It's that time of year for reflecting back on our accomplishments, what we've made and
what's to come, and as I do every year, I'm designing and making a simple holiday gift
here in the studio and although it's not architectural these side projects feed my creative intellect
and make me a better designer all the same.
I'm sharing it with the hope that it'll inspire you to make things in your own design workshop.
A personal project where you're the client one you can design and build in the day or
a weekend one without a massive budget one that reflects who you are and one that's driven
by process and principle.
Most of my side projects you'll never see, that's the whole point of a personal project
it's primarily for you.
Before I settled on the final design, I filled a trash bin with my failed attempts to construct
an abstract pine cone using wire ornament hangers, and piles of trace as I tried to
capture the concept of one year passing into another.
There were prints and video clips, head scratching and indecision, maybe even some cursing, each
one an idea that could have been and then wasn't.
Each one offering bread crumbs to the next.
As I was thumbing through materials here in the studio in search of an idea I discovered
these glassine envelopes which reminded me of ice and I started thinking about my kids
walking to the bus stop jumping on every frozen puddle each one cracking into glassy shards.
I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to deliver the gift in a box whose top was made of ice
and to get to the gift inside you'd actually have to break the ice?
So the top became the glassine envelope to hold a card.
I didn't want a plain envelope though.
When you really study ice it has all these gradations to it it's imperfect, so I started
playing around with printing things on the envelopes and after many attempts with tone
and scale I settled on this which allows you to see the blurry image of the previous year
as a gradation behind the new year.
The card slips in occupying the space between - the present - and the card itself is a temporal
print of the moon debossed into the white paper.
And that's a texture to one that can only be appreciated in the right light.
I don't know I thought it was fitting.
The star is the other part of the gift and of course it's metaphorically tied to the
moon.
It's made from two small squares of folded vellum with their flat sides joined together
and a bent guitar string affixed to create a minimalist hanger.
The box was crafted from strips of cardstock held together with chrome eyelets which intentionally
reveals it's simple construction.
I filled it with cedar shavings like a nest of sorts and it smells like the forest here
and that always reminds me of the holidays.
There's the contrast to of color and texture a warm tone against the cool of the ice above.
I added a simple hang tag with a message and that's all.
Now I know some of you are thinking: Really?
Who cares?
And it's true you don't have to care about or know any of this to appreciate the gifts.
Does it make you value them more knowing how they came to be?
Does meaning even matter if it's not accessible or obvious to the recipient, if they can't
unlock it?
Well, I think it does, but I certainly don't expect everyone to.
The satisfaction in it for me is knowing it’s present, much like the Swiss watchmaker who
requires every piece of the mechanism to be beautiful and functional even though no one
will ever see it.
The end result is a study in textures, of subtle shifts, and shadow and scale.
A moon and star as tiny objects so small they fit in our hands.
They're related: without the light of the star the moon is invisible.
The vellum is luminous, the paper reflects.
But I've already gone on too long.
There's more there if you care to look.
A short focused exercise in making can remind you that your entire creative life isn't wrapped
up in one project, rather who you become as a designer, as a person is the result of a
long winding path as you travel from one idea to the next.
And I’ve found it liberating to slip between definitions of what I am professionally.
I'm an architect, yes.
But I'm also a typographer and a filmmaker, a paper cutter, a UX designer, a writer; a
photographer.
And this is why I love side projects so much, they allow you to be any or all of these things.
Now your side project may be as simple as designing a holiday card, but it could also
be something as big as what this YouTube channel has turned into for me.
That started as a side project too.
Thank you as always for returning here whenever I publish a new video, for your comments and
emails, they all keep me motivated to keep making new things and push at the boundaries
of what a creative life can look like.
Cheers my friends, wishing you all the best!