50 years ago, I got my first passport, it was in 1976—a US Bicentennial year.
This was my first international travel, alone. I was 23 years old.
But it was the beginning of a journey that would change my life.
I’d been corresponding with designers in the US, as well as others internationally. I was shipping my work, samples, setting up meetings presenting my work to NYC design luminaries. I was writing to type designers, calligraphers and graphic designers in the US, mostly NYC and LA, That ranged from book designers and jacket artists, ranging from legenadary figures like Milton Glaser and Herb Lubalin to smaller, more solo artists, like Paul Bacon,
Jeanyee Wong and Alice Koeth.
I applied for a grant from the National Endowment
for the Arts to aid my trip—
back then, NEA’s $500.00 and my savings, booted me on the road.
I was building material for a presentation on American Design in Moscow, back then, the USSR, and later Tallinn, Estonia. These efforts were invited by calligrapher and designer Villu Toots in Tallinn, and Maxim Zhukov and Leonid Pronenko in Russia.
I gathered-up materials, shot them with an SLR, 35mm transparencies and took projector carousels. I decided to expand the trip, for a study stay at the Imperial College of London in Kensington Park. There, I studied medieval approaches to calligraphy, illumination and gilding on vellum.
And as an expanded study tour, an UK circulation–the arts of fine printing, paper making, letter press arts and the architecture of design.
I also went out on trips to meet type designers, stone cutters, glass and wood engravers and book artists like Will and Sebastian Carter—at Rampant Lions Press; and a visit to the library and epigraphic collection of type designer Berthold Wolpe, boxwood master engraver—Reynolds Stone; an exploration of master calligraphers, gilders and scribes to the crown, Donald Jackson, book artists and master scribes like Heather Child and Irene Wellington.
I met up with book sellers, studied rare book collections, toured museums, visited
sign-painters, brush-men and lettering shop tradesmen.
From there, I went to Paris and explored the printing shops, book arts and galleries at
Musée Cluny, Le Louvre, Musée d’Orsay.
Then by train to Austria, to meet another correspondent, Friedrich Neugebauer and Neugebauer Press, Switzerland and Adrian Frutiger, Germany—Hans Schmidt, Karlgeorg Hoefer, Hermann and Gudrun Zapf von Hesse and Hans Halbey, then director of the Klingspor Museum and a study of the manuscripts there. From Frankfurt to Moscow—a presentation there, with Zhukov and Pronenko, and onwards to a conference presentation in Tallinn.
These journeys were a sharing—my print and drawn work, 35 mm “slides” and some laminated portfolios. And a hands-on exposure in workshops, out in the field, at the presses and letter-cutting studios of legends—craftspeople that make a living doing what they do—from a signwriter of lorries in London, a pen shop owner from Drury Lane to a master pressman off the Cambridge University row.
But in a way, the journey of today is the journey of the past—the selfsame pursuit of the art of the story, lettered message, color, textured contact and experientiality—told in a circle, the 360º ring of the narrative sense—it’s paper touch, signboard, the rough stone, sharpened tools, the scent of inks, the heat of the press, the resinous fragrance of split timber.
That’s a story unto itself, and that’s the pathway of how the messages get out to everyone else, other stories, brandwork—the touch of a place, the layering of experience, the detailing of the teeth of the legend, a well-made, a packaged ideal.
When the craft is long wrung, you go back, thinking about the work—and history, contemplating my beginnings, and the journey from there to here.
Happy anniversary, there to here.
Think I’ve been around? Check out some of the brands we’ve worked with, history way back. 100s of years.
Older than America.
GIRVIN’s designed logos, brands and design systems for elder legacies like Metzler [NA,] Fukuju Sake, Hästens, Old Homestead [pg. 35,] Capezio and American youngsters like Nordstrom, Tomlinson, Duke’s Mayo, Cheerwine and Nalley Fine Foods—families, heritage, generations and passion.
Tim | West Queen Anne Elementary School Studios | Strategic Magic
Co-create. Collaborate. Connect.
GIRVIN | Strategic Brands
Follow Us:
Facebook LinkedIn Instagram Behance
digital: girvin.com
built environments: oseanstudios.com
Lean in and listen.
That’s how the stories get told,
bold to the future, far to the past,
and still they go on.
