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Simple Design

Can you do that style? Earlier in my career [1976,] as a advertising studio illustrator, comp[rehensive] packaging artist, headline drafter [for rough ad layouts] and an occasional calligrapher, I got that line, as a request. “Can you do that style?” “Sure I can.” It...

The Hand and the Heart

Make something. Use your hands. What’s coming back to me is the realm of the personal — that which is made by a person, from that person, to me. As we’ve moved GIRVIN from downtown Seattle [they’re demolishing our building] to the bottom of West Queen Anne, we’ve all...

Create More Beauty

The Principle of the Search: More Beauty [Photo: Dawn A. Clark, AIA Leed AP] In our life journey, as creatives — people that create — we listen, absorb, gather, interpret and make meaning. We work to import and deliver content in a manner that is compelling to a...

The Mystery of Design

Design Mysticism When you go deep. As a designer, you might meditate on your work, what you’re doing. And your being in that doing. There might be a brand strategy, and the unfolding character of tactics and deployment. But making marks is a legacy that is thousands...

The Hand Speaks

The Grace of Handwriting: Soul Drawings It is the physiological nature of our being that what the hand offers reaches back to the psychical current of the mind. In the journey of drawing, learning the way of The Seeing Hand, I was studying the treasury of master...

A MEETING WITH MASSIMO VIGNELLI

ONE STORY, ONE PERSON It’s interesting how a journey in the life of a designer will take them out to the ends of many roads in their explorations — and those roads might lead back, to the very beginning from which they first found insight into the deeper meaning of...

What could be worse?

There are bad signs, and then there are worse signs. In the journey of a designer of signing and related environmental graphics — the core point of the design strategy is storytelling — the story might be: this is the place; go here, do not go here, you...