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BRAND MAGIC: DESIGNING SIGILS, SIGNETS AND SYMBOLS

Design as a Transportive Tool
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We’ve talked about sigils.

Most of you might know
about the sigil as
a House Seal
in the Game of Thrones.

BRAND MAGIC: DESIGNING SIGILS, SIGNETS AND SYMBOLS

And I’ve written long about them
the sigil,
the signal,
the signature,
the signing.

The seal and the signet.

I reach back to my childhood for the beginnings of this telling.

And I practice what I preach, to patterning on furniture, fabric, signing and metalwork. Integrate them.

The House Sigil.

Because I believe in the magic of marks — their trans-planar qualification — draw it out [literally,] tell a story, transport, see something, listen to something — be changed in the journeying of design — the signing of one place, made to another:

Something seen in scene, patterned.

BRAND MAGIC: DESIGNING SIGILS, SIGNETS AND SYMBOLS

BRAND MAGIC: DESIGNING SIGILS, SIGNETS AND SYMBOLS

BRAND MAGIC: DESIGNING SIGILS, SIGNETS AND SYMBOLS

Marked.
Transported.

Think poetry; string allegory; consider narrative, draft plot lines, map characterization, and —
it’s about the magic of the work:
what
we
do

as designers
— that has changed people’s lives —
is that
we transport them,
pull them out of one place of seeing, knowing, experiencing, comprehending

to

another place,
drive them on

to
this other plane, a new imagining —
jump with them, jolt them, force them to leap,
from one plateau of perception — the poetic leap —
to another vista of
seeing, listening, sensing.

BRAND MAGIC: DESIGNING SIGILS, SIGNETS AND SYMBOLS

Sometime back, studying sigils, I began to design symbolic cluster marks. They are signals that utilize primordial meaning marks, letters of the alphabet, themselves laden with mystery and symbolic power.
I drew them mostly in chalk or salt,
bone-made black inks —
they were mystical, protective, talismanic
and portal openers.
Transporters.

Like a event mark.

BRAND MAGIC: DESIGNING SIGILS, SIGNETS AND SYMBOLS

They take you
from one place,
to
an
other
.

And they work.

Some
one
reads
those
signs.

And could be enchanted — if not entranced —
by them.

BRAND MAGIC: DESIGNING SIGILS, SIGNETS AND SYMBOLS

sigil (n.)

“a sign, mark, or seal,” mid-15c., from Late Latin sigillum, from Latin sigilla (neuter plural) “statuettes, little images, seal,” diminutive of signum “sign” (see sign (n.)). In astrology, an occult device supposed to have great power (1650s).When my mistress died, she had under her arm-hole a small scarlet bag full of many things, which, one that was there delivered unto me. There was in this bag several sigils, some of Jupiter in Trine, others of the nature of Venus, some of iron, and one of gold, of pure angel-gold, of the bigness of a thirty-three shilling piece of King James’s coin. [“The Antiquarian Repertory,” London, 1780]

The notion of the drafting of sigils, signs, magical marks, talismans and amulets is something that began, for me — 40 years ago, in meeting a talisman-maker at the Evergreen State College, Zac Reisner — just a conversation, a sharing that, as I look back at it, set me in a direction that I have unwavered from — since I was 20 years old.

At the Evergreen State College, he talked to me about drawing spirits, gathering souls, whispering prayers, gathering and collectively empowering objects and making marks that feed their portals.

That’s the work of design
breathing a story, legend-making
a string of words, markings and makings: a store, a product, a poster.

Takes the viewer away — someplace new.

The story relates
it carries.

As a student of the history of the book —
and the grimoire — one finds that these books that are repeatedly banned, their owners killed, might represent a kind of exemplar of the history of the book: rare books, dangerous books, powerful knowledge, risky content — since books like grimoires — magical workbooks — are fraught with such dangerous attention. But these books, and libraries too, are transportive — they carry the reader away. Mostly forbidden and frequently, along with their owners, burnt as blasphemous, they gathered marks, curses, prayers and manifesting sigils that called others, from other dimensions.

Sure, that’s out there.

Because it is.
out there.

BRAND MAGIC: DESIGNING SIGILS, SIGNETS AND SYMBOLS

The mark, the Light, the Leader and the Measure.

If one presumes that imagination isn’t merely the dreamy waft of the mind, wandering around ideas and forms of experience, then you might be short registering the power of envisioning. As many know, to envision, to dream, is the kickstart psychical electrification of ideas, future visions, sights and insights that shall become more realized if they are treated in that gesture of attribution. Dreams can reach far back into the deeper realizing of ideals and views of possiblehorizons that can embolden directions in life, place a stake in the ground, catalyze the dimension-solidifying of possible future states.

You won’t go anywhere unless you listen to the dream of imagining, which might reach to the deeper archetypes of human experience, and set in motion a journey of personally mythic directions. Which then are cemented in the strategy of action and catapulted
into actionable life expressions —

tactics play,
stories concretize
and experiences align.

And it might all start with a mark, which could be a sigil, that then becomes a signal, which finally energetically becomes an emblem in signature.

Signature, the sign which holds the genetic character, stories and experience, living legacy of the life workings to date.

And that’s magic.

Tim | OSEANSTUDIOS
…..
G I R V I N | THE MESSAGE IS THE VOICE
DESIGNED TEXTUAL CONTENT: THE BREATH OF SOULBRAND
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