New at Pentagram
New Work: Ennead Architects
Design firms with a namesake partner or design leader inevitably face a challenge when leadership passes to a new generation: how to establish an identity that distinguishes the firm from its former leader, maintains its legacy, and reflects the vitality of its current partnership? Today Polshek Partnership Architects announces the change of its name to Ennead Architects. The name, pronounced EN-ee-ad, is inspired by the Greek word for a group of nine, here the number of the firm’s current partnership: Joseph Fleischer, Timothy Hartung, Duncan Hazard, Kevin McClurkan, Richard Olcott, Susan Rodriguez, Tomas Rossant, Todd Schliemann and Don Weinreich.
Michael Bierut and Lisa Strausfeld have designed a new identity and website for Ennead that reflects the firm’s shared history and thriving collaboration. The branding strategy was developed in collaboration with LaPlaca Cohen.
Lisa Strausfeld Wins National Design Award
Lisa Strausfeld’s dynamic media wall for Bloomberg L.P. corporate headquarters in New York.
We are thrilled to announce that Lisa Strausfeld has been selected to receive the 2010 National Design Award for Interaction Design. The National Design Awards celebrate outstanding achievement in design and are sponsored by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. First Lady Michelle Obama serves as the Honorary Patron for this year’s awards, and the recipients will be honored at a gala on October 14 in New York.
Strausfeld was a Finalist in the Interaction Design category last year, the first year the discipline was honored by the awards. She specializes in information visualization, and her work ranges from software prototypes, user interfaces and websites to interpretive displays and large-scale media installations. Recent work includes user interfaces for One Laptop per Child and Litl; data visualizations for GE and The New York Times; websites for the Cleveland Museum of Art, Gallup, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro; and installations for the Museum of Arts and Design, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the corporate headquarters of Bloomberg L.P. She holds four patents relating to user interfaces and intelligent information search and retrieval.
Strausfeld has won five awards from the prestigious International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), and Fast Company magazine selected her as one of its 2009 Masters of Design. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Congratulations, Lisa!
New Work: GE
How healthy are our hospitals? Working with GE, Lisa Strausfeld and her team have designed a new interactive data visualization that tracks the quality of patient care in over 3,000 hospitals across the United States. The visualization presents 30 basic measures of care in five categories of common conditions for which patients enter the hospital: surgery, pneumonia, heart attack, heart failure and children’s asthma. The project is based on data from The Joint Commission, an independent, non-profit organization that accredits and certifies more than 17,000 health care organizations and programs in the US.
The visualization is being introduced via GE’s Healthymagination initiative and was launched at a GE Healthcare summit in New York last week. The visualization is the second in an ongoing collaboration between Strausfeld and GE, following the home appliance energy use calculator that launched last month.
New Work: Bertazzoni
Pentagram has enlisted the collaboration of information design specialists Applied Information Group (AIG) in the design and production of a new website for Bertazzoni, Italian manufacturers of precision-engineered cooking ranges.
The site builds on the branding created by Pentagram when Bertazzoni launched on the American market in 2005. The brand platform is constructed around the strong heritage of the family company and its founding in the 19th century, and the fine engineering and food traditions of Emilia Romagna in Italy, where the company has its base.
New Work: Cleveland Museum of Art
With top-notch collections in Asian art, Greek and Roman art, and European painting and sculpture, including significant works by Picasso, El Greco, Caravaggio and Pousin, among many others, the Cleveland Museum of Art is one of the world’s great art museums. It is also a vital part of its local community, a beloved institution that plays an integral role in the cultural life of Cleveland and its residents. The museum is committed to making its collections accessible to all—unlike most museums today, it has a policy of free admission to the public, a mandate established in its founding charter—and presents smart programming that consistently challenges and engages visitors.
From 2005 to 2009 the CMA undertook an extensive expansion that included a complete renovation of its 1916 Beaux Arts building and 1971 addition by Marcel Breuer, and the construction of a new East Wing designed by Rafael Vinoly, which opened last summer. The expansion has increased the size of the museum by 41 percent, allowing more of its collection to be put on view.
Now the museum has launched a new website that provides enhanced access to its collection. Designed by Lisa Strausfeld and Takaaki Okada, in collaboration with Michael Bierut (who took art classes at the museum as a child), the site is focused on serving the needs of the museum’s two primary audiences: the local member who visits regularly to view art and experience museum events, and the global art enthusiast who comes for the museum’s astounding collection. Users can create their own profiles, customize their experience of the museum, and share favorite works and museum events. The site creates an experience that is immediately engaging and, in the words of the museum, “visually addictive,” placing the museum’s objects front and center.
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.
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.
New Work: Neue Galerie
One of the few museums devoted to early 20th century Austrian and German art and design, the Neue Galerie New York presents its collection in an exquisite setting. Opened in 2001, the museum is housed in a landmark Beaux-Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile that was built in 1914 and fully restored by the architect Annabelle Selldorf. The museum includes works by Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, Kandinsky, Klee and Grosz, presented in an environment redolent of Vienna at the turn of the century. Abbott Miller has designed a website for the Neue Galerie that extends the museum’s unique atmosphere and beauty to its online presence.
What Type Are You?
Why did Brian Wilson use Cooper Black on the cover of Pet Sounds? Why did Obama use Gotham for his election propaganda? It has long been apparent that typefaces reflect the character of the person using them, and that type choice, as well as the words that are typed, is a powerful conveyor of meaning.
At Pentagram, we wanted people to be able to understand that meaning properly and use it more consciously. Hence our ‘What Type Are You’ application. Researched over seven years with a team of 23 academics across Eastern Europe, ‘What Type Are You’ asks the four key character questions of our day, analyses your responses in exceptional detail and recommends one of 16 typefaces as a result.
The recommendation is sometimes controversial but always unerringly true. Said one respondent, “At first I felt angry when I was told my type is Pistilli Roman but two weeks later, I was completely reconciled to it. Now I wonder why I ever thought I was a Gill Sans.”
Go to the ‘What Type Are You’ test. Password: character.
Project Team: John Rushworth, partner-in-charge and designer; Kirsty Whittaker, designer. Written by Naresh Ramchandani. Produced by The Brown Studio. Web development by Nerv Interactive.
New Work: Bard Graduate Center
Paula Scher has designed a new identity for the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History and Material Culture. Founded in 1993 by Susan Weber, BGC’s director, the school is an important academic institution devoted to the study of the history of the material world, the objects that people make to transform their surroundings: architecture, craft and design. It is one of the only programs of its kind in the country and a top school for scholars and curators of the decorative arts. The center is affiliated with Bard College and is located in a pair of townhouses on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Scher designed BGC’s first logo when the center opened in 1993. The original logo was a monogram of three letters set in Baskerville with a decorated “G” and was applied to letterhead and the covers of brochures without any established format or system. It was pretty, and it communicated that the school was devoted to the decorative arts. But in the years since, BGC has grown in size and stature, and the logo began to seem precious and no longer conveyed the breadth of the center’s programs. The launch of the new identity is timed to a major renovation and expansion of the school by Polshek Partnership Architects. The center has also officially changed its name to the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, lengthening it slightly from the already long Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture. The school needed a new institutional identity that communicated its importance. A simple, static logotype was no longer enough for the institution; its identity must function as a flexible system that supports broad applications across multiple platforms.
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