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.
New Work: Santa Fe Railyard Park
Last week, the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects announced their Design Awards for 2012. The list included many Pentagram collaborators, including architect Frederic Schwartz and landscape architect Ken Smith who won an Honor Award for their design for the Santa Fe Railyard Park. The park is the public core of a new mixed-use district redeveloped from the historic train yards near Santa Fe’s downtown. Pentagram collaborated with Smith and Schwartz on this project as signage and environmental graphic designers.
New Work: 100 Ideas
Laurence King have launched a major new series, “100 Ideas that Changed…,” showing that ideas that shaped the history of the visual arts still play a key role in them now. With covers designed by Pentagram’s Angus Hyland, the first two in the series on Architecture and Fashion will be followed later this year by books on Film, Graphic Design, Art and Photography. The series will give the reader immediate, yet deep insights into the nature of each art.
New Work: Poetry Magazine Anniversary Cover
Founded in 1912, Poetry Magazine is the English-speaking world’s oldest monthly dedicated to verse. Published by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, the magazine has helped establish the reputations of poetic greats like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore.
To celebrate its 100th anniversary, Poetry’s designers, Winterhouse Studio, invited 11 artists and designers, including Pentagram’s Michael Bierut, to reinterpret its iconic Pegasus logo, originally created by Eric Gill, the artist and type designer (Gill Sans, Perpetua), in 1932. The Pegasus has long been a symbol of poetic inspiration—the mythical creature was a gift to the Muses from Athena, goddess of wisdom—and various artistic interpretations of the winged horse have appeared on the cover of Poetry over the years.
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New Work: World Book Day
Today, 1 March, is World Book Day and sees the launch of a new mark designed by Angus Hyland and his team. For the last 15 years children of all ages in the UK and Ireland have been celebrating books and reading on this day by each being given a £1 book token. More than 14 million tokens have been sent to schools and nurseries across the country and many children have gone to school today dressed as their favourite literary character—Angus’s two boys chose to dress as the boy reporter Tintin.
New Work: Berlinale Retrospective
The 62nd Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale, wrapped this week following a program of over 400 films, many of them premieres. Each year the Berlinale also presents the Retrospective, a showcase of historical film that runs alongside the main festival and is curated in cooperation with the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen. This year the Museum asked Justus Oehler and his team in Pentagram’s Berlin office to create the graphics for the Retrospective. Oehler previously designed the identity for the Museum in 2006 and has since created numerous posters and campaigns for the institution and its exhibitions.
The Retrospective is always dedicated to an important but lesser-known director or period of film history and helps bring German and international film back to the big screen, often in restored prints. Titled Die Traumfabrik (The Red Dream Factory), the Retrospective program of the 2012 Berlinale has rediscovered the legendary German-Russian film studio Mezhrabpom-Film and its German branch, Prometheus, which operated from 1922 to 1936. The graphics designed by Oehler make use of an iconic black-and-white still of the Soviet movie Okraina (directed by Boris Barnet in 1933), combined with large, distinctive typography inspired by the Museum für Film und Fernsehen identity.
The Red Dream Factory program will travel to the Museum of Modern Art in New York this April in a new partnership between the Berlinale Retrospective and MoMA.
New Work: Microsoft Windows 8
Animation of the new identity demonstrating its capacity for transparency and motion. Transparent, it can become an actual window.
As Microsoft prepares for the launch of Windows 8, the new version of its operating system, it has announced a bold new identity that takes the iconic Windows logo back to its roots—as a window. Designed by Pentagram’s Paula Scher, the logo re-imagines the familiar four-color symbol as a modern geometric shape that introduces a new perspective on the Microsoft brand.
Meeting with Microsoft early in the development process, Scher asked: “Your name is Windows. Why are you a flag?”
The answer is the brand started as a window, but over the years, as computing systems grew more powerful and graphics more complex, evolved into a flag. Scher made the assumption that the waving flag was probably a result of typical industry comments that a plain window looked too static, and that straight lines were too severe.
“I think the waving flag was meant to be a flag in perspective,” says Scher. “All of the clichés of technology design are based on the idea that icons should look dimensional like product design that tech designers call ‘chrome’––look at the iPhone interface where everything has gradation and drop shadows.”
New Work: ‘IMPACT: 50 Years of the CFDA’
Video of our graphics, projections and interactive displays at the opening of IMPACT.
This season’s New York Fashion Week kicked off with the opening of IMPACT: 50 Years of the Council of Fashion Designers of America a commemorative exhibition at the Museum at FIT. Founded in 1962, the CFDA is the leading trade organization of the U.S. fashion industry and currently has a membership of over 400 of America’s foremost womenswear, menswear, jewelry and accessory designers. Conceived by CFDA President Diane von Furstenberg, IMPACT is the first museum exhibition to celebrate the organization and features over 100 garments and accessories designed by its members over the past five decades. The show remains on view at FIT through April 20.
Pentagram has a longstanding collaboration with the CFDA—Michael Bierut designed the organization’s identity in 1991—and was invited to create graphics and installations for the exhibition. Eddie Opara and his team have designed dynamic media that highlight the work of the nearly 600 designer-members who have graced the organization since its inception. Michael Bierut and Katie Barcelona contributed a fashionable identity and graphics for the exhibition.
New Work: Ladies’ Home Journal
Today Ladies’ Home Journal launches a much-discussed new editorial direction that incorporates user-generated content inspired by blogs and social media. The new strategy coincides with a redesign by Pentagram’s Luke Hayman and team that helps make the magazine more open, engaging and personal—more like a “journal.”
One of the country’s top ten magazines in paid circulation, Ladies’ Home Journal has a circulation of 3.2 million and a readership of over 12 million. Founded in 1883, the magazine is one of the “Seven Sisters” and in 1907 became the first American magazine to reach 1 million subscribers. Now published by Meredith, it has remained a fixture in American women’s lives. The redesign by Pentagram updates the magazine’s format to make it accessible, contemporary and relevant to today’s audiences, establishing a tone of intimacy that complements the new editorial strategy.
Quick Links
- Harry Pearce to Speak at Designer Breakfast
- Harry Pearce and Naresh Ramchandani's Identity for Hong Kong Luxury Destination Launches
- Meet Marina Willer, Pentagram's Newest Partner
- Inside Pentagram's Archive
- Michael Bierut to Speak at TYPO San Francisco
- "Today I'm Feeling Turquoise" Featured on New York Magazine's Approval Matrix
- The Story Behind the New Microsoft Windows 8 Logo