New at Pentagram
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.
Lisa Strausfeld & Luke Hayman Redesign Craigslist for Wired
Quick Link: Lisa Strausfeld & Luke Hayman Redesign Craigslist for Wired
‘@Issue’ Becomes a Blog
The brainchild of Kit Hinrichs, writer Delphine Hirasuna and Peter Lawrence of the Corporate Design Foundation, @Issue: Journal of Business and Design has now been turned into a blog, at the URL atissuejournal.com.
Fifteen years ago, the three founded the print version to present visually rich case studies of how good design has contributed to business success. The journal, officially published by Corporate Design Foundation, became a huge success, peaking at a circulation of 100,000. The print edition of @Issue has had to take a hiatus due to the downturn in the economy. Both to keep the brand alive and to seize the opportunity to expand the reach of the publication, the journal has gone online as a blog. The site has already attracted thousands of visitors from 66 countries. “Atissuejournal.com is not meant to replace the print journal,” Kit says. “Our intention is to publish shorter, more topical stories on the blog, and more indepth, analytical pieces in print.”
‘Design for a Living World’ Opens This Week
The objects that furnish our homes and workplaces have been sliced, bent, molded and hewn from materials extracted from physical landscapes. Many of the substances we think of as “natural,” such as wood, bamboo and leather, originate as living organisms, while others are mined from the earth. “Truth to materials” has been a theme in the discourse of modern design for more than a century. This principle, which celebrates the innate textures and behaviors of materials, has guided generations of designers. Today, as designers and consumers explore the environmental ethics of manufactured things, they seek transparency about where goods come from and how they are made.
Design for a Living World is a landmark exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York that opens an important conversation between conservationists and designers about the potential and legacy of natural materials. Presented by The Nature Conservancy and co-curated by Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton, the exhibition has commissioned 10 designers from the worlds of fashion, industrial and furniture design to develop new uses for sustainably grown and harvested materials from a specific place where the Conservancy works. The participating designers include Yves Béhar, Stephen Burks, Hella Jongerius, Maya Lin, Christien Meindertsma, Isaac Mizrahi, Ted Muehling, Kate Spade, Ezri Tarazi and Miller himself. The locations include endangered ecosystems in Australia, Micronesia, China, Mexico, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Alaska, Idaho and Maine. The resulting designs demonstrate that by choosing sustainable materials, designers can actively contribute to the advancement of a global conservation ethic.
In addition to co-curating and participating in the exhibition, Miller and his team at Pentagram designed the exhibition, catalogue and website. Design for a Living World opens this Thursday, May 14 and remains on view at Cooper-Hewitt through January 4, 2010 before traveling to other locations.
A closer look at the exhibition and a preview of five of its commissions after the jump.
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New Work: WNET.ORG
New York’s public television stations, THIRTEEN and WLIW21, have rebranded under a new umbrella identity, WNET.ORG. The new name references THIRTEEN’s historic call letters, a new commitment to digital communication, and the organization’s history of service to the public, locally and nationally. Working with WNET.ORG’s marketing and management team, Pentagram created an overall brand strategy for WNET.ORG, including a new suite of identifiers and the institution’s first online annual report.
New Work: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
New York’s Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. In the 1970s the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice was united with the New York museum under the aegis of the Guggenheim Foundation, establishing a precedent for an institution with an increasingly global footprint that now includes destinations in Venice, Berlin, Bilbao, and will eventually include the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.
Over the course of many years Abbott Miller has worked with the Guggenheim on various identity and publication projects. Recently he was asked to design a new identity and website for the Guggenheim Foundation that features the typeface that he originally commissioned for the Guggenheim’s magazine in 1996. Based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s lettering on the facade of the Guggenheim, Jonathan Hoefler’s font Verlag is now the lingua franca of the global Guggenheim. Miller and his team developed the design for the Foundation’s website as a “front door” to the collection of museums. ID Society produced the site based on Pentagram’s design.
The new Guggenheim site has been named the best cultural institution website in this year’s Webby Awards.
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Lisa Strausfeld Named 2009 National Design Awards Finalist
Lisa Strausfeld has been selected as a finalist in the Interaction Design section of this year’s National Design Awards presented by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. This is the first year the awards have recognized interaction design as a category. Lisa’s co-nominees are Potion and Perceptive Pixel. The New York Times calls this year’s awards “the 10th annual incarnation of the design world’s Oscars.” Congratulations, Lisa!
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