Back in 2013, Michael Bierut’s team at Pentagram (Twelve Labs, Becan & Natural History Museum) created the identity for Yale University’s inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes, a major literary award that honours outstanding achievement in the fields of fiction, non-fiction and drama. Bestowed by the estate of the writer Donald Windham and his companion Sandy M. Campbell, the awards are administered by the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which houses their collections.
Each year the event sees nine winners awarded with $175,000 each (up from the original prize of $150,000 each a decade or so ago), making it one of the largest literary prizes in the world. The award is run in coordination with the Windham Campbell Festival, a four-day public event at Yale that includes masterclasses, talks, readings and signings.
Bierut and his team, which also included Laitsz Ho and Jessica Svendsen, worked on the project with Michael Kelleher, the founding director of the Windham-Campbell programme.
Since these are literary prizes, the identity prioritises typography and uses familiar symbols of language and writing – namely brackets – which become graphic devices used throughout. The brackets also subtly offer two additional meanings, according to Pentagram: ‘First, brackets serve to group items or ideas, and the Prizes were conceived as a way to promote discourse and exchange among the winners, the Yale community, and the world at large – in effect, pulling people together’.
The studio adds that the use of brackets is a sly reference to ‘the way nominees, finalists and winners are organised in a tournament – brackets are a device familiar to anyone who has put together a sports betting pool’. Having never put together a sports betting pool (I remember my Dad doing the football pools when I was a kid, but wasn’t quite sure what that was either), this means very little to me, but we’ll take Pentagram’s word for it.
The brackets are multifarious in style, drawing inspiration from the time the team spent at the Beinecke, one of the world’s largest repositories for rare books and manuscripts, during the project. Some are ornamental, some plain; they vary in weight and tone and gravity. The idea behind having so many different styles of brackets was, according to Pentagram, to reflect the wide variety of prizewinners, who range from noted South African writer Zoë Wicomb to playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis to journalist Jeremy Scahill.
For the 2024 iteration of the awards, the designs were taken on by Pentagram New York partner Andrea Trabucco-Campos and his team. As with the original designs, the typeface used throughout is Yale, the face designed by Matthew Carter exclusively for the University.
And the bracket idea remains, now, however, updated from stark monochrome to use a bold, vibrant shade of blue. And according to Pentagram, for the 2024 awards the identity introduces ‘a behaviour of amplification: similarly to how the Prizes highlight important literary voices of our times, the brackets echo its contents, becoming a dynamic device that can be used subtly or very expressively to amplify and frame its contents’.
Pentagram continues, ‘Similarly to how the Prizes highlight important literary voices of our times, the brackets echo its contents, becoming a dynamic device that can be used subtly or very expressively to amplify and frame its contents’. Now, the brackets come to life in motion, giving things a sense of dynamism. At times, they’re repeated into patterns; at others becoming framing devices as well as graphic motifs.
For the 2024 awards, Trabucco-Campos and his team used just one style of brackets instead of the original identity’s numerous different forms, and it works – there’s a lovely balance of consistency and diversity in the smart way the designers have played with a singular idea and flexed it across numerous different touchpoints. It moves seamlessly across everything from print to digital to signage and other physical applications such as posters and merch for the festival itself, where, as Pentagram puts it, ‘the visual language coexists in harmony with the Yale campus’.
There’s not tonnes to say about the identity really: it’s legible, flexible, clear, and thoroughly fitting of an award that needs to convey both some serious gravitas and a sense of openness, modernity and inclusivity. Truly simple, and truly effective.
