Pentagram Design Studio
The Pentagram Design Studio is a design firm which was founded in 1972 in London by Alan Fletcher, Theo Crosby, Colin Forbes, Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky. The company is multi-disciplinary whose work encompasses graphics and identity, products and packaging, advertising, communications, sound and motion. There are offices all over the worlds including ones in London, New York City, San Francisco, Berlin and Austin, Texas. The 23 partners of the company are all actively practising designers working both collaboratively and independently. This creates a unique structure as it is now of the only major design studios where the owners are the people working with the clients to create designs and act as a primary contact. The hundreds of employees have specialities in design, architecture, advertising, branding, signage and identity to name a few.
Type of Work…
Brand Identity: the studio was contacted to a three dimensional typographic identity for the 2021 London Design Festival, which is the cities longest running design event. The designers utilised the colour by introducing black to the familiar red and while colour palette of the event, which highlights the top and gives it a bold, three dimensional appearance. The design is flexible as it was displaced across numerous locations. The studio focused on how the identity would centre around the idea of ‘form’ and stems from letterforms which were then transformed into graphic language.
Signage & Environmental Graphics: in the recent digital era, virtual and augmented reality are becoming more and more popular. So it was no surprise when Starbucks approached Pentagram to create a data visualisation installation and augmented reality experience for the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Milan. The installation is the centre-piece of the Milan store, composing of a floor-to-ceiling visual representation of the history of the coffee company. Pentagram also thought off, designed and developed an app to go along with it, which added a digital layer which interacts with the space directly.
Film & Motion Graphics: the studio was approached to create the opening title sequence for a recent limited tv series called ‘Ragdoll’, which takes the audience into the twisted world of a serial killer. A title sequence was created for each episode by creating layers of collages, projections on the cast members and type. This mirrors the nature of the title ‘Ragdoll’, something that is taken apart and pieced back together. This shows the level of variety that the design studio offers jumping from brand identity and design to visuals used in popular tv shows.
https://www.pentagram.com/about
https://www.linkedin.com/company/pentagram
IDEO
IDEO is a global design and consulting company that is committed to creating positive impact through their work. It was founded in Palo Alto, California in 1991, by David M Kelley, Bill Moggridge and Mike Nuttal. IDEO uses the design thinking approach to design products, services, environments and digital experiences for their clients which include American Family Insurance, Swarovski, HBO, PillPack, Holiday Inn Express and The North Face. It includes a community of designers, entrepreneurs, engineers, teachers and researchers who work across offices all around the world including the US, England, Germany, Japan and China.
The company was one of the early leaders of what we now know as human-centred design, and this is what created their aim and motto of keeping people at the centre of their work. IDEO believes that a key part of design thinking is to always design solutions for people first.
IDEO are credited with designing the first manufacturable mouse for Apple, which saw a huge advancement in human-centred design. Steve Jobs approached the company to design a mouse for a new radical design of his, the computer Lisa. The design team appointed completely abandoned all the previous expensive mechanisms which were involved in the mouse before. They replaced this with a design which was manufactured a lot easier, and this component is still used in virtually all mechanical mice that are being produced today.
The term of ‘Interaction Design’ was actually coined by one of the co-founders of IDEO, Bill Moggride, who led the design of the first notebook style computer for GRiD Systems. Looking back in hindsight, this was a beacon for the future. Moggride recognised the need for a completely new design practice to help define how users interacted with computer software.
