Portfolios, collectible design processions and creating metaphorical gallery experiences.
It’s an interesting contemplation to think about brand work, design, and value. Surely there is a lot of conversation about design as a value-inducement to brand propositions. Well-designed brands make them usefully relevant, emotionally viable, resonantly in tune with brand relationships—and we’ve written extensively about this string of alignments.
But what if the package is a proposition of 1000s of dollars—and on the art market—a program shown in galleries as a collectible item?
Personally, that’s where my history lies—letter press printing, entirely hand-lettered documents, calligraphy and specialized, galleries and museum journey-making, with limited edition lustrations of brand experientiality, and their shops, retail and restaurants.
It goes back, it comes forward, what was, is.
These might be silkscreened, engraved, hot stamped, punched, woodcuts or powdered glass in porcelain enamel. My first assignment was designing books—back then, with pencil-ruled page layouts, detailed marginalia on fonts, kerning and leading. And to this day, most of the books that we design are limited edition—they have a definitive press run—they’re not mass market, they’re targeted offerings for particular audiences.
Even this poster, designed for a magazine—Oregon Rainbow, was a limited run.
And so too, the design of limited run objects, like the collaborations with Scott Oki, haiku and other poetic explorations in limited press runs, for specific audiences.
But this is something different—a gallery of photographs—each limited runs of prints, from 200 to 2000, existing only once as a collective, boxed archivally, sold as a folio.
We produced these with handmade paper, which we curated and introduced into the production, along with letterpress and custom binding of all folios, now sold, and dispatched in worldwide markets. It’s hard to find even one of these folios available.
Like the design of a store, these are designed as journeys—the cover is. the shopfront, seen from afar—then opening the door, the journeyer makes their way into the interior of the story, then uncovers the opening of the collection—large scale photographic prints, mounted and signed, ready for framing.
For example, in Marsha Burns “Dreamers,” the folio is designed on the construct of the framing of the individual prints—their mounting arrangement. The cover is blind-impressed and hot-stamped with Marsha’s sigil.
The cover calligraphy is drawn by hand—for all folios by me—using a steel pen, a split Spencerian tool, which expresses stroke weight by pressure, as shown in the logo for Sleepy Hollow.
You can see the sequencing here—
Marsha Burns, “Dreamers.”
You can see the movement of the interior framing, evidenced from the “shopfront” to the interior pages, as it moves and defines the framing of the photographs.
Similarly, a gallery walkthrough for photographer Lawrence McFarland—
“the shopfront,” a narrative opening,
the procession, and the movement
into the interior.
As you can likely see, these are designed in a show-through grid, a system of points that I continually reference, from the shopfront to the gallery. And in a manner, a book, or a shop, is a tiering of expressions—it’s a walking exploration and lesson / experiential offering that is synchronous from the cover to the interior—and through to the gallery itself.
GIRVIN was approached by Richard Misrach, to build a folio journey for a photographic adventure unto itself—shooting the Parthenon from its interior, at night.
We called it Graecism—shown as a collection in the archives of MoMA.
Again, a journey, this time inspired by the star-streaks in his exposures of shooting after dark
with meandering illumination and carried, and projected, hot spots for imagery detailing.
The silkscreened overleaf, on vellum, with the star-streak exposures
And the journey from the stars, the skin of the shopfront, to the interior—
aligned with the pinpricks of the night sky over Athens.
Signed on print, archivally mounted and placed in a frammable windowed folder.
And true, so says the journeyer—artist or experiencer.
And you—brand strategist, writer and designer—what’s your journey making.
When I began, I built everything by hand—and still, this day—there’s analog, hand-world, and there’s screen realm, digital world.
Speaking of handwork, here’s my old gallery, built in a machine shop with sprayed aluminum granules on folded steel, with a rubber foot plate and metal interior—also, designed on a disciplined interior gallery-like framing, laminated on graphite metallic stock.
Yes, 60lbs and
bullet proof.
It’s worth thinking of design journeys as a kind of sequenced procession—a walk from the street to an interior pathway, discoveries along the way—stride or page turning, step or photographic reveal.
Then or now, it’s a narrative that reveals itself in the tread from the exterior to the interior, and the careful integration as to its explication and the detailing of the adventure.
We can help in that journeying—map-making, definition of approach,
acknowledgment of wayfarer and the build-out of the program and pathway to experience.
Tim
GIRVIN | Strategic Brands
Digital | Built environments by Osean
GIRVIN creates programs in strategy | story | naming | messaging | print
identity | built environments | packaging
social media | websites | & interactive
