people

Core Samples 03 — Chose one person from your list. What is your relationship with them? How would you represent this person in abstract form? What colors would be most accurate? What materials? What shape? What scale? What context? What words would be included?

When writing about people who have influenced me, I wanted to do a project about my previous boss, Pat Ford. I had always felt fortunate for meeting Pat, but did not realize the significant impact she has had on my life. She is unparalleled as a mentor, as a woman who runs her own successful design business. She has amazing design sense, along with esteemed social graces, cooking and gardening skills. She became an inspirational role model for me, in graphic design and in life. I wanted to create a book which symbolized her design style, her personality, and her influences on my life.

Pat had been the person who introduced me to the power of words and letters as forms, as I had worked for her designing signs before I came to grad school. I decided to create a book of letter forms to symbolize her professional influence on me.

The accordion book about Pat allowed me to look at representing space through a two dimensional medium. The book combines type, image, and space, which I thought were the appropriate symbols for Pat. Modernist and Craftsman aesthetics are manifested through the rectilinear and circular letter forms. I first attempted to create a childlike “pop book” to represent working on signs in Children’s hospitals with her. But, the book seemed to transcend childlike pop up books, and wanted to become a manifestation of Pat’s house and design aesthetic, two things I was immediately drawn to.

In a certain sense, Pat had been already represented by her house. The work I did was very much linked to this house, and I felt very comfortable there. She had transformed the house in her own image, from a humble, dilapidated cottage to an exquisitely detail and historically appropriate craftsman bungalow. This house was her home as well as her workplace. Design clients would come and meet on the marble table in a cherry paneled living room. Thus, I associated Pat with this house, and the book I created symbolizes her through symbolizing her house.

The book symbolizes Pat through its colors and forms. The oranges, yellows, and cyans have an “bungalow” association—they are simultaneously warm and modern. The color palette evokes her sophisticated color and material sensibility. Whenever we worked on signs or interiors, she would create color boards which were complex pairings of colors, rather than obvious primary choices.