Is your brand athletic?
In the game of games, resilience, strength, perception matter. So too in brands. To the allegory of sports, as a gamesman, I tend to contemplate allegory, conceptual alignments, metaphors. Think poetry. Flow. Focus. Speed. Strength. Perception. Flow: In the grace of...
Symbolic Interiors: Designing Talismans For A Place
The Journey of Design, Place-making and Creative Environments: Archetypal Signage As any designer knows, to brand and experience design, there is a link between storytelling and sequence. A story has an ingress — a start, a mid-point, a moment of spectacle, of...
Logomania
Brands, Logos, Communities Being in the business of design, and with a long history of work in the translation of the storytelling of brands into graphical interpretations, the logotype is at the center of brand style. And while there might be many layers of...
The Sign | A Meditation on a Journey in Storytelling
There is the sign, which is a way — a tool to explain process and direction, to instruct, to mark, to place: made. The Ace Hotel, Expressed Metal Plate But to the notion of place-making, how that sign is made, gesture or stone, or cut metal, wood can tell a layering...
The First International Nordstrom Store | Calgary
Exploring Retail Architecture, Metaphor and Magic. I had a chance to observe the strategic evolutions of Nordstrom’s brand presence in my friendship with Dawn A. Clark, AIA LeedAP — lead architectural strategist and team leader in the newly evolving architectural and...
The Scent of Place
What About the Smell of the Moon? A friend, high perfumer Christi Meshell, pointed out a note on the Fragrance of the Moon. That aligns with an earlier conversation we had about the smell of guns, firepower and gun powder. It’s like the smell of any explosive, the...
You Are Nowhere
Brands That Have Nothing To Say. As a designer, I think about layers. And I think about messages. Content. Holism. Contentment. Direction. There is a sign, but it’s empty. It has nothing to say, no place that it points. It’s nowhere. Like experiences that move from a...
Emergency Branding
Brand Medicine, 101. In our history, there are times when brand, their organic systems, begin to falter. — They don’t speak to a community, or they forgot who they were talking to, what they were relating, carrying a story and a product to a certain audience. As in...
Energy is Eternal Delight
The work, the craft, the art, the energy. In a manner, much of my journey has been about where I’ve been and what I’ve seen. And what is unforgettable in my experiences with designers, craftspeople, makers and wonderers [and wanderers]. The above image from a...
The Concept of The Thing
What is the thing? As in every thing, I begin as a writer, I look into the heart and history of words, to learn more about their original heat — what was their sparking ignition? I contemplate my use of many words as deeper meditations on patterning. Where did the...