Helping Haiti

    
Posters designed by Harry Pearce, left, and Justus Oehler, right, for the Haiti Poster Project.

Harry Pearce and Justus Oehler have designed posters for The Haiti Poster Project, which are on sale now in aid of Doctors Without Borders. The overall goal is to reach a donation level of $1 million (USD). Designers around the world were approached to create limited edition posters in quantities of 25 to 100. Apart from the money donated the goal of increasing social awareness and to highlight the role design can play in conveying important messages.

Pearce describes his work as simply trying to capture the weight of the sadness. “A city as a body beneath a sheet. It’s still, silent and the plain facts say it all.” The image of the lettering beneath the sheet was photographed by Richard Foster and the printing was kindly donated by Gavin Martin.

Oehler based his design on seismographs. Just as Haiti was suddenly shaken by the tremors, the word Haiti is also disrupted. “I used my fountain pen to write the word Haiti disturbed by fierce seismographic squiggles.” The simple text beneath the disruption encourages the viewer to ‘Help Rebuild Haiti!’.

The signed posters are available for sale through The Haiti Poster Project and all proceeds will go to Doctors Without Borders.

Harry’s poster also features on the cover of DAMn magazine and Justus’ on the Fast Company website.

New Work: What Is American Power?

In his photo series “American Power,” the artist Mitch Epstein has created a complex portrait of energy production in the United States, its environmental, economic and personal costs, and its complicated role in our politics, culture and national image. Photographed from 2003 through 2008, the series includes views of power plants dwarfing their towns; rows of windmills bordering on unnaturally green playing fields; natural landscapes depleted by mining and drilling; and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast. “I wanted to photograph the relationship between American society and the American landscape, and energy was the linchpin,” writes Epstein in American Power, the book of the series published last year.

Now Epstein has expanded “American Power” into an unusual public exhibition that launches this week, timed to the 40th Earth Day. Titled “What Is American Power?”, the installation presents photographs from the series on 23 billboards in Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio. Each billboard carries a simple URL, WhatIsAmericanPower.com, directing the public to a website that invites them to respond to the question. Designed by Pentagram’s Lisa Strausfeld and Takaaki Okada, and developed by Christian Swinehart, the site provides an immersive context for the project’s content and creates a public forum about notions of power and energy in America today.

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M&T Bank Opens New Signature Branch

M&T Bank officially opened its newest branch at Southgate Plaza in West Seneca, New York, this week, the first branch built with a contemporary new design by Pentagram Partner Lorenzo Apicella serving as a model for future branch construction and renovation.

The new 9100 sq ft building was constructed to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards (LEED) established by the U.S. Green Building Council and will soon be LEED registered. LEED is a rating system distinguishing high-performance buildings with less impact on the environment. The project was designed by Apicella and his team in San Francisco and London. Local AOR’s were HHL and Kideney.

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New Work: Scripps College

For a small liberal arts school, Scripps, the elite women’s college in Claremont, California, has a remarkably strong commitment to typography and the book arts. This includes its own typeface, Scripps College Old Style, designed by the master type designer Frederic Goudy in 1941, after he gave several lectures at the school. (See his amazing drawings for the font here.) Perhaps Goudy was inspired by the picturesque environs; according to a recent poll by Forbes, Scripps has one of the most beautiful campuses in the world.

This spring Scripps inaugurated its eighth president, Dr. Lori Bettison-Varga, and asked Pentagram to create an insignia to commemorate the occasion. The emblem is the centerpiece of a school campaign called “The Genius of Women.” Timed to the inauguration, the campaign draws attention to the achievements of Scripps alumnae and other women who have made an impact on the world. The theme also served as the focus of Dr. Bettison-Varga’s inaugural address, “Cultivating the Genius of Women.” The designers drew on the school’s graphic traditions to create an iconic emblem for the event.

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New Work: Achievement First Endeavor Middle School

With a little paint and some bold typography, a school designed to change the life of its students has undergone a transformation of its own. For the Achievement First Endeavor Middle School, a charter school for grades 5 through 8 in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, Paula Scher has created a program of environmental graphics that help the school interiors become a vibrant space for learning. The project was completed in collaboration with Rogers Marvel Architects, who designed the school as a refurbishment and expansion of an existing building.

Achievement First is a network of public charter schools in Brooklyn and Connecticut. With the support of the Robin Hood Foundation, Achievement First seeks to provide students in urban areas with an education that will put them on the path to college. Endeavor Middle School has a student body of about 300 and is ranked number four in the best K to eight schools in New York City. The students at Endeavor have a reputation for taking pride in their school, and the new graphics capture this confident spirit.

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New Work: ‘PLP Architecture’

Angus Hyland and his team have created an identity for the newly formed PLP Architecture.

PLP Architecture was founded in 2009 by Lee Polisano, David Leventhal, Fred Pilbrow, Karen Cook and Ron Bakker, the five former partners of Kohn Pedersen Fox’s (KPF) London office. The new practice operates from offices in Camden with a team of over 70. They are currently working on a number of projects in the U.K. and abroad, including a mixed-use tower in the City of London for Heron International, the over-site development at Bond Street Station for Grosvenor, a hotel in Abu Dhabi for Mubadala and a large-scale urban planning project for the Qatar Foundation.

The identity utilises a re-drawn version of the typeface DIN. The font has been customised into a stencil version evocative of architectural hand-drawn lettering. The slash between PLP and Architecture is positioned at the same angle as the slope of the ‘A’. A range of stationery is laid out using a linear hang-line system and clean typography and the background for literature uses a pattern based upon the diagonal slash.

Examples of the application of the identity after the jump.

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New Work: 20 Launceston Place

William Russell has undertaken a sensitive and careful remodelling of a Grade 2 listed building in Kensington London.

The building had been extended organically over the last hundred years to the point where little of the original remained barring the staircase. The project involved stripping away and cleaning up the space in order to create a four-bedroom home with large entertaining spaces.

More pictures of the house after the jump.

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New Work: Budgens

Harry Pearce and his team have been commissioned to redesign the complete own brand range for Budgens and Londis stores.

The own brand range has three levels, Good, Better, and Best, and many of the redesigned Good Value range have already hit the shelves with Pentagram’s designs for Good Value Jaffa Cakes and Good Value Assorted Crisps winning the Quality Food Awards 2009.

Now the first three varieties in the wines, beers and spirits range of Better products have been released with three sizes of bottle for the own brand whisky, gin and vodka. Each label takes a typographic approach with an individual letterform being adapted to capture the essence of the spirit inside. So the V of the vodka has a strong red constructivist feel with a silver foiled eagle set against it, the W of the whisky is foiled in gold against a faint thistle and the G of the gin is interlaced with a juniper branch replete with berries.

The text on each label adopts the same layout, which extends across all of Musgraves’ own brand products. It is expected that the whole redesign will take a year to roll out.

New Work: ‘William Kentridge: Five Themes’

In his drawings, prints, sculptures, books, films, installations and performances, the contemporary South African artist William Kentridge creates layered, complex narratives that connect the personal and the political. Abbott Miller has designed William Kentridge: Five Themes, a book that accompanies a major survey of the artist that debuted at SFMOMA last year and opens this week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Miller worked with Kentridge to develop different strategies to present this remarkably diverse body of work.

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Felt & Wire Launches New Design

Short of the paper cuts, the blog Felt & Wire captures the experience of all things paper: its endless varieties, uses and innovations, and the close personal associations we have with a material that is often right at our fingertips. The site was launched a year ago by our longtime client Mohawk Fine Papers to help foster a community of designers, artists, printers, papermakers, bookbinders and other craftspeople who are, as the site’s tagline puts it, “paper-obsessed.” The blog initially focused on paper-related topics like letterpress and written correspondence, but is now widening its focus to cover paper, print and design. To curate this expanded scope is newly appointed editor Tom Biederbeck, former editor in chief of STEP Inside Design and Dynamic Graphics magazines.

This week Felt & Wire launched an updated site design created by Michael Bierut and Katie Barcelona, who designed the original site last year. New features include a monthly Q&A column with Sean Adams, a forum for sustainability in design, and a monthly column called Studio Insider presenting the working spaces of leading artists and designers. The homepage now highlights reader comments and the site’s Twitter feed. One of the site’s most popular features is the Felt & Wire Shop, a curated marketplace introduced last fall that offers paper goods produced by designers and artists, including greeting cards, wrapping paper, books, posters and calendars. (Think Etsy for paper.) In addition to designing the site, Barcelona will be periodically contributing to the blog; her first column appears today.

And the name? Felt and wire are two materials used in the final stage of the papermaking process. Felt helps to absorb excess water and wire helps to structure the sheet as it forms. Representing the tactile and the technical, they’re also metaphors for the subjects that the site’s creators will continue to explore.