Pentagram is a design studio that was founded in 1972 by Alan Fletcher, Theo Crosby, Colin Forbes,Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky in Needham Road, West London, UK. They now have offices inLondon, New York, San Francisco, Austin and Berlin.
Pentagram was founded on the premise of collaborative interdisciplinary designers working together in an independently owned firm of equals. Theo Crosby claimed the structure was suggested to him by his experience of working on the seminal late-'50s exhibition This is Tomorrow: "it was my first experience at a loose, horizontal organisation of equals. We have brought it ... to a kind of practical and efficient reality at Pentagram". The firm currently comprises 16 partner-designers in 4 cities, each managing a team of designers and sharing in common overhead and staff resources. The partners in each office share incomes equally and all the partners own an equal portion of the total firm. This equality, along with the tradition of periodically inviting new members to join, renews the firm while giving even the newest members an equal footing with the partners of long standing. This 'flat' organization (there are no executive officers, CEO, CFO or board, other than the entire group) along with the self-capitalized finances of the business, allows equal participation and control of the group's destiny by the members.
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