Free! Live! Shakespeare in the Parking Lot

This being New York, not all alfresco Shakespeare happens in parks. Lisa Strausfeld and Brad Cloepfil have designed the new production of Henry V directed by Laura Strausfeld for the 15th season of Shakespeare in the Parking Lot on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The design incorporates live video projections and special graphics (English and French army logos by Michael Bierut!) that move Shakespeare’s historical war play into more topical terrain.

All performances free and open to the public. Shows run at 8 pm Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights through next Saturday 9 August, in the municipal parking lot at Ludlow and Broome. Bring a chair or come early to grab one of your own. Parking available. Meters in effect!

New Work: ‘The Sex Lives of Animals’

It’s true, everyone is having better sex than you. Even the animals. This is ably demonstrated in The Sex Lives of Animals currently on view at the Museum of Sex in New York. Designed by Michael Bierut and Jennifer Kinon, the exhibition explores the mating practices of species throughout the wild kingdom including those designed for reproductive purposes and those performed for sheer pleasure. Part entertainment, part natural history exhibition and part art gallery, the show features National Geographic-like photography and video clips as well as five specially commissioned life-sized animal sculptures by Brooklyn-based Norwegian artist Rune Olsen.

Try not to disturb the animals after the jump.

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New Work: Bobby’s Burger Palace

Ahh, summer: bikes, brews, chicken, and now, burgers. Our identity for Bobby’s Burger Palace, the new joint from celebrity chef Bobby Flay, made its debut last week when the restaurant opened at the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove, Long Island. Inspired by Flay’s cross-country travels, the fast-casual menu offers takes on the classic American burger prepared with regional flavors—the Dallas Burger, the Santa Fe Burger, the Miami Burger, et al.—and, if one likes, “crunchified,” or topped with chips.

Hungry? We’re goin’ to the BBP.

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James Biber Remakes Starbucks for ‘Architect’

The July issue of Architect magazine asked five architects, including James Biber, to redesign Starbucks in light of the company’s recent downturn. (Shares have fallen by 42% in the last year, and the company has announced its plan to shutter 600 stores.) Biber, who is featured on the cover caffeinating in New York’s City Bakery, proposed an environment that caters to a range of experiences—from fast to slow, from social to private—within a setting redesigned to be simple, efficient and universal. The approach even includes a new name for the chain: *$.

Biber’s complete proposal after the jump.

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Sugar UI Wins IDSA Award

The 2008 International Design Excellence Awards were announced today and Sugar, the user interface designed by Lisa Strausfeld and her team for One Laptop per Child, won a Silver in the Interactive Product Experiences category, one of four awards that went to OLPC in this year’s competition.

Our design for United Airlines’ First and Business class cabins was a finalist in the Transportation category.

The IDEAs are sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America and BusinessWeek magazine; full coverage here.

Green Machines

On July 4th, more than sixty buses hit the streets of Cleveland encouraging “Green Patriotism” with posters designed by native son Michael Bierut. The posters, which are visible on buses across the city throughout July, promote the use of mass transit and valorize buses as sound for the environment as well as for the vitality of Cleveland. Interior bus ads promote the development of green jobs in the manufacturing sector.

Bierut says, “Back in the 30s and 40s, folksinger Woody Guthrie had a slogan on his guitar: ‘This machine kills fascists.’ I was looking for a similar kind of statement to turn every bus ride into a blow for the environment.”

The project was organized in conjunction with The Canary Project: Landscapes of Climate Change, an exhibition on display through 10 August at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Bierut worked with Canary’s Ed Morris and Dmitri Siegel. Canary is using the project to inaugurate a nationwide program with posters from a wide range of designers.

Pentagram also developed the program’s emblem, a green silhouette of a Revolutionary War Minuteman. More pictures from the campaign after the jump.

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New Work: 2wice False Start

An animation of False Start, the new edition of 2wice.

2wice is a visual and performing arts journal designed by Abbott Miller that is built around specific themes that are explored through essays and performances conceived specifically for the page. These performances are sometimes based on an existing piece of choreography while others are developed uniquely for 2wice. False Start, the new issue, is a collaboration between the dancer/choreographer Jonah Bokaer, the photographer Joachim Ladefoged and Miller, who designed False Start as a 97-page flipbook which allows readers to reanimate Bokaer’s dance of the same name.

“Jonah Bokaer’s dance is an elegant condensation of so many strands of modern visual and performing arts: you can see John Cage and Merce Cunningham in it, Edweard Muybridge and Jasper Johns and Duchamp,” says Miller. “Our approach to the publication was to let all of those echoes play out in an extremely simple presentation that allows the complexities to unfold in the readers hands.”

“You can take each page as a portrait,” says 2wice Senior Editor Nancy Dalva. “Or, you can take the whole as a progression, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and view each page as you would a frame in an animation.”

A look inside after the jump.

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New Work: Harley-Davidson Museum

Listen closely this weekend and you may hear a rumble coming from Milwaukee, where the Harley-Davidson Museum opens on Saturday. Designed by Pentagram Architects' James Biber with his team and associate Michael Zweck-Bronner, the $75 million, 130,000-square-foot museum complex showcases the history, culture and engineering of this American icon.

The museum sits on a twenty-acre reclaimed industrial site directly across the Menomonee River from downtown Milwaukee and has been conceived as an urban factory ready-made for spontaneous motorcycle rallies. The three-building campus includes space for permanent and temporary exhibitions, the company's archives, a restaurant and café, and a retail shop, as well as a generous amount of event and waterfront recreational space. The museum's indoor and outdoor components were inspired by the spirit of Harley rallies in towns like Sturgis and Laconia, where thousands of riders congregate every year.

Creating a museum for an icon is an enormous challenge, and Pentagram conducted a massive amount of research to gain a thorough understanding of the complex cultural phenomena that revolve around the company. We even became Harley riders ourselves. The story of how we designed this major new museum after the jump.

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‘Thoughts on Democracy’ Opens at the Wolfsonian

Today, the Wolfsonian museum of art and design at Florida International University opens Thoughts on Democracy, an exhibition of posters contributed by 60 artists and designers, including Paula Scher and Kit Hinrichs. Each participant was asked to design a visual response to the classic Four Freedoms poster series created by Norman Rockwell in 1943. Each of the four original posters represents an essential American freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

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New Work: MillerCoors

Pentagram has designed the identity for MillerCoors, the new joint venture between brewing giants SABMiller and Molson Coors for the U.S. market. Officially launching today, the combined operation includes eight major U.S. breweries and over 30 brands including Coors, Coors Light, Miller Genuine Draft, Miller High Life, Miller Lite, Molson Canadian, Foster’s, Grolsch, Peroni, Pilsner Urquell, Killian’s Irish Red and Olde English.

The joint venture will be most used for business-to-business communications, and largely invisible to typical consumers. The familiar cursive logos of the two brewing companies will be unchanged. “The leadership at MillerCoors was positive about two things,” said Michael Bierut, who led the design effort. “One was that the value of the company is all about the power of the consumer brands. And the second is that no matter what happens in the future, the new company is going to remain focused on one thing: making beer.”

The new MillerCoors symbol, based on a view of a glass of beer from above, is at once neutral enough to combine with the rich heritage of the existing brands, forward-looking, and unequivocally about beer.

Project team: Michael Bierut, Katie Repine, Ben King. Logo animation by Favorite Color.