and Angus Hyland and directed by Simone Nunziato, each film starts by posing an important question then uses narration and playful animation to show how AkzoNobel has begun to answer it.

One film asks ‘How do we satisfy our love for salt and our need for health?’ The film goes on to explain the health problems intrinsic with our salt-loving culture, and then introduces a genuine salt replacement with less than 50% of the sodium content of salt.

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New Work: Aldo Rise Installations by Daniel Weil

Last week we posted about the Selfridges windows that Pentagram’s Daniel Weil designed for Aldo Rise, Aldo’s bold collaboration with daring new talent in the fashion industry. The windows promoted the heart of the experience, the pop-up installation in the Shoe Galleries on Selfridges’ second floor.

Daniel devised the installation around the experience of sitting down and trying the shoes. Each counter unit of the installation is supported by a single wood turning, inspired by a female shoe.

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New Work: The Selfridges London Debut of Aldo Rise

Fashion shoe brand Aldo asked Pentagram’s Daniel Weil to create both the main entrance windows and a pop-up store for the Selfridges launch of the Aldo Rise initiative, a bold collaboration with daring new talent in the fashion industry.

Collaborating with partner Naresh Ramchandani, Weil has created a display concept that runs through both the windows and pop-up store.

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From the Archive: ’Everything You Need to Know‘

Opening titles and bumper for the 1993 Comedy Central series ‘Everything You Need to Know,’ hosted by Christopher Hitchens.

Pentagram was saddened to learn of the passing of Christopher Hitchens, one of our favorite writers, essayists and acerbic wits. In one of our first (and little seen) ventures in television graphics, Pentagram, in collaboration with Curious Pictures and producer Billy Kimbell, designed the opening titles for the Comedy Central TV show “Everything You Need to Know”, an overview of world events with an unlikely host in the untelegenic, chain-smoking Mr. Hitchens. Planned as a weekly series, a pilot for the show ran only once in August 1993. Although it was never picked up, it can be considered a precursor to “The Daily Show,” which debuted on the same network three years later.

The titles were meant to reflect the show’s reduction of a vast amount of ridiculous material to an absurd core. The word “earwax” spells onto the screen against a black background, followed more rapidly by a long series of words beginning with the letter “E” and ending with the word “everything.” The process repeats with a series of foreign words ending in “you,” a series of homonyms (knead, knee, neat) ending in “need,” a series of numbers ending in “2”, and a series of pictograms ending in “know.” When the sequence is completed, which takes less than a minute, the show’s full title has been established.

Project Team: Michael Bierut, partner-in-charge and designer. Production: Curious Pictures.