This spring marks three decades since the first cases of AIDS appeared and were announced by the CDC in June 1981. Since then, progress has been made in the treatment of the disease, which has infected more than 60 million people around the world. Posters have been a valuable tool in the fight, used to raise awareness, help prevention, and combat prejudice. Graphic Intervention is an exhibition of over 150 posters from throughout the epidemic that opens today at the Art Directors Club in New York. The selection includes a pair designed by Pentagram’s Harry Pearce and Jason Ching for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, used to train Russian police about the prevalence of HIV among injecting drug users in Europe and countries around the world.

The posters featured in Graphic Intervention can be seen in an online gallery here; the show remains on view at the ADC through July 29.

New Work: Shakespeare in the Park 2011

The streets meet the sheets in Paula Scher’s 2011 campaign for Shakespeare in the Park, set to launch this week.

This year’s productions, to be presented in repertory starting June 6, are All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. Both plays contain elements of bedroom farce, and “Shakespeare in bed” is the campaign’s frisky tagline. In the 3-sheet version of the poster, the play titles, set in Knockout, canoodle with the sinuous curves of an outsize ampersand on a photographic image of a bed. (A pair of pillows is pictured on the horizontal-format posters for buses and the subway.) The campaign will also be seen in magazines and newspapers.

Continue reading "New Work: Shakespeare in the Park 2011"

New Work: Pecha Kucha Austin No. 11 Poster

Pecha Kucha, which means “chit chat” in Japanese, is a creative speaking format that was imported to the United States from Tokyo in 2003. The event was originated by a group of architects who were trying to get their presenters to talk about their architectural design work in a more precise manner, and to basically just get on with it. The fast-paced format they came up with did the trick. Ten presenters from a wide variety of creative disciplines are asked to speak at each event. Each presenter gets twenty slides set on a timer of twenty seconds per slide. The unique format, called 20 X 20, can lead to energetic performances, of about six minutes total, or spectacular failures that seem to last forever. The combination of 10 different personalities and presentation styles makes for an exciting, and inspiring, evening of creative passion.

There have been 10 Pecha Kucha events in Austin over the last three or four years, held at a wide variety of unusual and off-beat venues, including a Design Within Reach furniture showroom, a hot rod shop, a former warehouse and the Austin City Limits recording studios located on the campus of the University of Texas. Pecha Kucha Number 11 will be held at an abandoned 1950s municipal building called Seaholm Power Plant on the evening of April 27th at 8:20 PM. (The event is free and open to the public.) The cavernous public works building, constructed completely of poured concrete, is located on the north shore of Lady Bird Lake in the center of downtown Austin. With its five towering smoke stacks and its nostalgic Art Deco styling, the old power plant has become an architectural icon and a symbol of a bygone industrial era. It is ironic that Seaholm, a building that housed massive turbines for generating electrical power for the city of Austin, has not had electricity or running water since 1989, when the plant was shut down. The old landmark has had a bit of a popular resurgence lately—a “new energy” you could say—and has been the host of several large parties and concerts (with electricity and portable restrooms brought in, of course), including a Kanye West show during the South By Southwest music festival last March that drew record attendance

The official poster for Pecha Kucha Austin No. 11 was designed by Pentagram Partner DJ Stout and designer Stu Taylor in the Austin office. The silk-screened poster features a section of Seaholm’s Art Deco façade, three of its five iconic smokestacks and the names of the ten presenters for the event. The speakers include: George O. Jackson, photographer; Jorie Lodes, burlesque dancer; Dana Friis Hansen, former director of the Austin Museum of Art; Michael Yates, furniture designer; Southpaw Jones, musician/songwriter/performer; the Hancock Brothers, printmakers; Beili Liu, artist; Tiffany Harelik, trailer food diarist; Adrian Quesada, musician; and Johnny Walker, performance art curator. The posters will be offered to attendees at the April 27th event for a five dollar donation. “I’ve always wanted to create a type face out of smoke,” says Stout. “Austin has its roots in hippie culture, so I guess we could call this font ‘High Times.’”

Stout designed the poster for Pecha Kucha Austin No. 10 earlier this year.

New Work: The Playing Place

A shipping container has been placed in the middle of Truro, Cornwall and named The Playing Place. It opened on 26 March and will remain in place until 25 April. Inside the container visitors are able to interact with written and spoken language, stories and theatre. Domenic Lippa was invited to design a poster for the interior of the container influenced by the words of the BBC and Channel 4 script writer, James Henry.

Continue reading "New Work: The Playing Place"

New Work: ‘Building Hope’

DJ Stout and designer Stu Taylor in Pentagram’s Austin office have designed the poster for Building Hope, a new film by Turk Pipkin that will make its debut at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival this Saturday, March 12.

The new documentary was produced by the Nobelity Project, a non-profit organization founded by Turk and his wife Christy Pipkin in 2006. After interviewing nine Nobel laureates, Turk directed his first documentary, Nobelity, a film about global problems such as energy, hunger, land mines and climate change. The Nobel laureates featured in that film included Desmond Tutu, Wangari Maathai, Ahmed Zewail, Steven Chu (current U.S. Secretary of Energy), Harold Varmus, Steven Weinberg, Muhammad Yunus, Amartya Sen, Jody Williams, Sir Joseph Rotblat and Richard Smalley. Turk then spent three years traveling to five continents and twenty countries filming a sequel, One Peace at a Time, which focused on solutions in the areas of water, nutrition, education, health care, opportunity, environment and peace.

Turk’s third film, Building Hope, chronicles the construction of Mahiga Hope High School, in rural Kenya. In 2009, The Nobelity Project, in partnership with Architecture for Humanity, received an award from the Nike GameChangers Fund, an architectural grant to help build the school—the first high school in the area—and the award-winning Mahiga Rainwater Court, a basketball court and rain water collection facility that provides clean drinking water for the high school and the community. Through drought, flood, and fundraising challenges, Building Hope tells the story of the construction of Mahiga Hope High School, and the connection between a thousand people in the United States and a small African community working to create a better future for their children.

“The chalkboard solution quickly communicates the idea that this is a movie about building a school, and it also gave us a way to explain the idea of the Rainwater Court with a simple little sketch,” says Stout.

Watch the Building Hope trailer here.

Justus Oehler’s Haiti Poster Wins Red Dot Award

Quick Link: Justus Oehler’s Haiti Poster Wins Red Dot Award

New Work: Pecha Kucha Austin Poster

Pentagram Austin partner DJ Stout and designer Stu Taylor have designed the poster for the tenth edition of Pecha Kucha Austin. The limited edition silkscreened poster will be available to attendees of the event, which will be held next Thursday, February 10.

Pecha Kucha is a creative speaking event that originated in Japan. (Pecha Kucha is Japanese for “chit chat.”) Its unique speaking format was originally conceived by a group of architects in Tokyo as a way to get architects to talk faster during presentations. Ten individuals, from a wide-range of creative disciplines, are featured at each event. In the past this has included designers, painters, sculptors, musicians, choreographers, writers, photographers and even puppeteers. Each speaker has twenty slides set on a timer of twenty seconds per slide, so that each talk is only about six and a half minutes long. Ten short, spontaneous talks on passion and creative inspiration, one after the other, can be very powerful, however. There are three or four events held a year, usually held at interesting and offbeat locations.

Since coming to the States, the Pecha Kucha phenomenon has spread to every major city in the country. The Austin installment was originally brought to town by Herman Dyal and Carla Fraser about three years ago, and since then, they have hosted nine events. Last year the baton was handed off to DJ Stout and Lana McGilvray and now their first event as organizers, Pecha Kucha AustinTen, will be held on the evening of February 10th at 8:20 PM, at the Austin Speed Shop, a rock-and-roll hot rod customizing facility in South Austin.

The lineup for the event is: Federico Archuleta, graffiti artist and muralist; Jody Denberg, broadcaster; Larry Speck, architect; Turk Pipkin, activist and film-maker; Virginia Fleck, artist; Willie Graham, 10 year old architecture enthusiast; Tyson Cole, culinary artist; Liz Cass, opera singer, Harmoni Kelley, bass player; and David Kampa, package designer

New Work: ‘Structure of Light’ for Yale Architecture

Thanks to Diddy, our posters for the Yale School of Architecture have been in the spotlight. Michael Bierut and his team have been designing the series of posters—over 70 to date—for the past dozen years. The latest, issued earlier this month, was created for Yale Architecture’s symposium “Structure of Light: Richard Kelly and the Illumination of Modern Architecture.” Kelly was a lighting designer known for his collaborations with modernist architects including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Louis I. Kahn and Philip Johnson. The poster uses the series’ simple design parameters—black, white and type—to make the symposium title, set in Hoefler & Frere-Jones’s Tungsten, look like architecture emerging from the dark.

Michael Bierut’s original sketch for the poster after the jump.

Continue reading "New Work: ‘Structure of Light’ for Yale Architecture"

P. Diddy Likes Our Poster Design

Quick Link: P. Diddy Likes Our Poster Design

New at Pentagram

Paula Scher’s Posters That Celebrate the Joy of Type

‘Graphic Intervention’: Three Decades of Posters Against AIDS