Pentagram: Building an Image

Friday 14 January

Pentagram: Building an Image

“What is now commonly called design is quite simply commercial art.” Commissioned by CEOs and created by staff artists, today’s corporate client has the potential to initiate works worthy of a Pope Julius II ordering from would-be Michelangelos.

At least that’s the view of Kenneth Grange, British product designer and founding partner of the multidisciplinary design company Pentagram. As documented in the impeccably packaged portfolio (“Pentagram: The Compendium”, Phaidon, 1993), the first major survey of the group since 1978, Pentagram are one of the world’s most successful organisations to employ creativity for commercial gain.

This undeniably talented group of 17 partners build their images-for-sale from offices in London, New York and San Francisco. Starting out around the time of the Beatles, Mary Quant, stove-pipes and Pop Art, Englishmen Colin Forbes and Alan Fletcher pooled their graphic design talents to consolidate their individual freelance projects. Later joined by Grange (who cut his teeth designing the original Kenwood Chef food mixer in 1961 and the classic Kodak instamatic in 1966) and corporate ID specialist Mervyn Kurlansky, Pentagram became a going concern in 1972.

Now comprised of mostly middle-aged men (with the exception of New York-based Paula Scher) the partnership has made its mark on contemporary design from book covers to shopfronts, with clients-as-patrons drawn from the ranks of Xerox, IBM, Olivetti, Reuters, BP, Penguin and Roche.

According to the Financial Times, “Pentagram is the Rolls Royce of the design business”. To me, this encapsulates both its virtues and failings. Pentagram is the zenith of high design conceived in terms of class, luxury, and distinction. Consistently smooth and corporate, their ‘art’ has all its rough edges smoothed off and glossed over.

The group construct slick images as a business strategy. In the commercial real estate boom of the 1980s, they found a niche creating highly distinctive composite photos of potential building projects for developers. By merging separate photos of proposed sites with photos of realistic looking architectural models in a computer, the design firm played image-producer to the developer’s role as financier. Nowhere is this more striking than in the image of architect Helmut Jahn’s skyscraper seamlessly inserted in Connecticut Mutual’s proposed downtown Chicago building site.

The marriage of art and commerce can be more credibly witnessed in the partnership’s stylish and functional signage for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The group’s colour-coded hanging banners instantly mark out the entrances to the Chinese, Indian and Islamic sections of the museum, easily identifying corridors in a large Bodoni typeface.

The classic book designs for Faber and Faber also find their origins in the Pentagram stable. A distinctive double ‘f’ on a black panel placed over commissioned illustrations give the various editions a recognisability and unity. The book as object becomes part of a certain cannon of ‘quality’. The Faber abd Faber plays look like circus handbills, film titles feature a clapperboard attached to the black panel, while poetry books use Scotch rules to separate the text panel from the repetitive ‘ff’ background pattern.

At the end of the day, the notion of high design is the most irritating thing about the overall philosophy of Pentagram. The redesign of the British “Guardian” newspaper at the end of the 1980s sparked a whole debate (within the offices of Pentagram at least) as to whether a new look could influence the quality and tone of the paper’s editorial stance. Art director and partner David Hillman (who also redesigned the “New Statesman” and “City Limits”) argued that the paper could distinguish itself from the tabloids by being classic, “readable, well organised, clean, simple to put together and distinctive.” It could also be a formula for boredom.

At Pentagram, classicism rules. Even in pop music. Album cover designer Peter Saville (who left the group late last year) was the group’s best designer of this sort. Closely associated with the wave of young British stylists who came to the fore during the 1980s, Saville created some of the more memorable covers and liners for the Factory record label, of which he is art director and co-founder.

The grunge and anarchy of pop culture doesn’t always sit well with high designers whose commercial projects self-consciously aspire to the condition of art. Art with a capital ‘A’ is a straight-jacketed affair, more concerned with arbitrary notions of taste and class than with meaning, raw energy or rough edges. Consequently Saville’s work for London’s Whitechapel Gallery, fashion designer Yohji Yamamotto and the Centres Pompidou in Paris is about as rough as Pentagram get.

Despite these quibbles, “The Compendium” is an important contribution to the discussion and documentation of contemporary design. Like the group’s earlier “Living by Design”, it astutely manages to avoid pontificating and self-promotion. As a commercial art document itself, it expresses the enduring values derived from the intellectual and everyday underpinnings of commercial art and design.