All the work that GIRVIN designs is bespoke, it’s customized per project.
Designing customized typographical treatments for identity programs would be obvious for any designer worth their salt. Since the latter 70s, about 5 years into the draft of design, I’d always believed that a logo should be distinctive to the degree that it is registrable as a copyright-protected asset, it’s not just type, it’s been ownably altered, customized and uniquely applicable–a ™ can be applied, it’s a protected, distinguished asset. And, like any identity, it’s the first step in the story, it’s the
first place that communities find, and relate to, a brand.
Working for Nordstrom, then Bloomingdale’s, I designed campaign programs that found complex integrations, in shopfronts, enormous banners and signage, in-store merchandising, hang-tags, packaging, internal signage and shopping bags. You can see that campaign design and placemaking work here.
I’d create a logo, then build a font, for integrative applications—the tenor of the expression moves horizontally, through every touchpoint of experience planning.
A logo becomes a font.
And below, the Progetto Italiano typeface.
This theory applies not only to the past, but the present, for a visual system
for Dr. Greg Demopulos’s Omeros, a leading-edge pharmaceutical brand. We focused on
an earlier collaboration, playing on a Greek legacy, his father—a leader in the Greek Orthodox community of Seattle, a brush-drawn Alpha+Omega, along with a distinguishing font.
The font has a Hellenic quality,
and was designed and drawn based on pre-Christian Greek inscriptions.
In support of integrative applications, community recognition, we expanded that into a typeface.
Given the eye-related medicinal character of their product, Omidria, we designed an iris-like treatment that is built with the Omeros typographic system.
Also, in another identity program, logo then font system—PowerPC™—IBM, Apple and Motorola’s system, GIRVIN collaboratively named and branded the power metaphor and systemic application, and designed the PowerPC™ logo,
In support of the AIM Alliance [Apple, IBM, and Motorola] GIRVIN designed the PowerPC™ Typeface, for use in marketing, trade shows and promotions as it was implemented horizontally in hardware and related consumer touchpoints.
There’s an advantage to integrating identity and allied font systems, for example:
product numeration and designation. And a deep integration of brand character and experience comprehension.by customers.
For Walmart’s new brand development team we named, and built the upscale bicycle brand Viathon name, brand mark, and bicycle badging and model systems.
The bike livery and model system.
And the font that we built, around the details of the identity.
This idea of linking identity to aligned typography isn’t limited to these case studies, there are decades of applications—ranging from custom typefaces that we’ve built for buildings—custom fonts for signage and placemaking, like our work for Jon Runstad’s 1201 Third Avenue’s system
with Kohn Pedersen Fox’s neoclassical
rendering of that site and building tower.
A font built on a 1st century tradition of stone carving in Imperial Rome.
Simple, quiet and thoroughly deployed throughout
every signing implementation in the building.
Speaking of building identity, and
customized fonts, here’s another custom typeface
I designed for Massimo Vignelli—a core signage font—requested by Michael Bierut,
when the two of them are working together.
Customized typographic identity system crossovers can be found in our earlier identity
For the Nordstrom family. This is, as well, a customized font that we designed for Nordstrom’s use—particularly in signage, throughout all stores in North America, like the flagship signage at NYC’s megastore. We designed the signage system in deployment in all stores in the US and Canada.
Deployed horizontally in our earlier design systems.
Nordstrom’s font—for the earlier identity program—GIRVIN designed,
for all signage including departments.
In all—the expression of detailed integrations, identity and alphabetic systems—
comes down to this simple GIRVIN dictum—
“what’s the story, who’s telling it, who’s listening, what’s it feel like, and in the end, most crucially—who cares?”
Notes on GIRVIN’s type design.
Tim Girvin | Seattle Digital: GIRVIN | Built: OSEAN
“The child proud of learning its alphabet will soon master reading a verse or a saying, and then its first little story, and its first fairy tale, and while those who are not destined to be readers soon content themselves to practicing their ability to read on the news and financial sections of their newspapers, the select few remain forever bewitched by the strange miracle of letters and the words (each of which was once a charm, a magic formula).”
― Herman Hesse