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The Illustration of language, the flow of color in calligraphy - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
An color-washed innovation in handcrafted lettering for commerce During my earlier years, I got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, in funding a journey, a type designer’s odyssey—my so-called “Alphabet Odyssey,” to meet, talk and share with the greats in type design, fine printing, paper making, binding, letterpress, stone carving, engraving and […]
The Brand As Beacon | Symbolism and Allegory - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
We tend to think allegorically about the work that we do— brand as fire, design as transformation, and markings as magic. And plenty of the clients that we work with think of their enterprises as deeply metaphorical and soulfully intentioned —light bringers, wellness makers, cultural transformers, trend breakers, market anarchists, flavor sensualists, and storytelling entertainers. In the process of living as […]
The Quest for Flow | Mystical Principles in Brand Design - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Developing Hand-crafted Symbols as Deep Metaphors During my college years, I studied calligraphy with Lloyd Reynolds— the maestro of the calligraphic arts that inflamed Steve Jobs, during Steve’s limited foray at Reed College. And a core precept—this would be the I + O above, in the strings of weaving an alphabet, any form, any type, […]
A Drawing on Love - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Designing a hand drawn stamp for the United States Post Office Everyone knows that I’m moving; I’ve been in—and out—of the Northwest Industrial Buildings at the foot of Queen Anne Hill, crossed in the nexus of Denny and Western, for 30 years. I was actually here, as well earlier, in the 80s—this was, back then, […]
Chains - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
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 […]
Bespoke Brands, Designing Identities Built on Custom Typefaces - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
All the work that GIRVIN designs is bespoke, it’s customized per project. Designing customized typographical treatments for identity programs would be obvious for any designer worth their salt. Since the latter 70s, about 5 years into the draft of design, I’d always believed that a logo should be distinctive to the degree that it is […]
Happy Mother's Day | A Contemplation on the Feminine Principle of Creativity - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Memories of my Mother As some know, my Mother recently died—our celebration of life emerges in days, and that, of course, is cause for a meditation on my learnings with her, her influences and profound impetus on my life. The alignment with creativity, motherhood and the feminine principle for me literally began with her. During […]
Packaging Arts in Asia, the Furoshiki - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
A Journey in Design Explorations. When I first went to Japan to present my work as a designer, I was advised that I should be bringing gifts, and that I should offer the greeting–introducing myself, as well as the offer. This went like this, Hajimemashite, Tim Gabin to omoimas, handing my business card, another ritual, […]
GIRVIN’s Ideator® Naming and New Brand Development Toolbox - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
GIRVIN’s Ideator® Naming program came into being with Garden Botanika, the first process-driven naming solution created by Tim Girvin and his team. This led to 18 stores that GIRVIN designed for Garden Botanika and more than 400 SKUs, organized in channel groups, treatment types and demographies. When I was working with Jeff Brotman—on this project, […]
Humanized Technology with GIRVIN's Soul Branding - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
The GIRVIN | Strategic Branding & Design team have a long history in creating pathways to humanize the strategic impressions—and tactical outcomes, in technology brand experience—for enterprise employees, community relationships and customers. In a legacy of reviewing technological startups, as a judge in student competitions, as well as tech developer’s conferences, and in kickoff sessions […]
GIRVIN's BrandQuest® | Workshopping Brands Since 1994 - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Solving brand challenges in a collaborative innovation summit I created the first BrandQuest® a registered IP for GIRVIN in the request of an unusual challenge by a team from IBM, fronted by Nobuo Mii in 1993—a mission to build a microprocessor-powered personal computer based on the RISC system, a reduced induction and cooler-running computing system. […]
Hand-drawn fonts | A custom type face for the icon | Tim Girvin's Wanderer - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Most people know my notes, and my personal icon, the Wanderer Since 1999, I’ve had a relationship with the metaphor of a path chosen in a wandering, winding, wended pathway, a quest for answers and insights that is particular to a non-linear way of thinking—rather than a straight line, I respect, and inspect, a way […]
Letters from an Eagle Scout - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Notes on scouting and the meaning of the Eagle Scout legacy. Sure, some of you are Eagle Scouts—you know the drill, the years of Scout journeying, 30-milers, 50-milers, growth in the transitioning from Tenderfoot beginnings, Second Class, First Class, the move to Star, Life and finally, the 21 merit badges–fulfillment and collection, the completion of […]
Designing for Clint Eastwood - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
It’s been an intriguing pleasure working at the behest of theatrical “stars.” Surely, thinking about it—acting, or directing, is a complex expectation— the hours are demanding, the scale of the commitment is enormous, the creative expansiveness is deep. During production, everything can change, emotions roil, creative strategies convert to tactical realities and evolutions, dailies can […]
GIRVIN's Snow White | A First Time Movie Poster for Disney - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Fairest of Them All? Any study of this film’s current premise and promotion, the pitch and proposition— critical notes from the social community—might be up for a overload of remarkably acidic commentary. People, apparently, are not liking the marketing play—or making notes to that effect. It might be […]
Bespoke Books and Calligraphic Font Design - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Above, speaking of scripts, a Girvin stylistic expression: a broadly splayed opening capital, a hairline accentuation, a strike stroke from the opening character in its initiation, a bounced baseline and jumped x-height, an unexpected ligature, widely varied pen angles, with a hooked tail flourish and double-ruled underflourish to nest the mark. I started my career […]
Brand Design and the Game of Chess - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
The study of moves on the board. I was talking to a client about chess strategy, the moves, the personality of the players—the tactical delicacy of the moves. Are there archetypes in the game? Yes, player archetypes. First off, the legacy of the game is roughly 1400 years old—and, if you’re a player, you’d likely […]
Designing Limited Editions—Journeys, Shopfronts, Galleries - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Portfolios, collectible design processions and creating metaphorical gallery experiences. It’s an interesting contemplation to think about brand work, design, and value. Surely there is a lot of conversation about design as a value-inducement to brand propositions. Well-designed brands make them usefully relevant, emotionally viable, resonantly in tune with brand relationships—and we’ve written extensively about this […]
Drawing Love | Mapping Brands - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Workshopping allegories and brand soul I was thinking about the question of inquiry and exploration, the search—reaching in(to people)—listening to them, learning from them, and gathering their impressions and ideas. Search for it, listen to them, what does that look like? But more so, to the construct of what they love, what they love doing, […]
Brand Jewelry | Designing Brands for Jewelry - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Could a brand be so beautiful that it should be made into jewelry? “Sure,” says Susy Korb, an earlier Creative Director at Tiffany&Co., she asked, “Could we create a font that could be used in our print, as well as for actual fabrication into precious metals?” In our experience with laser and water-jet-related incisions in […]
Death Comes Home | Creativity, Motherhood and Lila Lee Shaw Girvin - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Everyone has a powerful connection to their mothers. My mother, Lila Lee Shaw Girvin died this past week. And it called into contemplation all of the things that one thinks about in death—of anyone near. You’re thinking, “they were here, now they’re gone. Forever.” It’s something to contemplate that she was my matrix, my inspiratrix, […]
Brands that are beautiful - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
The Quest for the Most Beautiful | Brands, Enterprises, Narratives and the People That Make Them. In our life journey, the threading of our work, as creatives—people that create— we listen, absorb, gather, interpret and make meaning. We work to import and deliver visual and messaged content in a manner that is compelling to a […]
Writing Creative Brief Strategy for Brands - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
How Bright the Future? Could a Creative Brief be…Brief? Not really. Brevity isn’t the point, it’s the concision of the document. This is a talk that I was asked to offer at P&G, then later again at Mark Anthony Brands—the beverage group in Vancouver, BC., then progressively, in other team related educational contexts, including the […]
Brands, what do you know, now? - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
The quest for where you were, and where you are now—and, as we’ve asked, “what do you know?” You might just never know. I’m walking out there, walking around remote pathways wild rivers, swaying bridges, down in ancient buildings and pathways. And while I’m down there, out there, I realize, “wait, I’m lost, where am […]
If you're not here, do you k[no]w where? - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Of course, as a brand person, a place-maker—as you are—we’re thinking: “if you’re not here, and not over there, then where are you? Do you know where you are? Or are you nowhere?” I’ve been talking A LOT about placemaking—and planning spaces, making places—since I’m walking around the edge of a move of one GIRVIN […]
Brand Stumbling - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
It happens to the best of us—there’s a confident gait, the gallant stride, a bold sprint and then: there’s a stumble. It rumbles in the background—all the time—the risk of misstep. Personally, I contemplate my own faltering—and there have been many. Moves that I thought were bold and smart, but somehow I hadn’t thought-through the implications […]
Brand Groves | Allegorical Brand Strategies and Symbolic Thinking - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Anyone can think symbolically—and likely, we all do. You see something and think, “that reminds me of a…” Living in a creative space, the memory palace of explorations, memories and meaning—the imagination swerves to new pathways, neural leaps to stringing ideas together in new ways, the brain re-circuits and new paths are created. Working earlier, […]
Branding Crime Stoppers | Design Against Criminals - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
The world of brand extends to crime-fighting. In our history, we’ve consulted for various police agencies, patrol and security groups, building brands around protection of assets, people and their communities. It takes a particularly assertive sense of presence—something, as a brand that is, shall we say, gripping and powerful. Things go around, and they come […]
The View from Below And Perspectives of the Sky Rim - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Dome Symbolism, kinæsthetic CX design strategies The View from Below and Perspectives of the Sky Rim I’ve been to three places where the architecture of the ground—the footprint of the structure—is remarkable, but the study of the built sky above it is far more compelling. Why, one would ask, is this relevant? In my experience, […]
The Leap of Imagination | Brands, Change, Fear and Risk - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
The leap of adventure in the movement of brands, spirit, soul and destinations— the risk to get out there, go further, get farther. In a recent set of GIRVIN brand soul summits, brandquest® workshops [how we work to get somewhere new as a team-based collaborative exploration] we talked about a brand’s spirit, the nature of […]
Keep Your Brand on a Swivel and Watch Your Six - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
The Nine Gates of Brand Intelligence In the long watch of the brand shepherd, steward and sentinel— it’s important to consider a 360º surveillance of territories. In a kind of mirrored language, it shall be called outlook and look out. If you visualize your brand as a landscape—a palace of dreams, a lighthouse, a mountainous […]
Holistic Brand Design for Hospitality | A Guide to Placemaking - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Spherical Design Holism for Hospitality | A Manual for Brand Placemaking Integration for Experiential Strategies and Tactics The Deployment of *Experientiality Earlier in my career, I worked on a string of projects for Disney, working with the Disney Imagineers and Park Strategists at Disneyland—designing experiences, brands and their integrated strategies in Orlando and Anaheim. It […]
The Long Route | Getting Out There To The Brand New World - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
A stride at Bláskógabyggð, Suðurland, Iceland I was questioning a brand client—and we were talking about the notion of soul, the spirit of the brand a human enterprise—and the mirroring of a human maker, and what they make in the journey of a brand. Everyone knows, if you know me, that the origins of the […]
The Fall Guy | The Metaphor of Failure - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
I was listening to a podcast by David Duchovny the proverbial Fox Mulder of the X-files–on failure. As he notes in his overview—a summary of his podcast— “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” Duchovny recites to WPR’s host Doug Gordon. The finale of that quote serves as the title […]
Be Brave | The Character of Courage - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
The interplays in life, heartfulness and the courageous spirit. Thinking about the heart—and life journeys—in talking to my mother; we were walking the idea of courage. People, friends, family—they come and go—as we all do; it’s one in a string of challenges that we all face. Courage plays out as the movement—a song—in all, going […]
Symbolic Placemaking Strategies in Experiential Design - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
As you walk a journey—there are symbols in the path of your stride. As a person that has history in building places, thinking design in destinations, I tend to think about everything as a migration of symbolic content. Surely, simply, contemplate walking in a door—you were on the outside, now you’re on the inside. What […]
Brand Magic | Enchantment and the Magnetism of Attraction - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
I was working in a team-collaborative session, a BrandQuest, Soul Summit—an innovation forum, and we were discussing the implications of attraction. As brand strategists and designers, you know about the implications of product attraction. As we put it, first there must be relevance—any needful brand has to have utility, it has a place as a […]
Seeing deep | close and near—brand farsight - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Deep perceptions, brand metaphors and the avian sentience. For most of my life, I’ve been a student of the birds. I admire them from the perspective of their calligraphic flight, fluttering and drifting, flourishing in elegant strokes in the air. I’ve cut them in steel, as above—a celebration of their call. And I’ve drawn them—for […]
Brand symbolism | The Cairn - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
Thinking metaphorically, there are plenty of symbolic allegories between the notion of brand building, design strategies, messaging and storytelling. You—brand designer, brand thinker, theorist, strategist—when you think of brand, the notion of a constructed and managed enterprise, integratively disposed—what comes to mind for symbolic alignments, brand + X? I think of cairns. In traveling the […]
Get your hands off that! Don't touch! - Girvin | Strategic Branding & Design
How many times—thinking about it personally—have you been told that? Don’t touch! Hey, don’t even think about touching that! Hand’s off—not for you! Please, just look—no touching! Mostly, these days, I don’t ask, don’t look around for approvals, I just touch— unless it’s a museum, gallery or antiquities shop. Or, perhaps, a place where I’m […]