Liberty, Pentagram, and Karel Martens celebrate creative collaboration at London Design Festival 2024 

For London Design Festival 2024, Liberty and renowned design consultancy Pentagram will celebrate their longstanding creative partnership with an installation at Pentagram’s Notting Hill studio. 

Rarely accessible to the general public, visitors will be offered the opportunity to enter the Pentagram design house. Insight into the collaborative development of Liberty’s refreshed visual identity will be presented alongside the sell-out Liberty Letters collection. The capsule fabric collection produced in partnership with the acclaimed Dutch designer, Karel Martens will also be showcased, with film screenings sharing further insight on Karel and his illustrious career.

The installation spotlights Pentagram’s longstanding creative partnership with the Liberty design studio; first collaborating on their visual identity and re-design of their brand logo in 2023, before launching the Liberty Letters collection shortly thereafter. The collection comprises a capsule range of bags, scarves, and fabrics referencing the typographic theme of their brand redesign to present a bold collision of colour and form through recurring letterform. 

A friend of Karel’s and an admirer of his work, Harry Pearce introduced the iconic Dutch designer to the Liberty design studio, marking the beginning of their creative conversation. Working between Liberty’s London design studio, the Italian printing mill, and Karel’s Amsterdam studio, Liberty Fabric designers worked alongside Karel to translate his signature hand-printed designs into wearable textiles, playing with scale and layout. Launched for SS24, the capsule collection presents an eclectic array of vibrant geometric prints, paying homage to Marten’s rich use of colour and graphic composition in his complex layering printing practice.

(L to R) Harry Pearce, Mary-Ann Bartlett Dunkley, Karel Martens & Andrea Petochi at Liberty x Pentagram x Karel Martens I London Design Festival 2024

“We are delighted to continue to develop our longstanding relationship with iconic design studio, Pentagram, at this year’s London Design Festival. From working together to develop our visual identity, to the launch of our sell-out Liberty Letters collection, our creative collaboration with Harry Pearce and Pentagram has played a key role in the evolution of Liberty’s contemporary outlook. Our project with Dutch graphic designer, Karel Martens, was one of the many joyous offsprings of our creative partnership. Harry kindly introduced us to Karel, who had always been an inspiration of mine, and sparked the launch of our joint fabrics collection inspired by Karel’s iconic portfolio. We cannot wait to unite these creative voices and visionaries at the Pentagram studio this September, and celebrate our collaborative journey thus far.” - Mary-Ann Bartlett Dunkley, Design Director at Liberty

“Karel has been a career-long influence and in the last 10 years a dear friend. His design work still remains as modern, experimental and fresh at 85 as it always has. Setting a high bar, he is often more forward-looking and challenging than designers half his age—a lesson to us all.” - Harry Pearce, Partner, Pentagram Design

Karel Martens portrait - Liberty x Pentagram x Karel Martens I London Design Festival 2024Liberty x Pentagram x Karel Martens installation I London Design Festival 2024

INSTALLATION INFORMATION

Opening hours
​Saturday 14th - Sunday 15th September ​
​Saturday 21st - Sunday 22nd September ​
​11am - 4pm

Address
​Pentagram Design
​11 Needham Road
​London ​
​W11 2RP

NOTES TO EDITORS

ABOUT LIBERTY
​Liberty has been at the cutting edge of design and the decorative arts since 1875. Born from the adventurous spirit of Arthur Lasenby Liberty, Liberty is a brand driven by discovery. From its globally renowned London location, the brand has remained true to its heritage and is famed for its bold and floral prints. Liberty continues to be associated with the world of arts and culture, building on its founder’s legacy to seek out the new and the beautiful. The interior fabrics and wallpapers celebrate Liberty’s historic love of craftsmanship and storytelling. Archival Liberty prints have been reinterpreted and appear alongside contemporary new artworks created in the London design studio. An archive of more than 60,000 pattern books, paintings, and drawings collated since the 1880s serves as the inspiration for today’s designs.

ABOUT PENTAGRAM ​
​Pentagram is the world’s largest independently-owned design studio with work encompassing graphics and identity, architecture and interiors, products and packaging, exhibitions and installations, websites and digital experiences, advertising and communications. It is the only major design studio where the owners of the business are the creators of the work and serve as the primary contact for every client. This reflects in Pentagram’s conviction that great design cannot happen without passion, intelligence and–above all– personal commitment, and is demonstrated by a portfolio that spans more than five decades and all industries.

ABOUT KAREL MARTENS
​Karel Martens was awarded the BNO Piet Zwart Prize in September 2023 in recognition of his extraordinary contribution to the significance and prestige of the design profession. His long career as a typographer and designer includes many commissions across all media: posters, books, external signage, stamps, coins and even telephone cards. As he himself emphasises there is no hierarchy in types of work; a small business card is approached just as seriously as a complex publication. Karel still works as part of the design firm Martens and Martens which he founded in 2019 and has an active involvement in art education teaching at ArtEZ Academy of Fine Arts in Arnheim where he started teaching in 1977, the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Design Academy Eindhoven and Yale School of Art in New Haven, USA. In 1996 he was awarded the Dr A. H. Heineken Prize for art and in 2012 he won the Gerrit Nooddzij Prize. His book Printed Matter published in 1996 with Jaap van Triest, was declared the best-designed book in the world by the 1998 Leipzig Book Fair and his books, letterpress prints and mono prints are highly revered and collectible.

FOR ALL PRESS RELEASE ENQUIRIES PLEASE CONTACT:
​liberty@camronglobal.com