Work Day at Pentagram Baltimore With Abbott Miller

Preparing for the AIGA New York Exhibition and tasting the design firm life.

This weekend I had the wonderful opportunity to work with Abbott Miller and a few of my colleagues at Pentagram’s Baltimore office. My typography 2 professor from last semester, Ellen Lupton, sent out an email recently saying that Abbott was looking for some help getting ready for a show of 2wice magazine at the AIGA gallery in New York. I happily obliged and it was only a five minute walk from my apartment to the Baltimore office of Pentagram.

Abbott is the editor/designer for 2wice magazine in collaboration with Patsy Tarr who is the editor in chief. Together they produce a magazine which describes itself as “visual and performing arts.” Each mgazine has a sort of theme or direction that dictates the contents and often features particular dance companies and productions along with amazing photography. The magazine was adapted from it’s predecessor, Dance Ink into it’s current form.

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Abbott’s extensive involvement in the magazine and its pure excellence have garnered it this exhibition at the AIGA National Gallery in New York. Entitled “Everybody Dance Now: 20 Years of Dancing in Print,” the exhibition features the magazine’s prolific collaborations with dancers, choreographers, and photographers, resulting in a cohesive idea of using the printed page as a stage for performance.

As a part of the exhibition Abbott set himself the task of selecting 30 individual pages from various issues of 2wice, usually somewhere around 120 pages in length, for display in the show. Becoming individual pieces of design, the pages numbering somewhere around 400, will be displayed in sequence and by issues along a wall of the gallery. Our task was to take the individually cut and paginated pages and precisely cut and mount them for display on black letramax board.

In this opportunity to view each page of 2wice at a much slower speed than one might read a magazine, I found myself appreciating the design of each page to a greater degree. Each spread has Abbott’s hand on it, whether in selection of image or in typographic treatment and this careful attention has led to its high acclaim and to this exhibition in New York with AIGA.

The small Baltimore office made the famous Pentagram Design Studio more accessible to me as a design student but I felt quite excited to work there even for a day. I got to observe Abbott, a designer who I admire very much, making design and curatorial decisions about his own art in the environment of a thriving design studio. The opportunity was helpful to me to get a snippet of what life in a design studio is like as this is one possible future for me as an undergraduate design student. It’s certainly an environment I would like to work in.

It being May/April now, I am stepping up my search for summer employment of some sort and any sort of opportunity like this is helpful to get my foot in the door. While this was not necessarily something to put on my resume it was helpful for me to get a taste of the design firm life.

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