Stories That Feel
BrandStories That Feel Brandstories in the Construct of Emotionality Earlier in our career, I was asked — in the 90s, to present what we thought was the newest context of brand strategy at Building One, downtown Cincinnati, Procter&Gamble. What we thought then was...
Soul Place
The Quest for Soulful Places As a designer, I find that the work on converting spaces to more meaningful places, which more often than not has to do with the very journey of what soul is supposed to be. Soul is a ancient seed sound — a voicing — for sea, and the point...
Typographicum Mysterium | The Warp and Weft of the Alphabet
Branding Buildings | Building Brands — Aligning Typefaces With Architecture In my earlier years I lived in a neighborhood laden with architects — like when I was 12 years old, in Spokane, Washington. I lived in a MidCenturyModern house [the one at 42nd & Perry]...
Look Back
LOOK BACK TO FIND MORE As a designer, many of us watch the trends of design, over time — we look back 10 years, 20 years -- 30, 50 years. We think about the cool airspun design of the 50s. Or we jump back to the 20s and 30s, we study post martial, WWII bulletproof...
ALPHABET MYSTICISM
THE STROKES, THE GRID AND THE CURVES OF MAGIC Mark off the grid of proportion, reach for meaning, touch the reed, learn the language, lean in and listen to the ancient tales. That is where the alphabet comes from: the mists of time and mythic meaning, the archetypes...
Brand Patterning
Creating organically realized places with conceptually founded pattern language I was walking a forest, looking at its pattern language — the light, the array of the trees, the patterning of Light on the forest floor, the tread of footprints in the shadowed light of...
Symbolic Emblems
SYMBOLIC EMBLEMS FOR INTERIORS: DESIGNING TALISMANS FOR A PLACE The Journey of Design, Place-making and Creative Environments: Archetypal Signage and Magical Badges As any designer knows, to brand and experience design, there is a link between storytelling and...
You Never Know
You just never know. Meditations on exploration and the beauty of being lost, and finding again. As much as you think — “it will go this way” — it just might not. And that way that it does go, it seems, just might be the way that it is meant to be. There are paths,...
THE ART OF FINDING
PLACEMAKING AND JOURNEYS ………………….. WORKING + BEING IN A CERTAIN PLACE — A JOURNEY OF FINDING. When you get some where, what do you find? There’s one critical point, to the idea of working in other places in the world and that is learning to be there: work there,...
THE MARK OF A PORTAL; THE CULT OF THE SIGIL
Designing Magic: The Draft of the Letter as the Quest for Mystery Everyone knows that occult really means hidden. But in that, one might surmise that the Cult of the Occult would be nothing more than the quest for the hidden. I probably live there, in more ways than...