Since 1972, I’ve created a long string of design environments—from my on-campus college office in 1973, while at The Evergreen State College—with my first business license—the cabin that I lived and worked in on Eld Inlet—named Tim Girvin+Alphabet, off Murray Court Road, Olympia, WA.
Then a studio on Bainbridge Island, Winslow, followed by the Maritime Building, adjacent to the Ferry Terminal in a string of offices—3 actually, then the Northwest Industrial Building—a team-based collaborative, including architecture, interiors, signage, brand, advertising, design and packaging,
called Elements.
1980 “folded recipe card” brochure.
Next there was Tim Girvin & Associates, and following-up,
Tim Girvin Design at Second and Pine, downtown Seattle, then GIRVIN | Strategic Branding & Design, with offices in NYC and Paris, with an around-the-corner move to Stewart and First, downtown Seattle, onwards to 3131 Western Avenue—two separate suites in that building, another now, to Suite 313 at the West Queen Anne Elementary School.
Since then, till now—all as one sequential research, strategic planning and integrative brand design practice, [Tim] Girvin, Inc.
I never applied for a job—nor had one—always working alone, with a team of contractors and employees, from 3 people to 92 employees. Why so many different places?
Curiosity—I like being in different places, looking at cultural links between design, placemaking, and experience which led, later, to working onsite all over the world. I worked in Beijing, Dallas, Chicago, Houston, Jakarta, Kobé, LA, Las Vegas, NYC, Miami, Osaka, Orlando, Paris, San Francisco, Seattle, Tokyo, and Seoul.
This gave me a particular perspective—specifically to intercultural work—designing brands for people in that place and for their distinct people-milieu.
Some pencils, all sharpened [by Gabrielle]
The Art of Arrangement
The other side to creating different design environments is how you credibly, realistically, and authentically tell your story, in a place that you have made for yourself. This process is about arrangements—how intellectual, textual and visual objects are organized and arranged for exploratory exposure, touch-viewing; it’s a sequence of customer exposures and views of uniquely disposed objects that can be seen, heard, smelled, touched and tasted.
When we think about our brand legacy, our work has been seen by billions of people, worldwide. Our theatrical brand design for hundreds of motion pictures is a worldwide reach and audience exposure—logos and theatrical titling treatments, as well as widely recognized packaging, Kettle Brands, Lauder, Fluke, Idahoan, among many others. It adds up.
And GIRVIN’s legacy is about telling our own authentic truth—building business for our clients, delivering results against brand transitions and reach-outs to communities throughout North America, Canada and Mexico and the rest of the planet. These are true stories of results that work for our customers, as well as meeting KPIs in results.
When we consider packaging, or websites, or environments, it’s a matter of arranged sequencing—the so-called customer journey, CX and integrative content.
I think about it in settling objects in my own working environments—some examples: a table setting of manuscripts from various periods—weighted with stones and seals from the manuscripts. They are distinctively touchable—out to be seen and examined, in an unexpected co-presentation of content–their combination tells a story of paleography.
Rough, distressed, wooden, stone and clay renderings of crows are contrastively arranged on a smooth field—designed to be held and touched. And visitors do—“wait, what are these, where did they come from?”
I made them from things that I found.
An expansive Hebrew manuscript is arrayed with symbolic interplays—
a tin star and a brass oarlock.
Look up. Row out farther.
The art of arrangement could be a theatrical merchandising of like-shaped objects—
a series of hand-held fog horns.
An alarming overhead arrangement of wasp’s nests—striking in their interplay and construction—are a kind of symbolic statement of enclosure. They build, they evolve, they grow—as containers.
And they tell a story of life.
And packaging—for those brand-cognizant amongst us.
And again, as a brand person who understands packaging, I’m sure you’re familiar with the layering of revelation, the opening and unfurling of a packaged object. In the Asian principle of tsutsumu, classical Japanese tsumaranai-mono, the gifting of “a boring little nothing,” modestly expressed, like, for example, an omiyage, objects of gratitude, presented by visiting guests.
In the work of brand design, and interior experience strategy, the procession or journey-making—it’s all about the arrangement of sensate tiers of experientiality.
Like the skin and interiors of a building, it’s all about the layering—outside in, inside out.
You have a story. Truth be told.
Make an arrangement
And incorporate the moments of sensation: touch, taste, sound, vision
and scent as a momentum of transduction.
Tim
GIRVIN | Strategic Brands | Old Queen Anne Hill Studio
We are stories.
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