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...
The Handmade Journey | Calligraphy
Sometimes you go back to go forward There’s a noun that is oftentimes used in contemporary parlance: “creatives,” as a description for those that work in creative and maker space. It’s an interesting idea, using an adjective as a noun, but it works. I was sitting at a...
Look out, look up, look in
PRINCIPLES OF ABOVENESS THE STATE OF WOWNESS* IN THE NATURE OF SEEING, THERE ARE DIRECTIONS – THE VECTORING OF PLACE AND SITE, SIGHT SEEN AND UNSEEN. BUT IT DOES COME DOWN TO THE LOOKING – AND THE LISTENING IN THE LOOK. AS ONE STUDIES ANYTHING, THERE IS THE REACH BACK...
The Sign and the Symbol, the Signal of the Sigil — Rudolf Koch’s Book of Signs
Strategic Magic, Designed Mysticism, Metamagical Thematics. It’s been said that illustration, the real meaning of the word is a shining — to illustrate is “making bright.” But also — to purify. The image above, a sigil of the Heptameron Arbatel, Peter de Abano, 1575....
Wowness | The Condition of Wow
What is wow? Girvin image above: a streetside wow, cast iron, Queen Anne Hill, Seattle. I was writing a proposal and overview for a client. And I used the opening: Wow! That was the first word. I contemplated that, an opening — wow! What is that? I was thinking about...
Captivating experience: to enchant, to engage, to embrace customers; the journey of layered brand messaging, visualization and experience design
What do you know, anyway? Enchantment, engagement and embracement in the layering of brand messaging, visualization and experience design. The quest to know? The mystery of mind, message and meaning. What about that question, I was contemplating it — someone asked me:...