Scent, brand, sense, place: Coca Cola as brand fragrance
Synaesthetic brand experience design. A friend of mine, Tracy Pepe, a scent strategist and consultant, founder of Nose Knows Consulting, posited this YouTube video. And she was exploring impressions -- "what's your take?" The sequence goes like this -- girl dresses...
The return of the bowtie
Tim Girvin and Jack Larsen, at his Park Avenue Studio A fashion archetype, reconsidered. I was relieved to hear that the bow tie is coming back. Somewhere around ten years back I'd moved past that detail -- the suit, the oxford shirt, the bow tie. That was a legacy...
Breathless, Rodarte and Jean Luc Godard
Cinematic alignment, storytelling and brand recreation "Breathless" regains its inhalation. Fifty years after the film’s release in France, Rialto Pictures has acquired the U.S. rights to a new 35 mm print of Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave groundbreaker, which showed at...
Steve Jobs, Calligraphy, Lloyd Reynolds and Reed College
And me. A week back someone said, "why are you always writing about Steve Jobs, I mean, really -- what's the connection?" Calligraphy The connection goes back to Stanford. And the Stanford Conference on Design. Back then, I would go to these yearly summits with...
Water: spirit, story, brand, design
The wave, the ripple, the droplet, the metaphor -- exploring allegorical symbolism in brand and business strategy. The idea of water is a metaphor that has consistency to the notion of exploring how people connect with each other: touch, connectedness, stories shared,...
Equine Brand | The art of the horse
Exploring brands, the equine legacy, design story and materiality Working in Sweden, with a branding program with the luxury group Hästens I found exploring the history of the brand -- which, in Swedish, means "Horses" -- is intriguingly intertwined with a heritage...
Aligning Humanitarian Brand Development with Cause Marketing
Ben Affleck | Fight Hunger Feed America Feeding America as the warmest bridge to marketing resonance Working on the mission of supporting cause marketing for humanitarian brands presumes commitment -- it starts with the extraordinary commitment of the founders, the...
Exploring the armory of the iron clad: the graphic identity of Iron Man
Elemental examinations of material and technology in cinematic design Earlier in our history as designers of cinematic identity, we were asked by the marketing team at Paramount Studios, lead by EVP Nancy Goliger, to explore the concept of a cinematic treatment of the...
The Experience of Scent, in Memory, Place and Sentience
This blog reference comes from a request from Steve Heller -- to write something about scent -- about design -- and creating and understanding experience. I was talking to him at a conference we were speaking at together -- and he asked -- "what about that?" It's...
iPad, Flash and Steve Jobs
Apple and Flash: Strategic notations Some notes from the man. As a persistent and tireless defender of all things Apple, and the early Girvin working collaborations and design connections with Mr. Jobs -- Reed College and Lloyd Reynolds, the later iterations of...