New at Pentagram
35 Years of Holiday Greetings from Pentagram
Every Christmas since 1971, Pentagram has designed and published a small annual greetings booklet and sent it to our friends, colleagues and clients. Usually designed around a game or activity, these small books are intended to provide a diversion during the hectic holiday period. The partners take turns researching and designing the books, which traditionally avoid any direct reference to the season, adopting a strong graphic vocabulary in order to set them apart from the myriad of cards received at this time of year.
Wallpaper has put together a gallery of the books from Christmases past, 1974-2008, published together for the first time. The 2009 card, currently in the mail, tweaks the format. (More on this soon.) Happy holidays!
Justus Oehler at the Face to Face Conference
Justus Oehler and Katrin Kahlefeld, Head of Public Relations for the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, will be speaking together at this year’s Face to Face design and business conference in Ludwigsburg, Germany. The pair will be discussing Pentagram’s work for the Deutsche Kinemathek - Museum für Film und Fernsehen, an ongoing collaboration since Oehler designed the museum’s identity in 2006. Following their talk, Oehler will be joining a panel discussion titled “Peculiarities that accompany the design process.” (We know about those!)
Established in 2001, “Face to Face” is the only design conference in the world dedicated to bringing designers and their clients together on stage with the goal of illuminating the design process. The German conference has a different partner country every year; this year it is France. The conference runs from 12 to 14 November. Registration information can be found here.
Justus Oehler’s DRK Kliniken Triannual Report on FPO
Quick Link: Justus Oehler’s DRK Kliniken Triannual Report on FPO
New Work: DRK Kliniken
Justus Oehler and his team at Pentagram Berlin have designed the Triennial Report for the DRK Kliniken (Hospital Group of the German Red Cross) in Berlin. This is the second time Pentagram has designed the report for the group, which is a non-profit network of five hospitals in the city that provide specialized, high-quality care.
While reports of this kind for organizations in the health market are usually “dry” and factual, the DRK report offers something new with the unusual theme of “Kopf und Herz,” or “Head and Heart.” This juxtaposition of Facts and Figures vs. Feelings and Emotions has been used to enliven the report with sections titled “Innovation & Tradition,” “Old & Young,” “Giving & Taking,” “Man & Machine,” etc.
The designers decided on a visual system that would echo this dichotomy. The cover illustration is a human brain superimposed with a spot-varnished and embossed red heart. Each of the 15 chapters that make up the core of the 50-page report have been arranged as single spreads, with text on the left, and illustrations, created by Pentagram, on the right, all printed in red, grey and black.
A look inside after the jump.
New Work: Philharmonie Luxembourg
Justus Oehler and his team in Berlin have designed the first annual report for the Philharmonie Luxembourg, the national concert hall of Luxembourg. The 140-page book describes the history and activities of the Philharmonie, which was launched in 2005 and is home to the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, Solistes Européens, the Orchestre de Chambre du Luxembourg, and other musical groups.
The designers used reportage-style black and white photography of staff in action to separate the individual sections of the report. The overarching colour theme is based on the Philharmonie’s rainbow-hued identity, also designed by Pentagram Berlin. The identity references the hall’s distinctive architecture by the Pritzker Prize-winning French architect Christian de Portzamparc. The logo shows the name set in black and complemented by a configuration of vertical lines in the colours of a rainbow. The typography recalls the slender columns of the main hall, while the rainbow of lines suggests both the curved wave of the building’s glass façade and the rich, colourful nature of music.
New Work: Montpelier Plantation
Justus Oehler and his team in Berlin have designed the visual identity for Montpelier Plantation, a luxury hotel on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean. The small, family-run hotel is a meticulously restored 18th-century sugar plantation that has been converted into a Relais & Chateaux boutique hotel. The plantation is set in a sixty-acre estate 750 feet up in the hills of Nevis and features 19 rooms with sea views, a private beach and a restaurant in a 300-year-old converted sugar mill.
The logotype is simple and elegant, set in Garamond Italic with the letters t and p connected to create a ligature. For the colour we chose a warm brown which is reminiscent of the colour of brown sugar, combined with a bright green lavender.
Justus Oehler to Judge Red Dot Design Awards
Justus Oehler has been invited to be a judge for the 2009 red dot design: communication design, the graphic design competition of the prestigious international red dot design awards. Justus will be judging in the categories of corporate design, stamps and banknotes, advertising and information design for public spaces. With more than 11,000 submissions from 61 countries and additional sections for industrial design and concepts, the awards are considered among the largest and most competitive in the world. The judging will take place on 15-16 July in Germany.
Justus Oehler Interviewed in ‘Der Standard’
“Too many good salesmen are selling too much bad design,” says Justus Oehler, Pentagram Partner in Berlin and London, in an interview with the Austrian national daily newspaper Der Standard (print edition only). He talks about his background, his career and the state of graphic/corporate design in general.
Standard: Do many of your clients sometimes lack the relevant experience?
Oehler: Even those companies who frequently change their corporate design do this every eight, nine years at the most. Most corporate designs are much older than that. This means that our clients often have very little experience in rebranding and corporate design exercises. They would have maintained existing corporate designs like you would maintain a house: fix the roof, a paint job every now and then… But building a house from scratch is a completely different ball game. To design a new logo and visual identity for a client is a big challenge which brings change and a lot of risk. This can be overwhelming for those managing the brand on client side: they become insecure because of their lack of experience.
Read the full interview here (German only).
New Work: Lextra
Justus Oehler and his team have designed the identity for Lextra, a new brand of foreign language instruction and dictionaries. The name Lextra was created and is owned by Cornelsen, one of the leading publishers of educational books and materials in Germany. The objective was to position Lextra as the “blue brand” on a par with the product category’s two major incumbents, PONS (green) and Langenscheidt (yellow).
Vessels of Verse
A selection of Justus Oehler’s book cover designs for Faber & Faber’s Poetry Series are now available on drinks mugs thanks to the Faber Made series of products based on the publisher’s back catalogue of cover art.
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