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.
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.