The redesign of L’Alliance New York was handled by Eddie Opara’s Pentagram team, using Inferi and Rules from Blaze Type, while the new logo is based on Dahlia by VJ-Type. From the case study:

L’Alliance New York, a key player in French culture in New York and beyond, offers immersive French language courses and a wide range of multidisciplinary programming. This independent non-profit organization celebrates the diversity of Francophone cultures and creativity worldwide. Formerly known as the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), the institution was renamed to better reflect its openness and role as a bridge between Francophone cultures and the New York public.

Pentagram redesigned L’Alliance’s visual identity by creating a framework that highlights its dynamic and welcoming spirit. The use of expressive typography and the creation of an apostrophe brand mark symbolize the organization’s lively approach to language teaching. The fonts chosen include Dahlia, a creation by the VJ Type foundry known for its dramatic curves, along with Inferi and Rules from the Blaze Type foundry, which bring an elegant and modern touch. This new visual universe, with its vibrant and contemporary colors, aims to engage a broader and more diverse audience.

The long-running font project EK Notice – consisting of EK Notice Sans, EK Notice Classic and EK Notice Decor (all designed by Erkin Karamemet 2017–2023) was known as EK Klodt prior to its official release as EK Notice.

The collection’s first official application before release is for Citizen magazine: a slightly modified version of Notice Decor was used for the Citizen wordmark.

Citizen is a new bi-annual magazine “documenting Black life and culture through the words of Black thinkers and the lenses of Black creatives, a beautifully designed record of Black life” by and for the Black community and anyone interested in culture at large.

Inside the publication, Notice is paired with ABC Repro, Genath and Gerstner-Programm FSL.

Halyard Display by Darden Studio stars alongside several typefaces by Vocal Type in the design of Ben’s Best Blnz.

Ben’s Best Blnz, or B3, is a cannabis brand initiated by Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s. Its mission is “to sell Great Pot and use the power of our business to Right the Wrongs of the War on Drugs.” The independent non-profit organization advocates for the decarceration of those convicted of nonviolent cannabis crimes and the descheduling of marijuana as a Schedule 1 substance.

For the branding, Eddie Opara and his team at Pentagram relied on eclectic and colorful typography, exclusively using typefaces by Black designers. Halyard Display by Joshua Darden is the text typeface on the B3 website (development by Jacob Macdonald), and is also used in the packaging designs as well as for merchandise such as T-shirts. Halyard is paired with a range of more expressive fonts all designed by Tré Seals from Vocal Type, namely Eva Peron, Eva Maria, Martin, Bayard, and Ruben.

Read and see more in Pentagram’s case study and on B3’s page about their art and design.

Homepage with mission statement, main menu, quotes, contact form, and infographics

Social Mission page with info on background, advocacy, investment, vendors and partners

Mission statement on the homepage. Interestingly, the lowercase glyphs from Halyard Display Regular are here combined with caps from the slightly heavier Medium weight.

Labels for the Blended SloSmokes that are available in various effects: Focus, Creative, Relax, Stimulate, Cloud 9, Kick Back, Happy Go Lucky, and Dream Sweet Dreams

Website detail featuring Eva Maria for the ticker text, Eva Peron for “B3”, and Halyard for text

Website details including an interactive shop finder

Get There Slower Full Color T-Shirt featuring Halyard Display with alternating glyph colors

Get There Slower Wavy T-Shirt featuring Halyard Display set on a wavy baseline

Full Spectrum Vape Pen packaging designs

Blended SmoSmokes packaging

Assorted packaging designs

Halyard is the brand typeface of FIT NYC and is used across the college’s visual communication.

Founded in 1944, the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) is part of the State University of New York (SUNY). The public college focuses on design, fashion, business, and technology. Pentagram partner Eddie Opara and his team developed a new brand system which was rolled out in fall 2018. FIT’s typography guidelines detail the reasons for the typeface selection:

Halyard from Darden Studio provides both a carefully crafted design as well as exceptional legibility and visual quality, especially effective for longer body compositions at smaller sizes and in digital environments such as websites and PowerPoint/Keynote presentations.

Apart from Halyard being an all-purpose font, it is empathetic and uncomplicated while also presenting a staunch-yet-playful disposition.

Halyard is employed in all of its three sub-familes; Micro, Text, and Display; largely replacing the previously used Bureau Grotesque. True to its tagline, “Nurturing Unconventional Minds”, FIT employs the size-specific styles in original ways:

Three weights have been selected from the Micro and Text families, and they can be used in combination or separately depending on the composition and desired emphasis of content.

Halyard Micro is used for display text and headlines; Halyard Text is used for longer running copy in denser, text-heavy publications and in business cards.

The logo (shown above) features Halyard Text Regular for the full name, combined with the FIT button in Bureau Grotesque, designed by Michael Bierut in 1999.

Headline on the FIT website, contrasting Halyard Micro Black with the Display Italic

The nested menu is rendered in various weights from Halyard Text.

Halyard Micro with its eye-catching ink traps is used for display purposes.

Page detail featuring styles from all three sub-families: while the key figures are in Halyard Micro, the heading is rendered in Halyard Display’s SemiBold style. Halyard Text serves for the reading copy.

Wordmark for the Unconventional Innovation initative, in Halyard Text Bold, with the letter o substituted by the FIT button

Website footer

Business card templates

The “Unconventional Minds Welcome” banner in Halyard Micro Bold was one of the first applications of the new brand identity.

From Pentagram:

Black artists and entrepreneurs have been instrumental to moviemaking from the start, helping to shape this most modern and popular of art forms while facing racism and prejudices that limited opportunities. Presented by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971 explores the rich history of Black participation in American cinema from its beginnings to just beyond the civil rights movement. Pentagram partner Eddie Opara and team [Jack Collins, Brankica Harvey, Dana Reginiano, Jun Jung] have designed a companion book for the exhibition that aims to be an essential resource on this heritage.

Co-curated by Doris Berger and Rhea L. Combs, Regeneration seeks to revive lost or forgotten films, filmmakers and performers for a contemporary audience, focusing on the foundational period that led to the explosion of mainstream and independent Black cinema that followed. (The exhibition takes its name from an independent all-Black-cast movie from 1923.) It is only the second exhibition presented by the Academy Museum since it opened its doors in September 2021 and coincides with the arrival of its newly appointed Director and President Jacqueline Stewart, a leading scholar on Black cinema and film preservation.

The book design employs an eclectic approach to typography inspired by the eye-catching posters and their dramatic display type that drew audiences to the films. The designers selected an ensemble of typefaces that hint at the period as well as the posters’ expressive lettering, most of which was originally hand-drawn. The lead role in the book is given to Sharp Grotesk, chosen for its sheer versatility and a range of widths that allows it to be everything from powerful to whimsical. The elegant geometric Parafina is a supporting player, and other fonts include Domaine Display, Surt and Arizona Flare.

The cover repeats the title in strong upper-case type (set in Sharp Grotesk Black), projecting out of the dark like a film in the theater and suggesting an evolution into a bright future. (“The title Regeneration is not just from a race movie, but it’s about the successive waves of Black filmmakers,” Stewart says.) The contrast gives the cover a sense of dimension, heightened by a foil varnish.

The designers developed a bright, modern color palette that draws from the posters. The vibrant color is used to offset the sepia tone of the historical materials, and visually echoes the title of the curators’ introductory essay, “A Spectrum of Black Cinema.”

Regeneration is helping to write history, the book is intended to serve as a valuable reference beyond the exhibition. The design encourages readers to flip around the pages and to follow various narratives. A system running along at the fore edge serves as a guide, indexing the essays, case studies, filmographies and interviews into separate sections.

The book is published by DelMonico Books in collaboration with the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

From Pentagram’s case study:

lululemon athletica is one of the world’s leading activewear brands, defining the athleisure category with its high-performance, yoga-inspired technical athletic apparel for women and men. The company goes beyond retail to function as a holistic lifestyle brand for a devoted following of consumers who apply its vision of wellness to their everyday practice of yoga, running, working out, self-care and mindfulness.

This is captured in the lululemon manifesto, a graphic representation of the brand’s core values.

According to lululemon:

The newly designed manifesto showcases Lululemon’s long-standing brand values across nine themes, including: integrity, personal responsibility, social impact, honesty/authenticity, overcoming fear, greatness, purpose, elevating the world (even on hard days), fun + laughter, sweat + the practice of yoga.

The manifesto in itself is designed with no less than four contemporary typefaces, namely: SangBleu Empire, Druk, Messina Modern, and Cut. Calibre, lululemon’s brand font, is also used sporadically in smaller sizes. All those typefaces are combined in Tetris-like playful composition, creating a type-filled pattern. This pattern has been applied on many products from the brand, ranging from retail ones (yoga pants, sports apparel, sports bottles, etc.) to promotional ones (shopping bags, shipping boxes, shop window fronts).

Learn more about the project and see more applications on Pentagram’s website.

SangBleu Empire is part of the SangBleu family, available from Swiss Typefaces. Druk is available from Commercial Type. Cut is available from Muir McNeil. Messina Modern is available from Luzi Type. Calibre is available from Klim Type Foundry.

A manifesto flag in front of Berlin’s lululemon shop

“It’s the manifesto—IRL. To celebrate our 20th birthday, we partnered with artist Shawna X to bring one of our most iconic manifesto lines to life in Brooklyn, NY.”

Wayfinding panel featuring raised Halyard Display with custom matching pictograms

Wayfinding panel featuring raised Halyard Display with custom matching pictograms

Halyard Display and Halyard Text in use on the information-heavy Grants Database web page

Joane (headings) used together with Halyard Text (subtitle and text) and Halyard Display (key figures), on the page about the COVID-19 Response & Recovery initiative

Spread from a publication with an overview of the Mellon Foundation’s projects. Halyard Display Bold is used for the titles. The large numerals are from Joane.

The logo with M symbol and wordmark

From Pentagram:

Toronto’s post-industrial eastern waterfront contains some of the largest areas of underdeveloped urban land in North America. “Toronto Tomorrow” is a proposed masterplan that will transform the location into one of the most innovative districts in the world, developed by Sidewalk Labs, the Alphabet subsidiary that reimagines cities using design and technology. Pentagram collaborated with Sidewalk on the design of the draft Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP), a massive, four-volume, 1,500-page document that details the proposal. The books’ design helps establish a visual identity for the project, using color, typography and illustration to capture the vibrancy of Sidewalk’s vision and balance the technical and the human. […]

The designers wanted a typographic tone of voice somewhere between sharp and technological and warm and human. They looked at the expressive differences between serif and sans serif font, ultimately selecting both, but in unconventional choices. The final suite of typefaces includes Neue Droschke (designed by David Einwaller of The Designers Foundry), an attenuated geometric Grotesk with unusual offcuts, seen in the book titles; the quirky sans serif Beatrice Display (designed by Sharp Type), used for the distinctive numbers on the covers; the standard Beatrice, a highly readable Grotesk, used for text and body copy, and Gliko Modern (designed by R-Typography), an elegant serif, used for headers and pull quotes.

Enormous flowers, luscious color, and desert landscapes. Georgia O’Keeffe pioneered revolutionary ways of visually interpreting the world, leaving a lasting legacy for generations of viewers and artists. The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art brings together a significant group of O’Keeffe’s works as the centerpiece of an exploration of her continued force as a touchstone for contemporary art. Viewers encounter paintings and sculpture by this founder of American modernism alongside works by emerging artists that evoke and expand upon O’Keeffe’s enchanting artistic language. — ncartmuseum.org

The Beyond is an exhibition catalogue designed by Pentagram / Eddie Opara for a travelling art exhibition (organised by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art) that explores the links between the art of Georgia O’Keeffe and contemporary art. The catalogue shows works by O’Keeffe and others.

The design employs the graphic motif of a straight, centered line, suggesting a leap or shift from one perspective to another––from the representative to the abstract, from here to the intangible “beyond.” The typography mixes Marr Sans, an eccentric and sharp grotesque (designed by Commercial Type), with Grifo, an expressive, neoclassic serif (by R-Typography). — Pentagram

Future Now USA uses Halyard Display by Darden Studio as the primary typeface. The bold, unpolished visual identity of the political initiative was designed by Creative Director-At-Large Mimi O Chun together with Eddie Opara and team at Pentagram.

To accentuate the immediacy of the concerns, the website is kept largely typographic, with black on white type. Boxed all-caps headings in Druk Super (Commercial Type) as well as accents in ultramarine provide hierarchy to the pages. Originally designed for larger type sizes, Halyard Display here is specified for smaller texts, too, including body copy, menus, and contact forms.

The project site America’s Goals follows the same design guidelines. The Report Card subpage additionally features Halyard Text, the subfamily that is fine-tuned for medium text sizes, ensuring better legibility of the dense information presented in the interactive map.

The text on futurenowusa.org is rendered in Halyard Display in regular and bold.

Halyard Display is used both for the large text and the small menu items at the top.

The project site americasgoals.org uses Halyard Text, a variant that is optimized for text sizes.

America’s Goals State Report Card, with labels and navigational items in Halyard Text.

The goals are listed in deep blue caps from Halyard Display. The framed headings with numbers use Druk.

A series of social media cards presents the goals.

List of candidate portraits. Text in Halyard Display, with names in the bold weight.

From a series of web ads for America’s Goals.

Social media card with a quote in Halyard Display, set white on a photograph.

Quinnipiac: The Lahey Years is a deluxe book designed by Pentagram that commemorates the work of John L. Lahey in the Quinnipiac University over the past 30 years:

The design employs a mix of typefaces from the new identity system, including the neoclassic serif Grifo, the modern san serif Atlas, and the text font Portrait.

Designed by Kenneth Deegan, Jack Collins at Pentagram
Eddie Opara — Partner In Charge/Designer
Brankica Harvey — Associate Partner/Designer
Pedro Mendes — Designer
Xingwei Huang — Design Intern

Pentagram partner Eddie Opara and his team invite you all to the typefest that is the late 2016 redesign of American magazine The Baffler. A modified Graphik serves as entrée and logotype, enveloping a complex system of types and moods.

Pentagram:

The designers worked with the editorial team to reorganize and rename the departments, including Salvos for essays and non-fiction reporting, Outbursts for opinion pieces, and the self-explanatory Poems, Art and Stories. These content types are shuffled throughout the publication, rather than grouped in specific sections. Instead, typography is the organizing element, with a diversity of typefaces used to signal different kinds of content. The various fonts are used in combination to provide a distinct voice for each category, an approach that reflects the magazine’s wide-ranging viewpoints and borderline-unruly personality.

The myriad typefaces include Stanley for essays and non-fiction reporting related to the issue theme, Domaine Sans for opinion, and Euclid for art pieces like poetry and stories. Graphik is employed for elements of the Baffler identity, such as the editor’s letter, page numbers and other identifying information. Text appears in Lyon, Euclid or Domaine Sans, depending on the content. Other fonts that play a role are Post Grotesk and Knockout. […]

Opara and his team created comprehensive guidelines for the identity and a style guide for the art direction of the magazine, which has been brilliantly implemented by The Baffler’s new art director, Lindsay Ballant, in the first issue of the relaunch.

Ballant also assigned and art directed all of the illustrations shown here.

Table of contents. Various typefaces are used to differentiate sections and subject matter.

Opening spread of an essay by Suzy Hansen in the Salvos section. Photograph by Lindsay Ballant. Heading in Lyon Display.

Opening spread of an essay by Robert Westbrook. Lettering by Jessica Hische.

Opening spread of an opinion piece, featuring Domaine Sans

Short stories appear on sky blue pages.

The magazine’s grid has been redesigned for greater flexibility.

Poetry appears on yellow pages.

Type size can be blown up to grab a reader’s attention.

Opening spread of an article by David Gambacorta. Photo-illustration by Lindsay Ballant.

Opening spread of an article by Joel Whitney. Illustration by Jon Han.

Black Suburbia: From Levittown to Ferguson is an exhibition presented by The New York Public Library's Shomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, one of the leading institutions focusing exclusively on African-American, African Diaspora, and African experiences. The exhibition examines the complex narrative of the African-American suburb from the 20th century to today, looking to communities such as Hempstead, NY, Ferguson, MO, and Shaker Heights, OH, as case studies for a contradictory yet hopeful dream. Pentagram's Eddie Opara and team designed exhibition graphics and print materials for Black Suburbia which address the unique triumphs and challenges of the black suburban struggle.

Developed in collaboration with the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, Black Suburbia, tackles issues such as suburban segregation, institutional discrimination, and residential racism in black communities from the late 1800s to current day. Opara wanted to stress the severity of these issues in the exhibition's logo, which sets type within an upside-down American flag. The application references the United States Flag Code, which states that the flag "should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property." The red stripes of the flag are echoed throughout the titling of the exhibition.

A pair of posters by Pentagram’s Eddie Opera for AIGA San Francisco’s InsideOut SF, “an exhibition and silent auction of original poster designs that highlight personal impressions of the city”.