Blogs By Tim Girvin
H E L L O,
Brand Heritage and the Soulful Journey
The Arc of the Brandstory in Building Centuried Brands In a reflection of history—GIRVIN’s brand history at more than a half century of continued creativity—there is a story, goes back, 1973, when I first began to work as a brand craftsman: sign-painting, calligraphic...
Flash! The Symbolism of the Thunderbolt
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...
Creative Briefing | Plot Lines in Brand Storytelling
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...
The Psyops of Branding | The Arts of Persuasion
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...
The Cult of Wabi Sabi
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...
Remote Viewing | The Absence of Presence in An AI Working World
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...
Another Notation On The Journey of the Journal
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...
The Journey of the Journal | The Book of the Mind
[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...
The Script of Odysseus
Design strategies, temporal tactics in typography and the palæographic narrative The calligraphy above is a rendering of ODYSSEUS [ΔΟ-ΥΣ-ΕΥ-Σ] I crafted in the ancient Greek boustrophedon style [as the ox plows] starting right to left, then left to right, the back...
Designing Disneyland & Imagining Collaborative Innovation
[Image shot onsite at Disneyland | Tim Girvin] Working Imagination | The Imagineers at Disneyland In my history as a design leader, we worked around various propositions of entertainment at Disney—not only working on films, but Disneyland itself, in a string of calls...