New Work: Train Track for Do the Green Thing

Train Track, the latest video from Do the Green Thing.

‘Train Track’ is the latest piece of sustainable inspiration from Do The Green Thing, the environmental non-profit initiative co-founded by Pentagram’s Naresh Ramchandani. Created to inspire people to take the train instead of driving or flying, ‘Train Track’ features a toy train which runs along a suspended ribbon of cassette tape, so playing a beautiful song about the pleasures of train travel.

‘Train Track’ was created by Naresh Ramchandani, Michael Olivia Knight and Michael Wright, features a song written and performed by Orlando Seale and was directed by Michael Wright.

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: ‘Today I’m Feeling Turquoise’

“Today I’m Feeling Turquoise” is an attempt to do something that should have been done a long time ago: pairing up colours with their respective moods.

Because everyone knows that red means anger, green envy, and blue misery. But who knew that olive was the colour of deja-vu, brown the colour of indifference, or pink of laughing on the outside, crying on the inside?

The booklet is made up of double-page spreads of coloured paper sealed with a perforated edge. The reader selects a colour and tears open the perforations to reveal the mood it represents.

“Today I’m Feeling Turquoise” was produced by Pentagram as our 2011/12 holiday card—but it’s much more than that. It’s the first step on a journey to finally matching all the colours in the world with their corresponding moods.

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“Today I’m Feeling Turquoise” Featured on New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix

Quick Link: “Today I’m Feeling Turquoise” Featured on New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix

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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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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Toasting ‘Just My Type’

Pentagram’s New York studio recently hosted the launch party for Just My Type, the new book by Simon Garfield. Friends, colleagues and clients gathered to celebrate the book’s amazing success—has there been another book about fonts to hit the New York Times best-seller list?—and enjoyed a brief and highly amusing presentation by Garfield about the secret history between fonts and dogs, and remarks by Chip Kidd, who contributed the book’s foreword, and William Shinker, Gotham Books publisher. Garfield later signed copies of Just My Type, while guests viewed the book trailer, designed by Pentagram’s Naresh Ramchandani and Michael Bierut, and sampled our trademark “What Type Are You?” personality quiz, cited in the book.

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Just My Type Trailer Featured on Unbeige

Quick Link: Just My Type Trailer Featured on Unbeige

999 Fonts in 60 Seconds

In Just My Type: A Book About Fonts, author Simon Garfield takes readers on a tour through all things typographic. The book, which received a rave this week from The New York Times, traces the development of typography through historic figures like Johannes Gutenberg, John Baskerville, Eric Gill and Jan Tschichold, while considering topics like legibility versus readability, the importance of typeface choice in political campaigns, the advent of digital type and corresponding explosion of new fonts, and what your favorite font says about you. (In the book, Garfield takes Pentagram’s own “What Type Are You?” test. He is Archer Hairline.)

Pentagram’s Naresh Ramchandani and Michael Bierut collaborated on the book’s trailer, a montage that sends the “Just My Type” title pulsing through 999 different fonts (more or less) in a minute. The trip starts and ends in Archer, the font used on the book’s US cover (designed by Roberto de Vicq de Clumptich), passing through much-loved fonts like Bodoni, Helvetica and Gotham, as well as ne’er-do-wells like Comic Sans, Papyrus and Arial. How many fonts can you spot?

Just My Type is out September 1 from Gotham Books. The book was originally published to acclaim in the UK last fall.

Project Team: Naresh Ramchandani, partner-in-charge and creative director; Michael Bierut, partner and designer; Katie Barcelona and Niko Skourtis, font compilers. Animation by Steven Qua.