![blog-header](https://www.girvin.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/blog-header.webp)
Filmic Mythology: Brand Storytelling + Cinema
Focus Features The folkloric intuition, legendary dimensions of the lensed visualization There are cycles, repeating patterning, in the engagement of story and archetype, mystery and beauty. When I was in college, I corresponded with Joseph Campbell, the grand...
Finding the community of brand presence | where’s your brand, what’s the place, what’s it look and feel like — and who cares?
Brooklyn microshops -- a complexity of sensorial engagements | Girvin photography Brand soul placement, finding the applications of presence in impression and experience design. I'd given a talk, at an international retail design forum at Starbucks recently, exploring...
GOOD LUCK: the charm of positive support
Shimenawa * 注連縄 Girvin The talisman of positive reinforcement and advancement: symbolic strategy, design and the meaning of words. Sometimes, there's more to an expression that we might at first comprehend. Thoth, the trickster, God of writing Kom Ombo Temple | C....
TOXIC PERFUMES | Industrial Fragrances
Scents that celebrate urban experiences: the innovations of Comme des Garçons (and others) in fragrance concoction; there are fumes that might be called poisonous to some, others that live in the interpretation of city scents, industrially composed and material...
Love of Letterpress | The Foundations of Typographic Design
The impressed letterform: elegance, beauty, sensuality At the beginnings of my career, I'd studied with a letterpress jobber -- first in Denver, then an old Linotype operator and finally in Olympia, at the Evergreen State College. I'd count that time as critical, the...
THE CHANT: Enchantment by Guy Kawasaki
From the start-up, kick-start maestro, a new book. I've studied the strategies of Guy Kawasaki for a couple of decades. Working at Apple, during the early years as a design consultant, Guy swung into play just after my efforts designing for Steve Jobs and the product...
Pitch Perfect: the fragrance of split wood
Girvin The dark tars of wood, fire, ash and burning. Scents as evocations -- the voice of the object and the emanation of its story. I contemplate the splitting wood -- cracking open the fragrances with an old axe. Burning the wood in my studio stove, I can scent the...
The script of connectedness: handwritten notes
Girvin There is something to the touch of the hand. And what can be made from it, in the note from the one to another. The idea of the hand -- the writing -- there are psychic links that reach to the soul, the electrical bolting that drives the inspiration of mind, to...
Crowdsourcing Drawing: An Artists Cloud of Creativity
The Animation of a Story, the Human Brand: Johnny Cash See this, beginning. What to the idea of drawing on drawing -- the draftsman overlaying the drafted line; one stroke expands yet another; each, a stroke, telling that story? There's a distinct fascination in...
CEO as Creative Director: Steve Jobs
Strategy, Brand Story, Leadership -- the crossroads iPad 2: This past week, Steve Jobs showed up to a standing ovation for the launch of Apple's new rendering of the iPad. "Here Comes the Sun" was the opening sound message -- the clarion call to opening the brand...