Pentagram redesigned the flagship publication of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH). In addition to completely revamping the publication, the Pentagram team, working closely with the MFAH’s Director, Gary Tinterow, and the museum’s Publisher in Chief, Diane Lovejoy, changed the title’s name from MFAH Today to The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Magazine, or “h Magazine” for short.
Before the makeover, MFAH Today had been a monthly publication for members that included a calendar and announcements of upcoming exhibitions and events. The magazine–more of a catalog, really–was nicely produced but failed to capture the attention of its intended audience. Plus, most of its content, primarily a series of press releases, was readily accessible online. So the MFAH asked Pentagram to develop a more sophisticated publication with engaging editorial features and dynamic photography and art—just like a real magazine. The Pentagram team recommended organizing each issue around a single theme and using the museum’s extensive collections as the primary resource for imagery.
The launch issue, which debuted in the fall of 2014, focused on the theme of “Water” and featured Claude Monet’s paintings of the Seine River, Vincent Chevalier’s groundbreaking daguerreotype, also of the Seine as it passes through Paris, and Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of water towers. The designers also infused the spare layouts with small, stylish infographics that provide the reader with additional content at a glance like the dimensions of the pieces, historical facts, and entertaining trivia. In that way the magazine’s signature diagrams function like the informational plaques and wall-texts that accompany artworks on display in the museum’s exhibitions.
The cover convention features a die-cut lowercase letter “h” that teases a sliver of an artwork, which is fully revealed when the page is turned. The cover of the redesign launch issue featured one of Claude Monet’s paintings from his acclaimed series titled Mornings on the Seine, which depicts an intimate stretch of the Seine near Giverny, and the cover of the second issue features a detail of a Japanese screen from the Edo period (1603-1868) from the extensive Gitter-Yelen Collection on loan to the MFAH.
The second issue of the new h Magazine is built around the theme of “Other Worlds” and features works from the museum’s upcoming exhibition, For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968-1979, Peter Paul Rubens’s otherworldly Flemish tapestries, Venezuelan artist Gyula Kosice’s visionary 1940s explorations of a utopian city, and the trippy watercolor paintings of Oscar Bluemner.
