Identity Politics

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

When an arts institution in New York wants to reinvent or reinforce its image, very often the artistic or marketing director’s first move is to pick up the phone and call a partner at Pentagram. A 25-year-old graphic design firm with offices in New York, London, San Francisco, Austin, and Berlin, Pentagram has had more influence on the visual identities of the city’s cultural institutions than any other firm. Its impact can be seen all over town, from the Public Theater to the Metropolitan Opera, and from the Brooklyn Academy of Music to Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Of the seven partners in Pentagram’s New York office, two in particular have done a lot of work for arts organizations in the city. Paula Scher made a huge splash in the 1990s with her designs for the Public, which included not only the theater’s logo and signage, but dozens of text-heavy — and, at the time, radical — posters for shows like “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk.” Since then, Ms. Scher has created visual identities for, among others, the Metropolitan Opera, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, the High Line, New 42nd Street Studios, the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Asia Society. She also appears herself in a new campaign for Hewlett-Packard.

Ms. Scher’s colleague Michael Bierut has designed a long-lasting and distinctive visual identity system for BAM, as well as one for the Morgan Library & Museum, tied to the Morgan’s recent expansion. Ms. Scher and Mr. Bierut have also designed logos for major corporations like Citibank, United Airlines, Tiffany & Co., and Coca-Cola.

Ms. Scher’s most recent cultural client is the Park Avenue Armory and Drill Hall, the new arts venue to be located in the former Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue between 66th and 67th streets. Back in 1999, when the Seventh Regiment Armory Conservancy, the group that is restoring the Armory, submitted its proposal to New York State, which owns the building, Ms. Scher designed the logo the Conservancy used, which looks like an architectural elevation of the building.

“You see the building, with this architectural plan behind it,” the president of the Conservancy, Rebecca Robertson, said. “You see that it’s a project that wants to have work done, [which was] the message we were trying to send to the state.”

Now, as the Conservancy gears up for several events this fall, it will gradually unveil the next stages in its visual identity. Ms. Scher’s current ideas, which have not yet been approved by the board, combine contemporary elements with other images that celebrate the building’s ornate Gilded Age architecture and interior design. Among other things, Ms. Scher is designing signage to cover the construction shed that will go up on Park Avenue this fall.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, cultural organizations focused mostly on oneoff designs for individual programs, and every few years they would get lucky and produce a gorgeous poster, the former vice president of marketing and communications at BAM and now the chief marketing and communications officer at the Whitney Museum of American Art (for which Pentagram designed the logo), Jeffrey Levine, said. What Pentagram did “was to show the value of a consistent identity — that you had much more to gain from a consistent, effective design than you did from the occasional piece that would come up once every two or three years and blow people away.”

Ms. Scher began her career designing album covers for CBS Records and Atlantic Records; she designed the original “Boston” album in 1976. She left to establish her own design firm, but soon realized that she was losing the major jobs to “more accomplished firms, or bigger firms, or men,” she said the other day in an interview at Pentagram’s office on lower Fifth Avenue, in a building that in the late ’80s housed the supper club M.K.

She joined Pentagram in 1991 and, shortly after, the producer and artistic director of the Public Theater, George C. Wolfe, hired her to design the theater’s logo and visual identity. For the logo, she chose a common font, American Woodtype, and spelled “public” vertically, with the letters going from thick to thin, in a visual reference to the island of Manhattan. “George wanted something that was very urban and connected it with the city,” Ms. Scher said.

The ads for the Public’s first season under the new identity, 1994–95, and for subsequent seasons at the Public and the New York Shakespeare Festival, were extremely eye-catching. “She did that rare thing, which is to revitalize the image of a theater not just through what’s put on stage but what’s in the advertising,” the Public’s current artistic director, Oskar Eustis, said. “Everyone in the field paid attention.”

“Everyone took a step back and said, ‘Wow, we want that,'” Mr. Levine recalled. Unfortunately, as others imitated it, the style over time became less distinctive, Ms. Scher said. In addition, as more work was done in-house at the Public, the design guidelines got looser and looser.

“That’s inevitable with any look,” Mr. Eustis said. “You start experimenting and trying to push the boundaries, and eventually they just become loose.” As much as he’s liked some of the designs that have come out of the Public over the last few years, he acknowledged, the theater’s advertising “no longer has that instantly identifiable feel.”

When Peter Gelb took over as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera with the intent of opening it to broader audiences, the marketing director he brought on, Tom Michel, had already worked with Ms. Scher at the Public and knew that she would be the right person to refresh the Met’s visual identity.

The main task, Ms. Scher said, was to reclaim the one-syllable name. “When I moved to New York, the Metropolitan Opera was ‘the Met,’ and the museum was ‘the Metropolitan Museum of Art,'” she said. But over time, as the opera addressed a small audience, while the museum attracted millions of tourists — and commissioned an extremely successful shopping bag from the designer Rudolph de Harak, which says “MET” prominently and can be seen all over the streets of Manhattan — the museum and the opera switched roles.

To take back the Met name, Ms. Scher designed a logo that says “The Metropolitan Opera,” with “Met” and “Opera” in black and the other letters in gray. She used a traditional serif font, but made it look contemporary by surrounding the words with lots of white space. For the first season’s brochures, she chose images that looked more like fashion photography than what people typically expect from opera.

In general, Ms. Scher said, the goal of creating a visual identity is “to take somebody’s essential spirit and make it communicable.” The job is easiest, she said, when an organization has a strong director with a clear vision, like Mr. Gelb. The more bureaucratic an organization is, “the blander the identity is likely to be, because it’s going to be distilled by too many voices.”

A typical identity usually lasts six to nine years, Ms. Scher said. “Then it needs to tweak itself up,” if only to adjust to how our visual standards and expectations change.

For the Morgan Library, an institution that Mr. Bierut said is “all about the greater glory of the printed word,” his concept was to use a very traditional serif font and make all the typeface look like words in a book.

He met with the head of the rare books department, John Bidwell, who showed him “all these type specimens,” until they settled on a font called Dante, a 20th century revival of a font originally designed in 1495.

“Every word [in the museum] is in it,” Mr. Bierut said, including “the long list of donors in the lobby, ‘Women’s’ and ‘Men’s,’ the Morgan Shop, every piece of membership information, and the label on the Gutenberg Bible.”

The director of the Morgan, Charles Pierce Jr., said that in the last 10 or 15 years, the city’s cultural institutions have had to compete more and more for New Yorkers’ time and attention. In that context, he said, “It’s important to have a clear identity, not only in terms of your name” — the Morgan changed its name at the time of the expansion, to the Morgan Library & Museum from the Pierpont Morgan Library — “but in terms of your mission and what you offer the public.”

Now Ms. Scher is in early discussions with two institutions based at Lincoln Center about redesigning their visual identities. Mr. Bierut is designing identities for the Museum of Arts & Design, for its new home at 2 Columbus Circle, as well as for the Tenement Museum and the Museum of Chinese in America.

Mr. Bierut said he thinks competition has “brought out the best” design-wise in the city’s cultural institutions. While arts organizations were once reluctant to market themselves like for-profit businesses, now, he said, “I work with Saks Fifth Avenue, and there’s not that much of a difference between what my client at Saks is worried about and what my client at BAM is worried about. They realize that their audiences overlap, and it’s coming out of the same market, where you’re going to buy shoes at Saks, or you’re going to a show at BAM, or to the Morgan.”


The New York Sun

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