‘Pantone’ and ‘The Art of Warhol’ 2013 Calendars

Put a little color in your New Year with the 2013 Pantone and The Art of Andy Warhol calendars designed by Pentagram’s Eddie Opara and Brankica Harvey. Published by Abrams, both calendars come in wall and engagement editions that will brighten your workspace or home all year long.

Pantone is the influential global brand known for its Pantone Matching System (PMS) that enables designers and printers to specify and reproduce accurate color. The company has been working to increase its presence in the digital sphere, and our design for the Pantone 2013 calendar re-contextualizes the familiar PMS chips into colorful “digitized” images for each month. The “pixels” of the images resemble the chips, with colors identified as specific PMS numbers.

The images are tied thematically to the seasons and holidays: a penguin for January, rain boots for April, flowers for June. In the engagement version of the calendar the scale of the images increases throughout the month, so the views become more abstract as the colorations and specifications become more detailed and exact.

Pantone also famously forecasts an official “color” for the coming year—Emerald 17-5641 is the color of 2013—and the calendar similarly selects a color for each month, represented in the images as well as in playful taglines like “Tickled Pink” and “Mellow Yellow.” The grid of the wall calendar looks like a series of Pantone color chips, with the days of the month ranging through the shades of the featured color. In the engagement calendar these shades appear along the side, like a specifier.

The wall calendar also features concepts suggested by the color (passion, love, etc.), the color's appearance in famous works of art (like Matisse’s Red Room) and what liking the color may mean about you. The font used in both versions of the calendar is New Rail.

The Art of Andy Warhol calendar is one of Abrams’s most popular, and 2013 is the third year running we've designed the title. Authorized by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the calendar includes a mix of Pop artist’s unknown, rarely seen works with his more iconic images. This year’s edition centers on Warhol's prints, with a focus on his more hedonistic, sensual subjects. The works have been chosen to thematically correspond with the months and their holidays: Skull appears with October, for instance; Pointsettias is December’s image.

The cover of the wall calendar features a large pair of lips (Lips Book) reproduced, as in last year's edition, on a reflective Mylar-like surface inspired by Warhol’s Factory. The wall calendar includes a 24” x 36” foldout poster of the artist’s famous Cow Wallpaper (Pink on Yellow) print from 1966, suitable for framing, with a particularly relevant quote by Warhol on the reverse ("Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?"). The team also designed a spiral-bound engagement version with $ (4) on the cover. Typefaces used in both the wall and engagement formats include Akzidenz Grotesk and a customized version of Akzidenz Grotesk Super that is textured to mimic the roughness of the silkscreened prints.