As an incubator for C&G's mission, design for culture, our monthly internal workshop series, Culture Crunch, explores big questions. What is culture? How does culture unlock relevance? What relationship do people have with culture? How can cultural strategy help a client’s bottom line?

In our August session, these inquiries were answered by guest Brand Stategist Meg Asaro and Design Researcher Anthony Alvarez. The lively presentation explored the ecosystem, identity, and aspirations of culture, as well as how semiotics leads to meaningful communication. Many thanks to Meg and Anthony for an inspirational hour.

This week, we teamed up again with AAM (American Alliance of Museums) and NAME (National Association for Museum Exhibition) for the annual NAME Summer Mixer. The event brought together exhibition-minded folks and emerging museum professionals for an evening of networking and mingling—over summer-themed cocktails and snacks, of course.

Today is your last chance to catch Citi Summer in the Square, the summer-long event by Union Square Partnership that takes over Union Square every week with over 100 events, from fitness classes and family-friendly games to live music and dance. C&G Partners created the original visual identity and this is our third summer of producing new print collateral, graphics, and streetscape elements.

Our transformation of Rockefeller University's biomedical imagery into modern art was featured in local and international design press this week. Outlets including Graphic Design USA, Design Week, The Drum, DesignBote and Paper Blog published our recent communications materials and website redesign for the University.

To capture the institution’s innovations in bioscience in a compelling way, we took actual biomedical imagery generated in the University’s labs and transformed it into art. This visual technique is now a signature design element for the University’s communications materials.

Just in: C&G's Stolen Heart Video Map for the Leo Baeck Institute was selected as a finalist for the SEGD Global Design Awards 2017. The 3D-printed, projection-mapped tabletop video is the centerpiece of the exhibition “Stolen Heart: The Theft of Jewish Property in Berlin’s Historic Center, 1933–1945,” which was on view at Leo Baeck. Topographic and time-lapse elements mix with stylistic color tints and a custom musical score in the animated video portion of the experience, which is projected onto a 3D-printed, 1:1500 scale, historically accurate model of Mitte, Berlin’s center of culture, commerce and government. Technologies powering the experience include players by Brightsign and specialty projection from Christie. Read more at SEGD.

Two of C&G's projects are featured in Graphis Design Annual 2018, released late last month. C&G's visual identity design for Trellis is a Silver Award winner. Trellis is a digital platform of the well-known American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Designed to be clear and effective, the Trellis identity is a series of repeating “T’s” that emerge from a circle, recalling the product name and its namesake, a structure on which plants grow. This visual metaphor reflects the platform's vision as a place where scientists' ideas are nurtured through collaboration. Platform members discuss climate change, biodiversity, and other ideas that matter.

Culture Crunch is C&G's ongoing monthly internal event series, incubating the studio's mission: design for culture. For June, C&G content developer and historian Will Twersky shared an important, but mostly unknown, aspect of design history. Will presented the history of the Ghost Army—the World War II battalion made up of designers and artists including Ellsworth Kelly who used their skills to save Allied lives. Peppered with examples of design decoy, the presentation was followed by a group exercise in which the C&G team brainstormed life-saving designs for wartime culture.

The long-running touring exhibition "The Art of the Brick" opened at in Tampa this week. We're proud to be the exhibit designers for the show, which features up to 100 artworks by fine artist Nathan Sawaya, all made exclusively with LEGO. The Tampa exhibition includes several new pieces as well as an interactive space, the "Brick Yard", where visitors can create their own LEGO artworks. C&G Partners has supported our longtime client, the production company Running Subway, for the entire tour, which focuses on unlocking the creative potential in everyone.

Read Keith Helmetag's insights on the SEGD blogpost, "Keith Helmetag: Then and Now," published today. The Studio Partner recounts how the SEGD Global Design Awards have transformed since he was a jury chairperson in 1996 until his recent juror's panel in 2017.

"21 years ago, the entries were mostly static signs for individual buildings that were designed primarily by NYC and LA studios. Today, there’s media, signage, exhibits, and place-making in a broad spectrum of scales and sizes, from all over the globe" says Keith who has been at the forefront of experiential design for over four decades and has several SEGD Global Design Awards to his name.