Mystery Brands
Brands That Live in the Dark Is there ever a brand that lives on the quiet side, unknown, unseen -- but quested after? Can you think of one? If you're a searcher for the unknown, you walk out to where others do not. You go where others care not to linger. You inquire...
Designing the Processional Journey | Retail strategies of sensation management
The layering of textured sensation at Comme des Garçons | Dover Street Market | NYC In one's career, there are intersections, points at which you make a crossroads crossing -- you come into the intersection going one way, and you leave that, as crossing guard,...
Doug Trumbull’s Brainstorm: UFOTOG
Cinematic innovations Launched at Seattle's Cinerama Reaching back, we worked for Doug Trumbull on Brainstorm. Like any theatrical advertising effort, you've got to know the story, and the tenets of its production design and technical strategy, to create any...
The ring of being | Designing sensation
The Context of Holistic Branding, Experience Design and the Person Earlier, in NYC, I was talking to an Aikido master about sensation -- and the sphere of awareness. It might be suggested that Aikido -- a "way of ki," is more about finding the divinity of an opponent,...
Happy Mother's Day
The Mothering of The Mother In my journey, I've studied the creative molding process as a man driven and bidden by the magicspell of making. In college, the 70s, I read Erich Neumann's monumental undertaking "The Great Mother" which was published two years after I was...
Deep Smoke
The Design of Fragrances From The Forest Sometimes, it's a ritual. A gathering of clans, spirits, prayers and reaching to another place, the plane of the unseen. Sometimes, it's just fire, smoke and the vapors of translation -- from woods and grasses and rotted roots...
What could be worse?
There are bad signs, and then there are worse signs. In the journey of a designer of signing and related environmental graphics -- the core point of the design strategy is storytelling -- the story might be: this is the place; go here, do not go here, you are here,...
THE LEAVES OF A BOOK, THE TREES OF LEAVES
THE FOLIAGE OF THE ALPHABET AS THE DEEPER HEART OF WISDOM Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonations of a few metaphors. - Jorge Luis Borges, “Pascal’s Sphere,” 1951 I've drawn a word a day on leaves, thinking: each word, as a work of time, is...
SAY YES
The journey of the answer. Anytime you have an answer, there was a question before. And any question is a quest -- it's a journey, from one place of comprehension, the grip of knowing, to the pathway to a step of insight. And in that in sight, you see in. I ponder the...
THE LIGHT BEHIND THE TREES
THE SOULFUL BRAND There is a proposition that a brand can have soul. That a brand, as a presence built by humans, can have a warmth of intention. Intention is the grasp, literally, to stretch out. What does the reach of a brand re-present? Any brand starts with an...