Brand Chains, Ropes, Knots
and the Entwinement of Meaning

As a Boy Scout—even out to the rank of Eagle—I always had a fascination with knots, ropes, lashing, sea-and-water craft in the tradition of sailing.

In scouting there is an expectation, as I’ve noted earlier, in knot craft—particularly those attached to camping, whether it’s tent-cinching, campsite furniture, watchtower construction and other adventures. The idea of knots became a kind of symbolic entity in my life.

It’s about taking a string of, for example, ideas, and cinching them into one entwined character—the knot. The character of a rope is almost like an entangled knot—it, too, is a string of many strings. One can see this most emblematically in steel cable, given the tensility of the material, the stranding of its manufacture, the cable and its threading forms a structure whose strength is based on the one of the many—a compositing of filaments, each with their own history, and, intertwined, they form a new whole.

Walking San Francisco, Powell/Mason, I am fascinated by the mechanisms of the cable car—with its Power stations, giant wheels and gear systems. And the marvelous sounds that it makes—the whirring of cables in the cable clamp attachment channel in the street. And I imagine the sheer power of this cable, dragging the street cars up one side of the hill—then down the other side

As a journeyer in brand, and the fire-starting of its fluency in community, I find myself in the study of the under-layments of how it works.

As noted long back, it’s a storytelling string, and as many know—story and history are an intertwinement between the layering of memory and the journey of re-collection. When one thinks about their life, they go back and collect paths they have wandered, what rooms reside in their palace of memory—it’s a reminding of places that have been opened, examined and explored, what has been stored. And, in reopening those rooms, what could be newly reviewed and explored. I made a chain-related journal, which was specific to intertwining filaments of life storytelling, moments, as strings that, intertwined, become the weaving of another story.
Which becomes of a knot of legacy.

The cover of the chain journal, a knot, the study in integrations.

When I was working on the opening strategies of Iron Man, in the first iteration—the initial crossover from Marvel Studios to Paramount,

I sought out inspirations at the Met, NYC and the Cleveland Museum of Art to study the medieval art of armor.
And, more particularly, chainmail, a kind of metal locking ring work for defense
against blades and arrows.

The Bechler Armor | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

What does that mean to the layering of branding, personal journeys and storytelling? There is a chain that features the concretion of timely passages in an earthly journey that then finds new relevance in an upward bound ascension.

Like our commentaries on the principles of magic and its alchemical and transformational journey-making, and brand design thinking— the traveler moves along the chain to new perceptions and layerings of content, threads intermingle—and that content finds a new shape.

Brands and design systems are transformational, and one might suggest that design — a signing — carries a viewer and listener from one point of learning to a new tier of insight.

Some thing sells, some story holds, an experiencer holds it and in that relating,
carries that story—as in “to relate” onwards to other relationships.

Our work as brand designers becomes inherently that—the trans-positioning of perception [holding through]—from one tier of understanding [the “inter-standing”stance between ideas] and the journeying forward.

That’s the work—perceptive evolution, which is the enchantment, embracement
and hopefully:
engagement.

And, it’s a chain, a thread, an intertwinement of filaments, the tapestry of strings which are the arcs of the brandstories, the spiraling DNA that makes up a recognizable principle in action—the flow to engaged, deepened, experientiality.

Tim
I collaborate.
GIRVIN | Strategic Brands
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Woven metal knots at the MET | NYC