New at Pentagram
New Work: 3 at Saks Fifth Avenue
This week our longtime client Saks Fifth Avenue reopened its designer collections on a newly renovated third floor. In the works for two years, the 50,000 square foot space is home to 49 collections, including 23 designer shops for brands like Dolce & Gabbana, Chanel, Gucci and Louis Vuitton, as well as a section for emerging designers. The floor has been outfitted with custom furnishings and fixtures by artists and designers including Zaha Hadid and Michele Oka Doner. (Take a video tour with Nina Garcia of Marie Claire and “Project Runway.”)
As part of the reinstallation Pentagram created a brand identity for the floor. The 49 names were rendered in Cyrus Highsmith’s Novia and combined to form a number 3. The Saks staff has adapted the font and identity for installations throughout the store.
Some sample applications of the new identity appear after the jump.
For the Love of Nonsense
Harry Pearce was called on by Saks Fifth Avenue over the holidays to add a dash of festive cheer to their seasonal catalog. The catalog makes holiday shopping so easy that Saks decided to sprinkle its pages with 108 of Pearce’s Typographic Conundrums, a long-running series of images that use wordplay and typographic invention to present a familiar phrase as a cryptic puzzle that toys with the relationship between typography and meaning.
Saks approached Pentagram after receiving our 2007 holiday greeting, Decipher, a collection of cryptograms designed by Pearce. Each year Pentagram issues a small book as a seasonal greeting to its friends and colleagues, intended to give better value than a simple card by providing an entertaining diversion over the holidays. The idea instantly appealed to Terron Schaefer, Saks’ senior vice president of marketing, who contacted Pentagram to devise a similar style of festive fun for the holiday catalog.
A closer look at Pearce’s Typographic Conundrums and a chance to test your wits against the complete set of 108 after the jump.
In the Bag
In a front page article about the trend of using shopping bags as portable fashion, the New York Times slips a bag over the head of the “renowned graphic artist” who redesigned the Saks Fifth Avenue packaging. In a comparison with other luxury retailers, Saks comes out on top for giving its formerly “battleship gray bags a sleeker, black-and-white look and more durable feel.” The artist in question, renowned or not, is never identified.
Saks in the TIME Design 100
Our identity for Saks Fifth Avenue has been chosen by TIME magazine for its Style & Design 100.
Saks and the City
Saks in the streets. Photo by Elizabeth Bierut.
Alice Rawsthorn interviews Michael Bierut about the Saks Fifth Avenue identity in T: The New York Times Style Magazine. There are eight million stories in the Naked City; there are 98.14 googol variations in this identity.
“We wanted something that would be immediately identifiable across the street or through the windows of a moving subway car, and that no one would throw away, ” Bierut says. “Blowing up the logo and rearranging the fragments in a million different ways on a grid made the identity much more dramatic.”
Regardless of whether it’s on Fifth Avenue or in the Houston Galleria Mall, Saks is a definitive New York store; the grid refers to the city’s street plan, and the fragments represent the frenzy of its street life. “It’s a metaphor for the larger-than-life experiences you can find on block after block in New York City,” Bierut says. “Though I really don’t expect anyone to notice that. If a Saks customer spontaneously spots the subtext, I’ll send them a gift voucher.”
Saks Change
Alice Rawsthorn spotlights the new Saks identity in an article about mutable corporate identities, in the International Herald Tribune. “‘Fragmenting the logo gave it energy and bravura,‘ said Michael Bierut, the Pentagram partner who led the Saks project. ‘And now we can create numerous permutations of the logo.’” (With slide show.)
Saks on the Grid
From New York, February 5 issue. Click for full chart
Our packaging for Saks Fifth Avenue lands on the Approval Matrix in this week’s issue of New York magazine—in the vicinity of “Highbrow” and “Brilliant.”
New Work: Saks Fifth Avenue
A new identity designed by Pentagram for iconic New York retailer Saks Fifth Avenue launches on January 2, 2007. After the jump, partner Michael Bierut describes the process behind the development of an identity with more variations than there are electrons in the known universe.
New Saks Identity Announced
The new Saks Fifth Avenue identity designed by Michael Bierut is announced in WWD (subscription required) and The Daily. The complete program launches in January.
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