Hello, reader! Congratulations on making it to Friday. As always, we have a new Design Diary roundup of all the best projects that have come across our inboxes and feeds this week—including the graphics for a Dutch theater festival, Instagrammable Adidas, Pentagram’s Library of Congress identity + more.
And as always, there’s more on Instagram @AIGAeyeondesign, Facebook, and Twitter @AIGAeyeondesign.
We probably could have guessed that the identity for a Dutch theater festival would be excellent—it’s a culture that doesn’t skimp on good design. But thanks to Sara Landeira and Ekhine Dominguez we’ve got proof: the designers passed us their identity for the Nederlands Theater Festival earlier this week. The central element to the branding is a series of different “frameworks” that range from brackets to undulating lines to double parenthesis, all set against a bright color palette. It’s all very nice, especially when you see the different applications. Spot it all on the equally nice website of What The, Landeira and Dominguez’s Amsterdam-based studio.
We also got an invitation to submit a classified ad in Leipzig, courtesy of Whose.Agency, a project that’s co-opting the city’s Digital City Light Poster signage—large-format, stand-alone screens typically used for retail branding—to display “feminist resistance classified ads.” Just visit the well-designed Whose.Agency site, choose whether to submit an offer or a wanted ad, and send a brief text. Those selected will make it onto the public signage in Leipzig’s retail-dense transportation hubs. According to the website, “Whether a salary demand for reproductive work, a personal ad, a political group statement, or a call for donations, the message is entirely up to you.”
In other news, the digital-first creative agency Code and Theory has recently been working with Adidas on the social and online campaign for its Podsystem shoes, which feature different archival shock-absorbing technology from the sportswear brand’s history. We enjoyed the work so much, we’ll just leave them here for you:
We’re big fans of the Library of Congress, the world’s largest library, located in Washington, D.C., which made it extra exciting to see that Pentagram’s Paula Scher redesigned the identity. Using the metaphor of a bookcase, Scher and her team designed an logo that treats the letters in “library” like books expanding on a shelf. The space at the center makes room for “Library of Congress” or acts as a display for any of the various images and objects housed within the collection.
“I Like Ike,” “IMPEACH!” a beaver-adorned “Give a Dam, Vote Conservative“—tiny plastic buttons have been serving up big political messaging since their invention in the late 19th century. Where protest posters have a limited lifespan, buttons get carried around as daily proclamations of their wearer’s viewpoints—often sharp, clever, and humorous. Since 2010, Chicago’s Busy Beaver Button Museum has been collecting and displaying buttons throughout history, and now Princeton Architectural Press has printed a selection on postcards. We don’t typically go for stuff like this, but the compositions of the buttons on these cards are pretty lovely. Plus, who can resist a “Folk You” pin?
