The Most Extraordinary Suit in the World | Zegna
Ermenegildo Zegna's Vellus Aureum Luxury strategies and authentic truth. Making things by hand is a disappearing legacy. And even to the concept of the most luxurious, the idea of an object being completely handmade is a vanishing tradition. The concept of design and...
Anish Kapoor and Bulgari | Collaborations: Brand + Art
Art, branding and jewelry I had an experience in working with the fragrance group at Bulgari, along with another friend, an executive marketing partner there, that moved on to build the brand Gilt. Recently, the concept of exploring the art of jewelry and its...
Audi and Iron Man | Brand, Story and Product Merchandising
Examining Vehicles and Brand Placement Automobiles represent a fabulous concretion of brands synchronized to complex emotional and value constructs. Cars contain far more than conventional brands, they are emotive in the context of containment. They exemplify a sense...
Designing custom typefaces for architecture and brand
The architecture of type "The map is not the territory. Shaping context & connection is an act of architecture. A new form of space requires a new form of architecture. Space made of information requires information architecture. " Alfred Korzybski...
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...