by Tim Girvin | Concepts | Nov 6, 2026
There’s a moment, in a storm, when all the chaos is suddenly illuminated, everything is clarified—a sudden insight. This idea, the symbol of the thunderbolt, is a persistent and migratory archetype. And perhaps it’s derived from the actual character of the flow of...
by Tim Girvin | Brand Mysticism, Concepts | Oct 30, 2026
Could brand creativity be defined in a brief? What is a creative brief—and is there a point to being brief? No, not really. Succinct, compelling, reflective, authentic, scannable as a document of ongoing review. But brief? Brands are inordinately complicated...
by Tim Girvin | Brands, Concepts, Motion Pictures | Oct 21, 2026
There’s a story in a story, a strategy inside a design, a psychic layering in the intention of the reach-out to community. Any good brandwork lives in the deeper, psychic space of fluency in visual and written narrative. There is a persuasive intention. Isn’t branding...
by Tim Girvin | Concepts | Oct 14, 2026
Exploring the *Experientiality of Sensation in the Aesthetics of Age, Utility and Beauty The image above, the entry to the Fukuju Sake Brewery in Kobé, Japan, was taken during a GIRVIN project mission. It’s a mix of fire-seared timber, rough-chiseled granite and...
by Tim Girvin | Concepts, Motion Pictures | Oct 9, 2026
I’ve been working in, walking around, an AI world, as a brand strategist and designer, in the tactility of a cocooning sphere, a place to utilize any LLM, but you, user, work In your own realm—private, proprietary, protected. Yet the relationship is recollective. As...
by Tim Girvin | Artists, Concepts, Storytelling | Sep 30, 2026
What about flow? The fluency of ideas, drafts of inspiration—and, as a wanderer, the meander of mindlessness? As I’d mentioned earlier, the journey of the journal is a way of managing the today, which then becomes yesterday, that draws a line to the future. You look...
by Tim Girvin | Concepts, Designers, Storytelling | Sep 24, 2026
[Image is a poster keepsake, GIRVIN’s journal workshop, of the rules of the journal-maker in documenting their pathways.] Your Mind Deserves a Room of Its Own I taught classes in journal making—which I see as a kind of room, a palace of memories and inspirations—a...
by Tim Girvin | Concepts | Sep 3, 2026
Everything changes; everything is on fire. Nothing is the same as it was; everything is the same as it shall be. In the mist of experience, it’s all changing—still, standards flow, and patterning emerges. While everything is in flux, everything goes as it has from the...
by Tim Girvin | Concepts | Aug 20, 2026
The Hatching Stroke and the Ubiquity of Archetypal Design Thinking # I was walking the beach near my studios and found the above timber mark, cross-hatched into a log, the proverbial “pound” or number sign. And I wondered about it. “When this type of mark is made,...
by Tim Girvin | Brand Mysticism, Concepts, Storytelling | Jul 15, 2026
Istanbul signage Following on an expanded range from my blog from last week, which you might’ve read—“A Life Of Crime”— and GIRVIN’s history designing logos and design systems for police agencies, entertainment and narratives on international crime-fighting. This...
