Nothing at Facebook is someone else’s problem
Telling the story by hand and meditation.
I can recall designing and writing out a phrasing by Michelangelo Buonarroti, “By hand, which follows mind and meditation.” It’s actually a telling that follows a longer contemplation:
“The best of artists never makes creation
That is not hid already in the stone
In marble fixed and yet the work is done
By hand, which follows mind and meditation.”
The Waves of Brand Story from the Light
When I walk into a place, I think about what I feel.
When I watch a person — in my room, my immediate space, I watch them wholly.
When I look at, read a story, I try to sense it, that telling, before I do anything else.
I listen big, and open — I try to hear the sounds, the inflections, around the sound.
I try not to evaluate it, but flow into it to sensually “see” what I can feel in that telling.
These days, it’s all about that sensate holism.
And, in the end, it all comes back to that idea of feeling.
It’s not the facts that matter in the end, it’s the feeling of it.
I don’t know that people really think and act on facts alone — it’s good “facts” with concomitant feelings and emotionality to support the follow-through to decision-making. People think with their instinctive reaction to what feels right — not, solely, the grounding of numbers and facts, alone. Surely, there are divisions in humanity of thinkers and feelers — but intuition and holistic “feelingness” can hold sway over even the most linear of analysts.
The nest, the egg, the weaving of the Matrix
The Whorl of Making and Imagination
Sometimes when I’m thinking about a challenge, working my way throughout a complex puzzle — I draw my self into it, and out of it.
Above, my little finger on an iPhone.
Studying the Eye and the Touch of Seeing
Studying the Eye, In sight and
the Touch of Seeing
The Rhythm of Insight, Seeing-In — 1000 Eyes –
the brushstrokes
of Storytelling, the Rippling of Imagination
I was looking into the eyes of a dragonfly that I’d arranged on a mapping, a cartographic
brush-drawing of a circle stroke of containment.
THE RED THREAD OF IDEAS AND INTENTIONS
AND THE ATTENTION TO DETAIL, IN THE SPATTERING OF INSPIRATION.
When I was in college,
I taught workshops to help my payment of the tuition, along with support from my family.
I used variously colored butcher paper to do that –
pulled, ripped out and sheared on a rolling roller of “wrapping paper stock.”
We have this in the office, on rollers, to move around the office, for improvisational note taking
and idea jotting, think mapping.
All photography, this blog,
by Gabrielle Girvin
The Patterning of Space, Made to Place
The Storytelling of Place, in the Minds of the Experiencer
I just told this story recently.
I was working with a colleague, in Florida — our client, her boss, was Michael Eisner. He had a dream about a Disney place that would be a kind of learning experience — but something even slightly theatrical, a traipsing venture, akin to his memories, along with his wife of the notion of Chautauqua — a circuit of entertainments and wisdom-wanderers that might sparkle wonder in a rural road of touring. The proverbial Chautauqua circuit — a way of self learning, that has a deep legacy in the roots of american culture, which reached its closing nadir in the mid-1920′s. Eisner’s dream was the Disney Institute — and our role, to the branding of it.
Different now, than then.
But, presenting to another group in California, I was talking about the layering and detailing of experience. And at the conclusion of the talk, a woman came up and said — “I went there, to that Disney Institute place — very fancy, very nice, a big place. But what was something that I remembered, wasn’t the big things, it was the small things, the touches — little details that I’ll never forget. And it’s not that I’m an interior designer — but when I go places, I look at things. I remember noticing that there were many little things, seals, icons, devices — and they kept coming out — these icons — stories in teaching, showing themselves — ways to learn, what to learn, and finally, how to learn. It wasn’t the big, but it was the small that stitched themselves together, to lead me somewhere, to get the whole, big idea.”
The gesture of black, raven ink — drawing the spirit of birds
Hand-ground pigment, split timbers, scent and
the explosive splatter of haboku.
When I draw, my senses are open, the touch of the paper, the splintering of the wood, the sound — the gasp, the clasp, the rasp of the stroke of the brush on the stock.
Drawing People
[in] with Flowers, the Flow
of Story in
the Craft of
Rendering Ideas
In my beginnings, I drew flowers — and sold them as art pieces and gifts; then, at Christmas, I did groupings of flowers, silkscreened and signed in limited editions of thousands. People collected them. The list grew and grew, so that Christmas time became days of work signing the full sized serigraphed prints. I’d go places, visiting recipients and find that the flower prints were the key art in office suites, Doctor’s offices, clients, and friends’ homes.
I was surprised how popular they were. Aside from their sheer graphical power, strikingly colored and profoundly saturated contrasts — they were simple treatments — brush-stroked renderings I still have parts of the run of every year during that period.
Tom Ford, the Creativity of Babyhood
How are Designers, Creative Minds, Changed by Babies?
Having met Tom Ford, albeit in a short quasi-interview and completely unscheduled encounter at a WWD | BEAUTY + FASHION CEO SUMMIT; I’ll admit that I was afraid [of him.] When I was working for YSL, I was told that Tom would never come to the store unless it had been cleared of everyone. Yet, talking to friend Dawn Mello, who might be credited with the first global boost of exposure for the power of the designer Tom Ford — “Tim, don’t worry, he’s just the nicest man.” In working with Shirin Von Wülffen, the wife of Frédéric Fekkai, while she was a publicity director at YSL — she said the same — “a super lovely man.” When I finally met him, connected live, eye to eye, there was a classical genteel mannerism, almost “Texas etiquette.”
He was so kindly, accommodating, generous, that I was shocked.
The Search for Beauty — the Beauty of You, The Brand of You, and Others.
In the quest for the truth of brands, the soul and heart of their storytelling — invariably, appropriately, there are humans involved. People make brands — mostly for other people, so the notion of inherently building brands around the bigger ideas of human aspirations makes sense, though is widely decried– “brands don’t have souls, they’re not human, they don’t have a heart!”
