Pentagram

Acknowledgement

A massive thank you to Pentagram for accepting me for a work placement. It was an incredible experience that has allowed me to improve my understanding of working within a Design Studio and allowed me to grow and develop the dynamics of becoming a Graphic Designer.

“Pentagram is the world’s largest independently-owned design studio” Our work encompasses graphics and identity, architecture and interiors, products and packaging, exhibitions and installations, websites and digital experiences, advertising and communications. Our 23 partners are all practicing designers, and whether they are working collaboratively or independently, they always do so in friendship.

Our structure is unique. We are the only major design studio where the owners of the business are the creators of the work and serve as the primary contact for every client. This reflects our conviction that great design cannot happen without passion, intelligence and — above all — personal commitment, and is demonstrated by a portfolio that spans five decades and all industries. - Pentagram

What’s Happening 01

Introductory Statement

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Day One

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Day Two

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Day Three

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Day Four

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Day Five

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First Week Reflection

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Day Six

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Day Sevem

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Day Eight

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Day Nine

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Day Ten

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Image Reference

Introductory Statement The final year students of Visual Communications at the Cass School of Art had the opportunity to complete a work placement for the module of Work Ready 2. The university provided opportunities to work within a range of different design studios spanning across London. The placements were tailored to each individual student and were chosen off the styles and sections worked on within the Creative Industry.

This publication documents a two week period of work at ‘Pentagram’ in Notting Hill. This was an incredible experience as the design team that I was working under was headed up by Astrid Stavro, a partner at Pentagram. Throughout the two week period I was working under Jake, a designer within Astrids design team. The team consisted of Flo and Jake, both newly graduated designers; Jake a graphic Designer and Flo a Creative Coder. Astrid Stavro focuses mainly on typography and work with type, their work ranges from book design, campaigns and awards to logos. Understanding the dynamic and positions within the studio was interesting as Pentagram’s designers ranged from graduates to partners that have been within the creative industry for many years now. This allowed me to interact with people who have just experienced going out into the design world and those who

have been in it for years. Listening to everyones unique experience of how they arrived to the position and job they are in today was very eyeopening as each of them informed me that it never goes they way you expect it to. However, this journey and experience is what makes you a unique designer.

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Day One

First day, first brief. The first brief that I received was for ‘San Francisco Design week 2019’. The brief asked the designer to create a poster to advertise for the Design Week 2019.

The brief was commonly something the team would complete within a day because the rate of pay for this brief equivalates to one days worth of work.

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The first stages of working on this brief was to research into the ‘Design Festival’ to understand if they have a specific theme running throughout their designs, for example any specific colours, logos and typeface. With regards t0 the brief the only mandatory requirement was the size of the poster, which was required it to be A2 size, which meant that the brief was very open to interpretation for designs. Throughout the process of creating and designing the poster I chose to start with using the theme of type based posters. I chose this avenue to work on as Astrid and her team predominantly focus around typeface.

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Day Two

Today I continued the San Francisco Design week brief. After experimenting with type based posters yesterday Jake and I had a discussion about experimenting with more graphic based designs. Throughout the discussion Jake talked to me about how he developed his own work by experimenting with styles and ideas that he would not usually use. Throughout the rest of the day I created a range of different styles of posters.

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Day Three

Continuation of San Franscisco Design week posters.

At this point I was continuing to develop the idea of type-based posters. However, with this poster above I was developing more of an idea of having the logo being the main differentiating factor.

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Day Four Day Four was an interesting day, the design team were working on creating a design for ‘Art book Awards’. This award was in connection with the ‘Whitechapel gallery’ brief. As a section within the brief they also needed to produce a design for the award itself. The award was a block of 5 pieces of wood connected through a wire in the centre, to resemble a stack of books, the design needed to allow movement of the collection of books. The team were sent a prototype of the award, the blocks of wood were bare in order for the team to create mockups.

After a design meeting between Jake and Flo they were asked by Astrid to brainstorm ideas of designs for the award prize. Jake and Flo asked if I would go around Notting Hill and gather some photos which they could use to mock up designs on different backgrounds and scenarios with a connection to the categories of awards.

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Flo specifically asked me to take photos around different areas with books, nature, contemporary design and open areas. As the Design studio was in Notting Hill there was a lot of potential for the photographs to be placed around different areas within these categories.

I was away for around an hour gathering photographs of different modern cafes, restaurants and neighbouring areas. This was a very interesting task for myself to complete as I have never experienced taking photographs for specific backgrounds for an award. What I noticed from the way in which the team tackled this job, the display of their mock ups were just as important as the design itself. This was because the way you display the mock ideas to the client is just as important as it conveys a narrative to the design itself.

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Day Five Throughout the first Friday I was asked to look through the archive that Pentagram has on the bottom floor of the studio. The archive takes up one third of the floor space downstairs and is stretched across the whole right side of the building. The archive is inside a selection of file cabinet mobile archives from floor to ceiling, they need the storage space and the accessibility as they keep all of the work that anyone within Pentagram produces.

Jake asked me to find a book within the archive that he needed in order to reference within the book Awards PDF to be sent in a few days. He informed me that there was no rush in bringing the book to him and gave me the opportunity to have a browse through the archive.

Unfortunately, I was not able to take any images of the work within the archives.

Looking through the archives was very interesting because it was very visible that all the work was so unique and had its own style, yet you were still able to recognise that all the work was produced by a member of Pentagram staff, I think this is due to the quality and production value of the work. Throughout looking in the archive I was able to gather an understanding of everything that goes into the process of creating Design work.

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9 - 10 Arrival time

10 - 10:30 Design Group Meeting

13:15 - 14:15 Lunch Throughout my time at pentagram, each day was different with regards to my work load.

However, the break down of the day was structured and allowed the designers to have scheduled meetings each day at certain points to regroup.

17 - 18 Mid Day Design Meeting

18- 19 Leave the Design Studio (depending on current deadlines)

The structure of the day compared to the quantity of people within the studio meant that lunch was divided into two halves as lunch was provided by the studio. The set routine is that the designers on one half of the studio went for lunch from 12:45 to 13:45 and the second half of the studio goes for lunch at 13:15 to 14:15.

Throughout the hour lunch break Jake and the team took walks throughout Notting Hill to break up the day and make it easier to focus. around computers.

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First Week Refelection The end of the first week has allowed me to look back on the past five days and understand the dynamic of working within a design team.

This is a big stepping stone for myself as I have never had an experience working within a design studio before. However I have had some experience as an independant practitioner.

This was a big learning curve in understanding the day to day running of recieving briefs and communication between practitioner and client and practitioner to practitioner throughout the studio.

Working within Astrids team under the supervision of Jake has allowed me to see how teams are divided and how each role functions.

Flo works predominantly on the research and idea building. Jake works as the creator spending the majority of his days creating and editing the final pieces that the clients have asked for. Astrid, being one of the partners within Pentagram, works as an overlooker, she depicts the outcome and display of the designs.

However, they all work as a team and they continually have two to three design meetings throughout the day depending on how busy

they are and how much communication is needed between designers.

As feedback to myself at this point throughout the next week, I myself need to push to actively ask more questions. The dynamic that the team has is very close which creates a positive open atmosphere, this allows for easy communication which opens up the communication for myself and in turn develops my understanding.

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However, as you can clearly see the layout was the pivotal point within this publication due to the quantity of images. I was informed that they prototyped around 5 different layouts to gather a uniformed look.

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Day Six Day six was the first day of the second week.

Throughout the day the team had a large deadline so Jake let me look through some of the publications he was about to send off to get printed. The publication you can see to the left was a collection of ‘Cahiers du Cinema’ 750 publication covers. This publication really stood out to me because of the layout and the design.

Jake told me they went for a simple minimalistic design that focused purely on the images inside. He told me that they had some elements of difficulty rendering the images as some of the publications dated back to 1951 and the resolution and quality of the covers were not easy to render.

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Day Seven Throughout the rest of the day I sat with Flo and watched her put together an InDesign PDF of visuals and information regarding the illustraitons. The PDF is then to be be sent to the client to look through examples and styles that he could potentially take through to his finalised logo.

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Through this research I discovered that the original illustrations were not originally created for the celebration of the ‘Day of the Dead’ festival but in fact created between the dates of 1900 to 1910 by José Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican political printmaker and engraver.

Posada is described as the “printmaker to the Mexican people”. The illustrations were created to make a mockery of the middle class, at that time in Mexico there was a huge divide between the middle class and the working class this then was represented through Posadas artwork. It was only in 1920 when Posada had passed away that his work was rediscovered by Jean Charlo a French expatriate and then brought them to a new light in regards to the festival of the ‘Day of the Dead’.

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With my understanding, after multiple conversations with Jake it was very apparent that because the brief was so open it was causing a problem because they are creating with no guidelines or theme of what the publishers would like. Jake showed me the different variations of what were sent off and a few that have been placed on the back burner in case they need a few more options to send off. The covers were clean and minimalistic, predominantly type based with bold colours.

One of the covers had feature lines running across the type of ‘Women’, it was a really eye catching design although this design was the one that had just been sent back from the publishers to change.

To the left are a few examples of what Jake had told me the client was interested in. What was apparent from the selection was that the client wished some form of illustrative based design, that is clean and eye catching. Throughout the rest of the day I spent a considerable amount of time with Jake as he brainstormed new ideas in regards to the cover design. Here are a few of the experimentation examples I created.

As you can see I experimented with different styles and colours. I started working on the Black typeface as Flo asked me to experiment with type and bring in colours after a basic experimentation with plain typeface.

Day Eight

Over the course of the two weeks I spent at Pentagram following Jake as he worked on live briefs, he was working on a publication for ‘Greatest Women Artists’. Jake has spent over a month working with the publishing company finalising the design and layout of this publication. He had already completed the content layout the previous week before I arrived. However, there was a few issues with the cover of the book, the clients had been sent multiple drafts of different variations of cover designs, the client gave Pentagram free reign over the design of the cover. However this was proving difficult as the design he had sent back had no feedback surrounding what he did not like about the cover design.

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Day Nine

MAN TAC Today was a continuation of research and development for the ‘Taco Maco’ logo brief. After the research stage of this brief we then started to work on logos. When I was discussing with Flo about the theme and design of the logo it was apparent by the lack of information given by the client that there was very little art directive because they did not know specifically what he wanted.

There is a meeting set up the week after I leave work placement when they are going to discuss the theme and idea of the logo down to a more narrow and focussed area. This current stage and task was more about creating mock ups of different ideas and themes, to visually give the client a variety of different possible ideas. The ideas and themes I focussed on were predominantly type based, this was because when I was discussing with Jake he explained to me that they mainly focus on type based designs and logos and due to the lack of information provided by the client they focused on their specific focus area of expertise, typeface.

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Flo asked if I could continue to carry out some more research as this would allow her to have more themes and colour schemes for ideas.

Flo specifically asked if I would be able to research into some more traditional Mexican themes as well as looking into different styles and aestetics of restaurants.

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Day Ten

On the last day of my placement. Jake and the team were asked to help complete a brief with another partner in Pentagram. The brief was to rebrand Waitrose own range of products.

The main selection in which Astrid’s team were asked to take part in was for the alcoholic beverages for example; Beer, Cider and Wine.

This was an interesting process to watch as they had to combine a large group of people, some with the knowledge of the original brief and some without, this meant that their needed to be a clear stream of communication between the design teams.

I spent the day observing Jake go through the process of understand and interpreting how to rebrand these selections of wines. Jake researched into the different regions and designs that this wine was associated with.

I was able to watch a practitioner develop and create the designs of certain food packaging for Waitrose. It was incredibly interesting as he was brought in as a freelancer which meant that he was working for Pentagram for roughly 4 months until the Waitrose brief was completed.

Interacting with this practitioner allowed me to understand the dynamics of working as a freelancer with a design studio.

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Reflection

My time within Pentagram was an incredible experience it has opened up my eyes to the dynamic and lifestyle of working within a Design Studio. I met many incredible practitioners that were very enthusiastic about working within their field of design. The traits and tools I learned while I was on placement have allowed me to understand what I have to do moving forward after university to become a practitioner within Graphic Design.

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Throughout the duration of the work placement I was involved in creating and completing briefs.

The team was incredibly busy working on briefs to submit, during the two weeks I was there, so I was given different tasks to complete, as well as the opportunity to watch them work on their live briefs. What I felt that I learnt the most on this work placement was the dynamic of working within a design team. There are certain social and work elements that really stood out to me as a student which I would not of recognised and understood without this experience of working in a design studio.

The desks are set up in a certain way which meant that communication between each other was easy and non-disruptive. This is vital during their time working together, as each designer worked together yet still completed the majority of the tasks themselves. Throughout my time within the team I was not able to work on the briefs they were completing due to the Non Disclosure form I signed at the start of the placement. However, this meant that I was able to watch and ask questions in regards to the practice of Graphic Design such as advice on portfolios, their journey on how they gain experiences and jobs, the dynamics of the different teams, working with clients and certain techniques and tips of design software such like InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. What I felt that I personally took from this experience is the communication and work ethic that these

designers have. What was very apparent while talking to different designers not just Graphic Designers was that it took them a lot of time to create a portfolio that they were happy with and to find ‘the perfect job’. I feel that this has a huge effect on how they work because they were excited to be there, with them completing briefs in their own time to build up their portfolio, working as a freelancer for difficult clients and spending more hours at home on their portfolio.

This was important to my own learning and understanding of the industry because they have given me some great tips on how to succeed and have the right attitude towards putting myself out there as a practitioner to find a job. Some of the conversations I had with Jake throughout this time was in regards to the variations and amount of work they received. They work for Astrid Stavro, known internationally for her work with typeface and talent of creating complex designs and producing them in a minimalistic design. Jake explained to me that because Astrid is so well known for her work with typography they do a lot of publication designs, it just depends on what the client’s needs are. They occasionally work on Logos or product design, but this is not their most common work. Overall, the experience I had working with Pentagram with Jake, Flo and Astrid was very fundamental for my understanding of the industry and a brilliant experience that has evolved my creativity and knowledge of the industry.

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Image Reference All imaged were self taken images, with permission from Jake, who was in charge of me throughout my time at Pentagram.

Arial view of the Desing studio situated on the introductory statement was a picture taken from Pentagram themselves. Displayed on their website Reference.

Pentagram. 2019, Arial view. https://www. pentagram.com/contact

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