by Tim Girvin | Concepts, Human brands, Storytelling | Mar 10, 2015
Contexts of Nomenclature and Meaning. According to the Greeks, “the etymon is the name of the true thing.” Etymos=true. What that means is that a name is a deep name, and that the truth would be told. Etymon — comes from the Greek for “truth” — and powerful names for...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Concepts, Storytelling | Feb 24, 2015
The Deep Quest to Know a Brand Earlier in my life I was an inveterate spelunker, a cave explorer. In a manner, exploring caves is a richly metaphoric enterprise. You go deep into the heart of the earth, in winding, supremely dark and likely unknowable and risky...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Cool People, Human brands, Storytelling | Feb 17, 2015
Brands, Dreams, Visions and Imagining It takes a special kind of person to run a brand. There will be fire found. In the near four decades of working experience, one comes to know what will work, and what will not, in the management of brand. One can have all the...
by Tim Girvin | Concepts, Human brands, Places, Storytelling | Feb 12, 2015
The Deep Sprint: If you’re going someplace, how are you paying attention? Brand journeys and explorations. I can remember a time — especially when my children were younger — that traveling was a cumbersome burden. Now, my children are onto their own lives, and...
by Tim Girvin | Concepts, Cool People, Designers, Storytelling | Feb 10, 2015
Can you do that style? Earlier in my career [1976,] as a advertising studio illustrator, comp[rehensive] packaging artist, headline drafter [for rough ad layouts] and an occasional calligrapher, I got that line, as a request. “Can you do that style?” “Sure I can.” It...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Concepts, Designers, Storytelling | Feb 3, 2015
Make something. Use your hands. What’s coming back to me is the realm of the personal — that which is made by a person, from that person, to me. As we’ve moved GIRVIN from downtown Seattle [they’re demolishing our building] to the bottom of West Queen Anne, we’ve all...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Concepts, Human brands, Storytelling | Jan 22, 2015
In the Work of the Personal and the Intertwinement of Brand There is knowing and there is being. What do you know? And what do you — be? In the work of branding, looking for soul and truth, sometimes I feel like a kind of vampire hunter, looking for the real, the...
by Tim Girvin | Artists, Concepts, Cool People, Motion Pictures, Storytelling | Jan 20, 2015
The Waft and Weft of Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar.” There is a story, then a story within the story, a story behind the story, and the story that you hold in your mind, wrists, fingertips. They weave. Or lips, in the love story that never ends, it keeps going on,...
by Tim Girvin | Concepts, Designers, Storytelling, Trends | Dec 24, 2014
The Principle of the Search: More Beauty [Photo: Dawn A. Clark, AIA Leed AP] In our life journey, as creatives — people that create — we listen, absorb, gather, interpret and make meaning. We work to import and deliver content in a manner that is compelling to a...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Concepts, Storytelling | Dec 16, 2014
EBOLA AND BRANDING OR REBRANDING. I was talking to a GIRVIN colleague about the CDC’s management of the Ebola viral spread — from Africa, now stateside. That might be a question to rebranding [the CDC — to reliability,] as well. We’d talked about the legacy of their...
