Branding with shape and color
Branding.
Sometimes it's as simple as a shape and a color. For example, you know the brand name of this tractor even though you can't read it in this photo. And you know what truck this is even though the name has been pixelated in this picture.
The truck's color and shape say something to me, like "Here comes your birthday present from your brother in Dallas." The tractor colors say, "Someone's growing a bumper crop of high-fructose corn syrup."
So here is my favorite sign shape and color in the entire world:
The shape, color and also the FONT of the National Forest Services say to me: "Wilderness and camping!" Since camping in the wilderness is my idea of heaven, these signs always make my heart go pitter-patter when my fellow campers and I are zigzagging up a mountainous road on our way to the Sierra Nevada or Anza-Borrego Desert or the Cleveland National Forest.
Cowboy Cool
My newest website is designed for the Wildwood Smokehouse & Saloon in the outskirts of Iowa City. Rather wisely, I believe, it is located just off Interstate-80 where it meets the Herbert Hoover Highway. This makes it very handy for people from Iowa City but also the entire East Central Iowa area to come.
It's a restaurant - BarBQ - and a live music venue which will feature plenty of country & western but also rock music.
Expected opening is the end of July 2009.
More Frank Lloyd Wright, with hollyhocks
Frank Lloyd Wright experimented with architectural styles all his life. The cement block houses of Los Angeles were intriguing but apparently are not surviving nature very well.
Wright came up with an interesting representation of the hollyhock flower in the decor of this house. The hollyhock was the favorite flower of the woman who commissioned the house to be built. There's even a feeling of the old millefiore style in this house.
Wright hyper-designed his houses - the inside, the outside, the furniture, the lampposts. In the lamppost one can even see the same hollyhock pattern.
Another of Wright's methods was to narrow down the entrance as one approached until the visitor was in a small space. That way, the contrast was even greater when the visitor would suddenly enter an open, well-lighted space. We weren't allowed to take pictures inside the house, but the entryway was intriguing.
Sadly, the Hollyhock House in Los Angeles has serious roof problems. The carpet got destroyed by rain. According to the guide, most FLW houses seem to have serious roof problems. He didn't work well with engineers. Too bad, because if there was one thing that FLW wanted it was a legacy, but if more of his houses start falling down, there goes the legacy.
William Morris, Recycler
Design: we cycle through phases, then later recycle again. Clothes from the 70s and 80s are becoming popular again. The cycle of rebirth of design trends seems to have speeded up in my own lifetime, but certainly it's been going on for centuries.
In the mid-nineteenth century, William Morris, a British novelist, artist, designer, and perhaps not coincidentally socialist, was an early adopter of Gothic Revival, the trend that brought about Victorian Gothic style. Morris became a key person in the founding of the Arts and Crafts movement. His own designs for textiles and wallpaper were replete with flora and fauna. He was fascinated with the natural world. And his designs were very like medieval millefleurs (thousand flowers in French) tapestries.
And those tapestries were very like the famous rosette windows in Middle Ages cathedrals like Notre Dame in Paris. Which again were like millefiori (thousand flowers in Italian) glasswork.
Morris was recycling a trend, but updating it and making it his own. In the same way, Candace Bahouth, a needlepoint and mosaic artist working in Britain in 2009, has updated the millefleurs look in her tapestries and pillow designs.
And just to bring it ALL up to date, in the past several years, the design world has been enamored of floral flourishes in design. So everything old does become new again.
Nature by Design
Ever heard of a Herkimer diamond?
Nope, not actual diamonds. Herkimers are simply one type of quartz crystal. The world abounds in quartz. But Herkimers are special and cool and unusual - they have two terminations. Instead of growing out of a rock and having one pointy end, they have two pointy ends. They are found only (so far) in the Mohawk River Valley in New York State and are named for Herkimer County.
Herkimers can be used in jewelry-making, but for my money, leave them in their natural state. The best presentation is "in the matrix," meaning that the crystal is kept in the rock in which it is found. Many times the crystals are trapped in the rock and often are loose (since they are not growing from the rock).
I own several Herkimers and my favorites are still in the matrix. As clear crystals, Herkimers aren't as showy as, say, amethysts (which are single-terminated, by the way), but I love the simple little treasures of nature.
Frank Lloyd Wright in Iowa
If you live in east central Iowa, treat yourself to a visit to Cedar Rock, one of FLW's Usonian houses. It was built for an Iowa businessman; once he and his wife passed away, they left their beloved house to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, including a trust to take care of the house in perpetuity. So it's free to visit.
My brother, also a fan of FLW, visited from Los Angeles where he has gone through FLW houses such as Hollyhock. He's been to Taliesen. After seeing Cedar Rock, he said it's his favorite Wright house, period. It's small and intimate and only so many people at a time are there with you. For a short while you can almost imagine yourself living in this beautiful house on a beautiful bend in the Wapsipinicon River just outside of Quasqueton.
This is one of the houses that Wright deigned to "sign," shown by the red glazed tile with his initials that is near the entryway to the house. Notice also how the grout between the bricks is visible in the horizontal plane, but that the vertical grout has been darkened. Wright did this to emphasize the horizontal appearance of the long, low house, anchoring it to the landscape.
Vintage Disneyland
A very cool Flicker set of vintage Disneyland posters can be found here.
Like the era, these posters have clean edges, bold shapes and bright colors. Disneyland calls itself the Happiest Place on Earth, and the design of the posters reflects that beautifully. While I happen to think that Disneyland has the highest concentration of molded plastic on the planet, my cousins who practically grew up on Disneyland's Main Street concur with the theme park's tag line. Anyhula, their posters are way cool.
Blackwood By Design
Welcome to the blog for Blackwood Design. I'll be talking about all sorts of design. Stay tuned.