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Brands That Go Deep

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...

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YOU ARE HERE

BRAND PRESENCE, PARTICIPATION AND SENSUAL DESIGN You’re here, right? That is: right now, you’re presenting, you’re present: you’re here? When you’re walking a space, trying to create a place — something unforgettable — you need to be in here. Present and focused,...

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Dream Deep

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...

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Simple Design

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...

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TOUCH ME MORE:

I LIKE TO BE TOUCHED. And I like to touch. Just one way to sense is to touch. In having a conversation with one, I find that a touch is a way to link to someone in a different way — it’s a bond that will take the track of a discussion from one tack to another. Touch —...

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The Hand and the Heart

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...

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GET OUT THERE

THE JOURNEY OF DISCOVERING IS NEVER A STRAIGHT LINE Brand. Place. Team. Community. Who is it, where is it, what is it, who are we talking to? When there is a new inquiry — a brand to be evolved and rebooted in some manner — I make it a point to get out there, wander...

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The Perfume of Trees

Earth head down, to the roots and up to the wood [above: a pitch burl from a pine in the Grand Canyon] As a person that walks the woods, it is a place that is alive with scent. The mystery of the trees, in their own complex and profoundly beautiful ecosystem, takes...

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You Could Be More

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...

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