The Power of Touch in Reimagining the book:"Ink on Paper – design & concepts for new publications"
The Book as Sensate Storyteller It's been said that the book is the most perfectly designed object for "reading." That is according to earlier conversations with book and type design legend, Bill Hill, typographic theorist and book / tablet reading and UX scholar at...
Menus, the calling card of brand storytelling: restaurants
Menu design as a core element of legend-making in crafting food & beverage experiences A friend sent these along to me, and I'm not sure where they came from, what collection. Apologetic for not defining their provenance. But it reminded me of another missive,...
The Geometry of Design
The Scribing of Design Thinking The word scribe to script, as a verb, is a "scratching, a scribble, a marking." Describe comes to mind, for in that scratching, definition and articulation of idea becomes manifest. It comes right back to the very nature of design as a...
The Marks of Many | The Layering of Message
The Tiers of Brand Experience [Image above by Dawn A. Clark] In writing messages, related to brand and brand storytelling, like any legend-telling, the process of experience will be more than one strike and stroke on the tablet of messaging. It will be layers. There...
The Symbolism of the Axe
Brand, story, object and ritual. The art of the axe, chopping wood, arranging wood, starting fires, it holds a string of stories for many. Being in Portland, a proverbial city of the Axe, has built a culture around the axe. The axe is a splitting adze, a blade that...
Strokes of Goodness, The Freedom Signature
The Marking of Meaning, Goodness and Brand Storytelling. We think about the idea of design as a kind of signature -- with mind, motion, memory and meaning. What is design -- but the sign, illustrated. And of course, to signing and illustration, that would be...
Google Monster Signing | London
Making a Statement of Identity in the Procession of Experience. Sometimes, as a designer, one cuts to the chase and puts the story right there, out in front. Big. So too the dynamism of Scott Brownrigg's designed installation of monster identity in the environmental...
windows
The symbolism of the window Thinking design / portals of storytelling / brand / story / insight. In the window to experience, you see in: in=sight. In the window to the object: circumspect -- you walk around, surveil from the circumference. In the window to the soul:...
Twister | Kiev The metaphor of the story, the storm
Designing story, in place, the allegory of nature, space -- in making a place I find myself in the study of the symbolic, the metaphorical -- and, to the end, the magical. I recall when Apple defined the iPad as 'magical." An interesting choice of language in defining...
Leaning in —the curve of listening
The angle of listening, listing and leaning | "Lean In," by Sheryl Sandberg There's no doubt that Sandberg is remarkable -- the incidence of laudations about her come from every degree of the literary arc, including a recent string of notations in the NYTimes, which...