Pentagram's Custom Signs Make Picking Up Dog Poop A Religious Experience At Manhattan's Famous Cathedral Saint John the Divine.

Michael Bierut and designer Jesse Reed of Pentagram have created a series of heavenly signs for New York's well known Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine that gently remind visitors to curb and leash thy dogs on Sunday, Oct. 6 (today) for its annual St. Francis Day Blessing of the Animals.



Funerals of many notables have been held at St. John the Divine, such as Soprano's star James Gandolfini, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, writer James Baldwin, inventor Nikola Tesla, musician Dizzy Gillespie and puppeteer Jim Henson.



Visitors will encounter a new set of commandments designed for the institution, which employs the custom font Divine, a redrawn version of Frederic Goudy’s 1928 Blackletter.


above: The font, St. John The Divine, was created exclusively for Pentagram to rebrand the Cathedral by typographer Joe Finocchiaro in 2009.




Throughout the past few years, Pentagram has been refreshing the identity of Manhattan’s Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. Their relationship with the Cathedral, an extraordinary New York institution, goes back fourteen years. They designed its previous identity in 1999.



Shortly after 9/11, the Cathedral was severely damaged by fire; a painstaking seven-year restoration followed, and the interior was reopened to great acclaim last November. The updated identity, which has been slowly introduced over the past years, builds on the success of the reopening.


above: The updated identifier pairs a drawing of the Cathedral's rose window with the name set in Franklin Gothic.

The Cathedral’s identifier juxtaposes a drawing of the rose window (shown below) that dominates the building’s western wall with asymmetrical sans serif typography. The signature is complimented with a new version of Frederic Goudy‘s blackletter text from 1928, which Goudy had based on Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible.



In a process that paralleled the Cathedral’s detailed interior restoration, typographer Joe Finocchiaro “repointed” Goudy’s letterforms to ensure crisp reproduction at large sizes.


above: A comparison of the letter P in Goudy's original blackletter, left, and redrawn by Joe Finocchiaro for the custom font Divine, right.

The signs will be a permanent addition to the Cathedral grounds, a popular spot for walking dogs in the neighborhood.


above: The church also holds many exhibits. Dog Bless You: The Photography of Mary Bloom, opened there last month and will be on view through winter 2013. For more information on the exhibition and photographer Mary Bloom's evocative portraits of Cathedral friends both four- and two-legged, visit here

Related links:
Pentagram
Joe Finocchiaro
Cathedral of St. John the Divine
Architectural history and images of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine
Construction of the West Rose Window

Pentagram's Daniel Weil Designs A Clock For An Architect

Privately commissioned to create a gift for an architect, Daniel Weil created a one-of-a-kind clock that is both simple and complex. Reducing objects to their component parts has long fascinated Weil. The Radio in a Bag* he created for his degree show at the Royal College of Art three decades ago is an icon of 20th century industrial design. This clock is the latest demonstration of his interest in investigating not just how objects look, but how they work.




Constructed in ash and nickel-plated brass and silver, the clock is built of five separate elements. The numbers, both hours and minutes, are inscribed on the face and interior of a 9 3/4-inches diameter ring.




The mechanism for setting the time connects with the central mechanism with visible rubber belts.



A single AA battery provides power to the clock through visible power strips that are recessed in the assembly’s base. (Note the different screws that support the battery stand, keyed to the positive and negative poles of the power source.)



And, befitting the object’s recipient, the housing for the central mechanism takes the form of, literally, a house.




Daniel's sketches for the clock:






“Objects like clocks are both prosaic and profound,” says Weil. “Prosiac because of their ubiquity in everyday life, profound because of the mysterious nature of time itself. Time can be reduced to hours, minutes and seconds, just as a clock can be reduced to its component parts. This doesn’t explain time, but in a way simply exposes its mysterious essence.”

*

above: Daniel Weil. 'Radio in a bag', 1983. 28.5 x 20.6 c


above article and images via Pentagram

Inside Jon Stewart's Book, Earth: A Visitor's Guide To The Human Race.

Jon Stewart's newest book hit the stores yesterday. Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race is his highly anticipated follow-up to mega-hit America (The Book) Teacher's Edition: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction



The man behind the best-selling America (The Book), Emmy-winning, Oscar-hosting, Daily Show-anchoring Jon Stewart asks: Where do we come from? Who created us? Why are we here? Questions that have puzzled us since the dawn of time. But when it became apparent to Jon Stewart and the writers of The Daily Show that the world was about to end, they embarked on a massive mission to write a book that summed up the human race: What we looked like; what we accomplished; our achievements in society, government, religion, science and culture -- all bound in a 256 page book with lots of color photos, graphs and charts.



With eye catching page designs by Pentagram, this definitive guide to our species is filled with Jon's trademark sense of humor. Nothing is sacred and everything is hilarious. From captions under images to the appendices, the book is filled with wit, sarcasm and style. Here's a look at many of the spreads, crops and images (not in actual order) from this fun and fabulous new trendy tome.