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What if you were closed?

I was trying to connect with what I thought was an open resource — a brand, an enterprise, a place, a team of people. Nope. What if you were closed all the time? [Image: a door on 30th Street | off Madison, NYC]. I tried to sync up with the team, the brand, the...

What "space" do you live in?

Isn’t it so — that you find your space — and, it’s you, your story, that will define and make your own place? I walked into a painter’s workplace, a studio – in NYC. It was, to all expectations of pretense, a good studio, a study in...

This Is For You

The Power of Person to Person I was working in San Francisco, walking the streets of Chinatown and contemplating the nature of the work that we all do. It’s a gate, to a bridge, a point of transition — from one step to another. And the portal to a person....

Mystery Brands

Brands That Live in the Dark Is there ever a brand that lives on the quiet side, unknown, unseen — but quested after? Can you think of one? If you’re a searcher for the unknown, you walk out to where others do not. You go where others care not to linger....

The ring of being | Designing sensation

The Context of Holistic Branding, Experience Design and the Person Earlier, in NYC, I was talking to an Aikido master about sensation — and the sphere of awareness. It might be suggested that Aikido — a “way of ki,” is more about finding the...

Happy Mother's Day

The Mothering of The Mother In my journey, I’ve studied the creative molding process as a man driven and bidden by the magicspell of making. In college, the 70s, I read Erich Neumann’s monumental undertaking “The Great Mother” which was...

Deep Smoke

The Design of Fragrances From The Forest Sometimes, it’s a ritual. A gathering of clans, spirits, prayers and reaching to another place, the plane of the unseen. Sometimes, it’s just fire, smoke and the vapors of translation — from woods and grasses...

What could be worse?

There are bad signs, and then there are worse signs. In the journey of a designer of signing and related environmental graphics — the core point of the design strategy is storytelling — the story might be: this is the place; go here, do not go here, you...

THE LEAVES OF A BOOK, THE TREES OF LEAVES

THE FOLIAGE OF THE ALPHABET AS THE DEEPER HEART OF WISDOM Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonations of a few metaphors. – Jorge Luis Borges, “Pascal’s Sphere,” 1951 I’ve drawn a word a day on leaves, thinking: each word, as a work...

SAY YES

The journey of the answer. Anytime you have an answer, there was a question before. And any question is a quest — it’s a journey, from one place of comprehension, the grip of knowing, to the pathway to a step of insight. And in that in sight, you see in. I...