I have been slow to unwrap and properly appreciate the incredibly impressive two-volume book which Pentagram has produced to celebrate its fifieth birthday – well, strictly speaking, its fifty first as it only arrived last week.

Volume one is all the partners in alphabetical order, including Harry Pearce, with whom I worked closely at the RA. He established its current design identity, which is clever precisely because it is low-key, a background logo based on its graphic design history which turned out to be vastly much more interesting than expected, particularly in the 1950s:-

He also did the design identity for Berry Bros. and Rudd, which is particularly brilliant, again because it is low-key and ostensibly historical, but modern at the same time, a tricky combination:-

More recently, he has refreshed, as they say, the identity of Thames & Hudson:-

And he designed my book The Art Museum in Modern Times during that long first summer of COVID, so that we never actually met during the long process and the book probably benefitted from his total concentration:-

I regard him as a design genius.