New Work: SCAD Museum of Art

An interactive installation can draw a user into an immersive experience, illuminating an exhibition or object in depth or detail. It may also foster interaction between users, creating a collaborative atmosphere that sets a welcoming social tone for an institution. For an expansion of the SCAD Museum of Art, the contemporary art and design museum at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Pentagram’s Eddie Opara and team have created a unique interactive table that introduces the museum and its programs in a communal experience. Visitors gather around the table to view and exchange a series of “cards” that dynamically present information about the museum exhibitions, collections and programs.

Conceived by Opara and team, the communal table is an ideal form for the museum. SCAD supports a large community of students, artists, designers and educators in Savannah and beyond. The school is a pioneering institution with a campus of over 60 buildings spread throughout the city, many restored in the historic and Victorian districts. Designed by Savannah-based architects Sottile & Sottile, the new $26 million expansion adds 65,000 square feet to the existing 1856 Greek Revival building, originally the headquarters of the Central of Georgia Railway. The expansion creates additional galleries for the museum’s temporary exhibitions and permanent collection, new classrooms and performance spaces.

Video of the table in action, from development to installation.

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New Work: Lucy’s Fried Chicken

Pentagram’s DJ Stout and his team in Austin do chicken right. They rebranded Popeye’s in 2008, changing the name from Popeye’s Chicken & Biscuits to Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen. The new identity they created for the national chain, known for its spicy New Orleans style chicken and red beans and rice, was included in the Graphic Design: Now in Production exhibition that opened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis last fall. Then in 2009 they created a new identity for Chicken Now, a fast food chain that sells chicken strips and chicken fingers primarily in malls.

Now Stout and designer Barrett Fry have created the logo, identity, menus, T-shirts, website and even a neon sign for a new self-proclaimed “Rock and Roll Fried Chicken joint” in Austin called Lucy’s Fried Chicken. The new restaurant/bar, located at the far end of ultra-hip South Congress Avenue, is owned by James and Cristina Holmes, who named the place after James’s grandmother who taught him how to cook fried chicken. They also have a daughter named Lucy and own another, more upscale restaurant in Austin, Olivia, named after their other young daughter. James started cooking fried chicken for his Sunday brunch at Olivia and it was a big hit with his customers. Then he started selling it from a food trailer during the Austin City Limits Festival, which generated long lines across Zilker Park, where the festival is held annually. He realized that he had something special and that fried chicken, which had fallen out of favor over the years, was making a big comeback.

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Justus Oehler’s Haiti Poster at Kunstmuseum Dieselwerk Cottbus

Justus Oehler’s award-winning poster for The Haiti Poster Project, created in response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, is one of the works featured in Es geht um die Welt (It’s About the World), a major exhibition that opens this Sunday at the Kunstmuseum Dieselkraftwerk Cottbus in Germany. Showcasing works by over 100 designers from around the world, the exhibition presents posters about nature and the environment, looking at humanity’s influence on the natural world, and vice versa. The show remains on view through 15 April.

Oehler’s poster was previously selected as Judge’s Choice in TDC57 and received a Red Dot Award.

Emily Oberman Joins Pentagram’s New York Office

Pentagram announces its newest partner, Emily Oberman.

Emily, who will join our New York office in April 2012, is a multi-disciplinary designer whose work encompasses brand identity, motion graphics, publications, packaging, advertising and websites. Her most recent projects include the website for This American Life, the identity, website and retail graphics for The Original Soupman (the basis for the beloved Seinfeld character), as well as work in progress for Science Friday and the technology company Conduit.

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New Work: Aldo Rise Installations by Daniel Weil

Last week we posted about the Selfridges windows that Pentagram’s Daniel Weil designed for Aldo Rise, Aldo’s bold collaboration with daring new talent in the fashion industry. The windows promoted the heart of the experience, the pop-up installation in the Shoe Galleries on Selfridges’ second floor.

Daniel devised the installation around the experience of sitting down and trying the shoes. Each counter unit of the installation is supported by a single wood turning, inspired by a female shoe.

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New Work: ‘David Hockney - A Bigger Picture’

Harry Pearce and his team have created the identity for David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture currently on show at the Royal Academy of Arts. This is the first major exhibition in the UK to showcase David Hockney’s landscape work. The show takes over the full suite of main galleries and features more than 150 works, mostly created within the last decade, and with the Academy’s galleries in mind.

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Arts Foundation Awards Presented at Pentagram

Pentagram’s London office hosted the Arts Foundation Awards last night at which Guest of Honour, poet Sir Andrew Motion, announced the names of the six recipients of the £10,000 fellowships.

Five art forms are chosen each year across the fields of fine and performing arts, literature, craft and new media. In 2012 the categories selected were Animation, Choreography, Opera Composition, Poetry and Product Design as well as the Yoma Sasburg Fellowship for Sculpture.

From a breakdancing choreographer to a product designer who prefers to work in the desert the recipients were;

Robert Morgan: Animation
Wilkie Branson: Choreography
Elspeth Brook: Opera Composition
Ahren Warner: Poetry
Markus Kayser: Product Design
Ruth Claxton: Yoma Sasburg Award for Sculpture

New Work: The Selfridges London Debut of Aldo Rise

Fashion shoe brand Aldo asked Pentagram’s Daniel Weil to create both the main entrance windows and a pop-up store for the Selfridges launch of the Aldo Rise initiative, a bold collaboration with daring new talent in the fashion industry.

Collaborating with partner Naresh Ramchandani, Weil has created a display concept that runs through both the windows and pop-up store.

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New Work: Rolls-Royce

Rolls-Royce is the iconic luxury automobile, representing the finest in British engineering since the company’s founding over a century ago in 1904. Pentagram’s Justus Oehler and his team in our Berlin office were commissioned by Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, now part of the BMW Group, to develop the theme and create the overall look and feel for the Rolls-Royce exhibition stand at Europe’s most important car show, the IAA (Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung) in Frankfurt. Oehler’s solution for the brief was to create a gallery-like environment that showcased the exquisite craftsmanship of Rolls-Royce and brought to life the spirit of its manufacturing.

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New Work: ‘Is Drawing Dead?’

“Is drawing dead?” A provocative question, but you are probably reading this at your computer, and perhaps the only pencil at hand is the one you chew on for comfort. Since the Renaissance, drawing has been the architect’s primary tool of expression and investigation. Now the use of digital technologies like parametric modeling and computational design have changed the way architects define and depict space. This February the Yale School of Architecture will host “Is Drawing Dead?,” a symposium that considers the present and future role of drawing in the architectural profession.

Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and Yve Ludwig have designed a poster for the event using the simple design parameters of the series of posters we’ve designed for Yale since 1998: black, white and type. Here, a broken pencil takes the form of a “Y.” And yes, the poster was originally conceived with a hand-drawn sketch.

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