This, Here

About This, Here is a project from Clifton Burt and Nicole Lavelle, intended as an exercise in design writing that will coincide with the inaugural Design Week Portland. The project is this blog. We call it a "pop-up blog" because it will intentionally have a very short life. During the week of October 13-19th, 2012, a week leading up to it, and maybe a few days after we will write pieces that ruminate on the people, projects and practices that make up Portland's design community. Why are we doing this? We want to be better writers. So, we started a weekly writing club. We're not great at it but we know we want to be better. We're convinced that the way to get better at it is to write...a lot. Hence, projects like this pop-up blog. We wear many hats. Artist, educator, creative director, copywriter, strategist, community organizer, publisher, printmaker, illustrator: these are all titles we find ourselves borrowing to create Frankenstein hybrid descriptors of our practices. Writing is another hat, yes, but it also a means by which to understand the myriad roles today's designer plays. This blog will showcase our attempt to understand the discipline of which we are a part, both locally and globally. Design is messy, and no matter how earnest our efforts, we will make mistakes, hurt some feelings and leave out important details. But we also hope to celebrate brilliance, dissect complicated topics, and encourage active discourse within our community. It's worth noting that the opinions expressed on this blog are entirely ours. While the people behind Design Week Portland are our friends, we do not claim to be their voice. This, Here is a snapshot of a moment in time in a specific place. It's an experiment in temporary publishing, in real-time criticism. We'll write as fast as we can. Please excuse the spelling errors. —Clifton and Nicole

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It's A Wrap

As planned, this pop-up blog must now come to an end. We can't think of a better way to have spent Design Week than writing our way through it. Thank you to everyone who joined us along the way. 

Keep up with our next projects at cliftonburt.com and makingstuffanddoingthings.com

Thank you!

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Coast Modern

Architecture professor, James Steele, described it as the “washing machine effect.” You enter a structure—in this case, a residence—from a noisy and confused world. You interact with the space, how it’s organized, how the natural light falls, how it’s integrated into its environment. These things affect you. You then exit, cleansed.

That was the ideal, at least, of modernism.

It’s fascinating to consider the idea of emotional states being altered through design. Intentionally being moved from state x to state y, like being on a conveyer belt. From scattered to focused, anxious to calm, tired to renewed; successful architecture has had that effect on each of us. 

What happens when that idea is applied to communication design? Action and excitement are what we’re often interested in, “helping” large numbers of people move from inactive states to active states. But are there examples of achieving different states? Calmness? Balance? Quiet?  

It’s nothing new to consider visual elements as triggering reactions, but I think it is interesting to consider state-changes so directly. I know that that’s something I never hear verbalized quite in that way in a graphic design context.

Imagine having one hundred test subjects hooked to monitoring devices and having them look through your work to date. What physiological reactions would you hope to have happen? What if there were none? Could your work be considered successful if has it no measurable effect on people? In fact, one way to reframe this question is to consider the idea that communication design must change the state of the viewer from one state to another, or else it has failed. 

So, there’s a challenge for your next project: change our state.

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Huh?

Today I watched a movie called Design and Thinking. It's not a movie, I guess, but a documentary film. Directed by Mu-Ming Tsai, the film grew out of a collaboration with Taipei Design Center U.S., and is about the problem-solving process and how designers (and others) apply their critical thinking and iterative creative skills to MANY (too many?) different contexts.

I think I'm the exact audience for this film. I'm a graphic designer, but I'm interested in how the ever-ubiquitous Design (with a capital D) crosses into multiple contexts and informs different disciplines. I teach a class called Design Thinking at Portland State University, a course that focuses on process and research. I think I have a relatively good grasp on the concept of "design thinking," and I was excited to see an effort to clearly communicate different ways the design thinking process has shaped our world.

Instead I was really bored. The film was compelling and informative for the first fifteen minutes. I'm considering sharing those few golden moments with my students. But the remaining 55 minutes were unengaging and left me confused. It was seemingly a recipe for success: the filmmakers talked to all the right people: David Kelley from IDEO and Stanford's D School; Tim Brown, also from IDEO; the late Bill Moggridge from the Cooper-Hewitt (and also from IDEO), and a bunch of other people doing seeming important work. But that's the problem. They just talked. Forever. 

I'm disappointed. I wanted to see REAL projects in action, real, tangible examples of design thinking. Design is hard enough to explain clearly, and it's a shame that the tools employed by designers (storytelling, visual communication, attention to clarity of message…) were virtually absent from this film. It was CEO after CEO, talking about iteration and experimentation and prototyping, and by the end I felt like the editors had checked out and just let the ramblers ramble.

The film was confusing. It was vague.  Parts of it were irrelevant (Jack Perez), and some of the people they spoke to had never heard of design thinking before (Tony Yu-Chen Tsai). I understand the intention—design thinking is a process employed by all kinds of creative thinkers, and even though people don't know it by name, they can contribute to the conversation—but it was tossed together in a haphazard sequence that did little to clarify or educate. 

To quote a Twitter user named Jacob Furniss, "What is design thinking? I just watched a movie about it and still don't know."

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Designing for Designers

Do plumbers call the plumber? Do furniture builders sit in chairs built by other people? Do editors have editors? Do designers hire designers? Lizy Gerzenshon and Travis Kochel, aka Scribble Tone, were charged with creating the branding and identity for Design Week Portland. It's a peculiar circumstance, one I suspect doesn't happen too often, where designers are every piece of the puzzle: maker, client and audience.

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Documenting DIY

"It's kind of difficult for people to grasp all the little parts of what I do. My work ties together at some point, but I walk in a lot of different circles." 

Faythe Levine's talk at Portland State University yesterday showed a perfectly chaotic mixture of her own work and the work of others, demonstrating simply that her work is the work of others. Her work chronicles and curates, tasking herself with both documenting and creating community.

Case in point: Levine spent the month of August living off the grid in the Appalachian woods of North Carolina, surrounded by friends in a month-long celebration of kinship. She refers to it as a "land project," an experiment in living that breathes intentionality, collaboration, and creativity. She lived in a wood shack with no cell phone reception or electricity. "But I can't not work for a month," she explained, "so I decided to document." Levine shot 3500 photos in one month.

"It was actually, to be perfectly honest, the best thing I've ever done," she said.

Levine walked the audience through her images, temporarily transporting us to the lush, hilly forest outside of Asheville, North Carolina. The outdoor communal kitchen, bunches of bananas and bags of onions hanging from the rafters. The houses made from hay bales, with colored glass bottles for windows. Little shacks made of scrap wood and old windows. Costumed people with painted faces. A woman perched high in the trees, hand-tying a teetering rope bridge to a treehouse platform thirty feet above the ground. "I didn't go up there," Levine joked. The entire month was coordinated via snail mail, with no promotion or invitations made via the internet. 

This intentionality, this homemade, DIY spirit, is both the subject of Levine's work as well as the ethos that drives her practice. "Most of my work is based in community. People working together, living their lives together," she said. Her involvement with and interest in DIY communities goes back to years spent as part of the Black Cat Cafe, a vegan anarchist collective in Seattle. She shows us a single photograph of the cafe and notes that she didn't have a camera at that point. "I guess I was too busy being an activist," she said.

But now she does have a camera. She also has a gallery space that she curates in Milwaukee, where she lives. Levine helps shape and articulate the story of an active community of crafters through her annual craft event in Milwaukee, Art vs. Craft, as well as her documentary and book Handmade Nation. Her work, whether as curator or documentarian, brings makers together and helps generate exposure for their creative work.

Levine's latest project tells a different story, but one that still relates back to her general interest in creative communities who use their hands to make a visual impact. Signpainters is a documentary film set to debut early next year, with a companion book that comes out this month. Co-authored with Sam Macon, the book and film document the shrinking art of sign painting, tracing the trade's history, decline and recent renaissance. 

"I have a general interest in people going back to the old way of doing things, and how they fit into contemporary society," Levine explained. 

Signpanters was created at an apt moment. Our landscape is inundated with visual garbage—a “creeping sameness,” as the Signpainters book description explains. Handmade Nation was made during a similar time, when the resurgence of craft was firing up in response to the proliferation of mass-manufactured consumer goods. Each community has their own approach, a DIY approach, that stands in contrast (if not in opposition) to the dominant culture of manufacturing. 

By calling our attention to the differences between objects that are built by hand and those that are mass-produced, Levine is raising questions about the impact of a machine-manufactured culture. If fewer humans are involved in the making of consumer goods, does a community have room to grow around common work? Levine calls upon us to wonder: as human hands shape fewer of our physical surroundings, will our own drive to participate and create fade?

Signpainters, Handmade Nation and Levine’s expansive practice of curatorial and documentary projects show us that creative community can can be defined in many ways. Not just by a shared set of skills and materials, and not just by a shared set of values, but also through the articulation of a community’s story. Narratives help shape identity. As we read, watch and engage in these communities’ stories, we’re helping to acknowledge the value and impact of their work on our own lives.

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Messy Problems

But, what are we, designers, really qualified to do?

I think that design is simply bringing structure to messy problems. That's it. All of this output that we generate are just artifacts of that. The posters, logos, furniture, products, packaging, layout, usability, interactive and the other forms of design production. We, as designers, not only have to be comfortable with ill-defined, confused, vague, incongruent, problems with fuzzy edges, we need to understand that we have the toolkit to structure those problems and solve them. What works out nicely is that well-structured solutions are usually beautiful.  

As graphic designers, I think that the messy problems we mostly deal with are messages. Our job is to figure out the best way to visually communicate messages. Sometimes we help people understand their own message and other times we take direction and translate that into a visual language. 

Is there a way to be a graphic designer, not be broke, and feel ok about what you are doing?

No. :)

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All or Nothing

I'm paraphrasing, but his remarks went something like this:

General Idea decided, from the outset, not to compromise on anything; that we wouldn't allow partial ideas to move forward. That we would arrive at a consensus as a group or we would take that idea and put it back on the shelf for a while. We did that with many things and, sometimes for years. As time would pass, our thinking about our previous ideas would inevitably shift and we would revisit those ideas and see them quite differently. For some reason, consensus was usually easier after time had passed.

It's interesting to consider agreeing with your collaborators, from the beginning, to not compromise on anything. To agree on an idea or shelve it and move on. What does the passage of time do to our thinking about an idea? Maybe when our focus and energy changes to a new problem, the original problem doesn't seem as mission critical as it once did making it easier to find consensus? 

Well, he's got a track record of successful projects that stretches back longer than many of us have been alive. He's clearly got something figured out about how to collaborate well.

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Curating Process and Sharing Connections

The exhibit was made of paper scraps and crude cardboard prototypes. Tracing paper with smeared graphite sketches sat atop a podium and videos made by high school students played on computer screens that were bolted to the wall. There was a blue chicken coop in the middle of the room. The Studio H exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Craft was not a typical presentation.

"You can't show architecture in a museum," Namita Wiggers explained. Wiggers is the Director and Chief Curator of the MoCC and she was presented with this unique challenge when she began thinking about how to showcase the work of Studio H, the educational arm of humanitarian design non-profit Project H. The physical building is only part of the experience, Wiggers said. And so sharing the design process that yielded the building is a way to tell part of the structure's story, at least as museums seek solutions for translating architecture experience into a gallery space.

Why is a museum of craft is showing this work at all? Isn't Project H more appropriate for an educational context or an architectural setting? Isn't this content best suited for a design community? Perhaps, but the work spearheaded by Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller and executed in collaboration with Studio H students fits squarely into the types of cross-disciplinary conversations the museum is interested in fostering. "I think that craft and design go hand in hand,” Wiggers said, “and you could argue that all three: craft, art and design, go hand in hand. But, in my mind, craft and design are particularly aligned because you can't craft something without understanding the design process.” Design and craft are interrelated. Woven together, bound together. MoCC has been fostering a dialogue about craft since its founding in 1937. If we choose to believe that design and craft are such good friends, then the museum has been instigating conversation about design for just as long. "Obviously the [exhibitions] with 'design' in the title are easier to grasp," Wiggers said. She cited one show in particular as a prime example of the relationships between design, craft and art. Manuf®actured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects, installed in 2008, featured artists working with off-the-shelf objects designed for mass production. According to Wiggers, their techniques of manipulation came from craft processes, yet the final products were "very conceptual," an attribute typically associated with fine art. The show currently on display at the MoCC exemplifies the crossover between craft and design, though in a different way. Design with the Other 90%: CITIES is traveling from the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and is co-presented and co-hosted by local humanitarian non-profit Mercy Corps. It focuses on socially responsible design solutions that address critical urban issues across the globe. CITIES is a curatorial challenge in itself because the connection between design and craft is a bit harder to tease out of this collection of projects. The multifaceted show highlights innovative approaches to urban planning, housing, social services, entrepreneurship and education, but there are fewer objects than we might expect and the scale of the work is vast—housing developments, buildings, neighborhoods and transportation corridors. The connections between this type of strategic design work and craft are indirect. Wiggers explained, “It’s tangential things, like the attention to materiality. [It’s] the attention to repetition, to processes, to solutions that come from reworking materials right where you are and making do with what’s available.” Problem-solving, which is arguably the essence of design, is something a craftsperson has to do all the time, Wiggers noted. While CITIES may not be a precise example of craft, its inclusion in the museum’s programming helps us rethink craft itself and consider its contributions on a larger scale. The MoCC is also raising questions about how to talk about these crossovers, implementing innovative curatorial approaches that place them in the position of rethinking the role of the museum in the 21st century. Let’s think back to the Studio H exhibit for a moment. “That was an experiment. To see, could we show process?” Wiggers asked. “That kind of design process, the sorting, the sifting, the culling, ending up with a design brief—It's messy, it's chaotic, it's confusing. It doesn't look like anything for a very long time. “When you present an exhibition that is process-oriented,” Wiggers continued, “what you end up having is this really great opportunity to get people to question process, to question their own processes of working, and to question what it means in a museum to not present the finished, final product, and what it means to be a museum itself.” Museums are cultural institutions. They’re educational institutions. They’re public spaces that carefully choose content and present it in ways that helps us think and discover. Museums facilitate active learning and collective inquiry, offering communities specific topics and bodies of work to share in conversation together. The idea that individuals and communities can rally around a topic or collection of work as an active way to understand their own live and places is a potential championed by contemporary museums. People tend to view museums as an “other,” an institutional and authoritative voice distanced from the reality of their own lives, homes, and communities. While museums are, and ought to be, curated by experts and intellectuals, there is a move within contemporary museum culture to better connect with the public. Institutions like the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Design Museum London are working to make art and design content more comprehensible and relatable through educational initiatives, accessible programming and, like MoCC, through fresh approaches to content and presentation. “By challenging people out of their complacent ideas of what they think a museum should be, we're making them better museum-goers," Wiggers said. "We're trying to get them to ask questions of their own lives, and their own environments, about their homes, their offices, their everyday spaces. If we really want craft and design to be a part of everyday life, we have to teach people how to ask questions.”

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The Problem with Solutions

The projects presented at FullscreenPDX, last night, ranged from the beautiful to the banal. A public forum is supposed to be unfiltered and unpolished with ideas being presented in an early form but, like a yard sale, you have to work pretty hard to find the good stuff.  And there was indeed good stuff. What really resonated with me was Steph Hatcher’s experimental physics based world for mobile devices, but also the Strange Agency’s iOS audio applications and Simon Yuen’s DIY CD cases. 

We need to be able to sift through the ideas at these events faster and somehow circle back around to the strongest ones. Maybe ideas could be voted up or down as they’re presented. Maybe the event needs to be more like a game show. Or maybe, instead of showing the audience a result, the presenters should show us a problem they’re having and the audience can help find solutions. That approach has some potential, but we’ve experimented with that with our critique sessions called the Feedback Loop to mixed success. For example, Greg Jones of 54/40 presented a product-packaging dilemma he was having. Designer Mette Hornung Rankin saw the potential and their resulting collaboration turned into a beautiful solution. But that was one success from batches of presentations that weren't able to connect. If the ideas being presented don’t connect with at least somebody in the audience, then it’s hard to consider the presentation a success, I think.

It will take more experimenting with the format to get it right. That’s good. These type of events are a favorite of mine and hold a lot of potential. I’d like to see Portland lead the way in developing strong models of forum critiques. Somewhere in all of that is a perfect structure for it, we just haven’t found it quite yet. But let’s keep experimenting. Count me in.

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"I think that graffiti is design."

Tonight, the Portland chapter of the AIGA presents Graffiti Fine Art, a film about the intersection of art and graffiti. Filmmaker Jared Levy will be in attendance for a Q&A after the film, and there will be a showcase of a graffiti-inspired alphabet made by Portland’s top designers and hand-letterers.

Levy’s film addresses the friction between graffiti and art, but its inclusion in Design Week and its presentation by the AIGA led me to wonder how design plays into that relationship. In anticipation of tonight’s screening, I asked Levy a few questions. Read below for his thoughts on graffiti, art, and design and the intricate economic, cultural, and visual relationships that play out in his film.

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Throughlines at Design Crush

The other throughline was that there was a lot of hand-drawn editorial illustration. I think it strikes a note that still resonates with Portlanders. That note being…organic creaturism? Considering how much vector based art there is on the internet, I was surprised to see very little of it at Design Crush. Maybe there are still shreds of regional design left after the internet takeover of graphic design? 

So, Cookie Monster blue and lots of hand-drawn editorial illustration. Look for them at Design Crush*. There will be an open house for the show on Thursday from 3 to 6pm. Go see it and meet some of the art directors behind the work. I’ll be there too (I think).

* Bonus points: Find the Cookie Monster blue in the Design with the Other 90%: CITIES logo

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This or That

Let’s take a look at some of these head-to-head events, and just for kicks let’s work backwards from the end of Design Week.

Saturday: Coast Modern and Ai Weiwei —OR— The Straight Six —OR— Nike Graphic Studio Art Show. 

Friday: Sign Painting —OR— Designing Narrative Media Experiences

Thursday: This is a tough day for those who don’t want to choose. Wieden+Kennedy, Selling People Things They Do Need —OR— Design Writers Panel. 

Ouch! I want to go to both of those. And then later it’s another match up with How to Make a Book With Steidl —OR— Designspeaks with Jeff Kovel

Wednesday: Collaborate for the Better with Jolby & Friends —OR— Different By Design at Nemo

Which brings us to tomorrow, Tuesday. Right out of the gate there are events competing for my foot traffic. Fullscreen PDX at Instrument —OR— Sergio Palleroni Charrette at Mercy Corps —OR— Petits Poèmes Fleuris. And those all take place during the Design Week Opening Party. 

It has been suggested that, for next year’s Design Week (Design Week Too!), the events are structured into tidier windows of time, more compartmentalized so that the amount of overlap is reduced. Another thought is to coordinate all of the events so that they happen in consecutive order. So there you go, we’re already improving next year’s Design Week and we haven’t even yet begun this one. That’s because we’re epic problem solvers!

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Thinking Caps

• Will Design Week have an effect on your practice? If yes, what is it? If no, why go?

• Will the Mayor be attending any Design Week Portland events? What’s the City of Portland’s role in Design Week?

• Who isn’t part of Design Week either in events or open houses? Why?

• What challenges does Portland’s graphic design community face? If you could snap your fingers and one thing would be fixed, what would it be? 

• Are there too many graphic designers in Portland? How many are there? What number would be satisfactory?

• What’s been the most significant development, good or bad, in local design in the past year. 

• Are the Portland design schools (PSU, PNCA, AI, OCAC) doing a good job? How would you improve them? 

• Are there too many graphic design students here? In a town where recent graduates don’t want to leave, is there enough work to support them? If not, what, if anything, should be done about that? 

• Did you know that the PSU Graphic Design program’s budget is set at $0.00 for this year? And that the program has around 550 graphic design majors? (Full disclosure: my wife is faculty there)

• There is no student AIGA chapter at PSU or PNCA? Only AI?

• Is there a highest strata of designers in Portland? Who’s on that list? What criteria puts them there? Where are they in Design Week? 

• Tell me: what can we not say publicly about our design community? I'll write about it.

Nicole has questions too

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Asking stupid questions (and smart ones, too)

"This is my favorite park." I was walking up Elsie Street in San Francisco towards Holly Park, with my eleven-year-old cousin and her dog. She was quiet for a moment and then asked, "Why?" "Well, because it's on top of a hill." "Why do you care that it's on top of a hill?" "So that I can see views from it." "Why do you want to see views?" "I guess I like to see cities from up high." "Why?" "So I can understand better where I am and see how far the city goes." "Why do you want to see how far it goes?" "Mmm, I think I like to have a sense of place and a sense of scale when I'm walking around." "Why?"

It seems that a wide sampling of Portland design people are represented in Design Week programming. But did we leave anyone out? Are there individuals or groups that should be included, and how do we ensure future Design Weeks remain inclusive? What on earth is Produce Row? (Isn't it a restaurant with a nice outside patio?) Does branding a neighborhood really help it grow?

Wieden+Kennedy is hosting a talk on Thursday called "Selling people things they do need," discussing their work for cultural institutions such as Travel Oregon, the American Indian College Fund and Caldera. Does that mean the rest of their work sells people things they don't need? Should humanitarian design be shown in a craft museum? How does that help the public understand design? How does it confuse? Where does the creative services industry rank in relation to Portland's other industries? If Portland had a design manifesto, what would it say?

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Ready, Set... Go!

It all starts tomorrow. The first evening of Design Week Portland feels almost like a debutante's ball, a debut of sorts. Now is design’s time to shine, through an overloaded week of compelling lectures, presentations, parties and films. The events held on this first evening of programming offer a glimpse at some key characteristics of Portland's design community. Sharing, collaboration, hunger for inspiration, and the incessant mixture of leisure and inquiry are features of our creative scene that will be on display during this first evening of programming and throughout the week.

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We Gotta Be Stretchy

Next week, movie houses across the city will be overrun with design. There will be a documentary film about an experimental book publisher, a performance retrospective about the artist Marina Abramović, a film discussing the process of design thinking, a feature-length biography about Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, a piece on a Japanese fashion design icon, and a showcase of American West Coast modernist architecture. Whew! We have Felix Ng to thank for that.

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What Happened to the Portland Storage Co. Sign?

It’s fascinating to think of signs as conversations that people inside of buildings are having with those outside. They're both silent and clamorous at the same time, and they can transmit complex messages like, “hey, we’re a shop that sells coffee” with a simple image of a coffee cup. How many messages are silently delivered via sign in Portland each day? Millions surely.

At a full city block in width, the sign was enormous, almost grotesque in scale, and yet it offered up no ornamentation and no information other than the name of the company in bold white on black: PORTLAND STORAGE CO. Rising above the heart of the Central Eastside Industrial District from S.E. 2nd and Morrison, and painted on the windowless east facade of the John Deere Plow Co. building, it was visible from all around the Southeast quadrant, especially when driving across the Morrison Bridge. You couldn’t not see it.  

It was plausible that it had been created as early as 1910 or as late as the '90s, but was it historic? To answer that question I asked the source, the Portland Storage Co. Turns out, it wasn't: the sign had been painted in 1996. But, did it evoke classic sensibilities? Yes.

In August of 2010, it was painted over. After a 14 year run, the Portland Storage Co. sign was replaced by an advertisement for cheap airfare to Hawaii on Alaska Airlines.  

Seeing the change underway as I passed by, I wondered why painting over it was necessary. Why not keep it intact and instead lay a billboard over it? The answer, as I later learned from the Portland Storage Co., is because the building is listed on the historic registry. The hardware necessary for hanging anything of that size from the side of the building would violate the integrity of the historic structure. While this restriction is understandable, it still seems unfortunate that the sign had to be deleted. 

A Portland Mercury’s Blogtown author thought so too, posting about the over-painting as it was happening, titling it “Dying as I Type” but mislabeling the sign as the “Portland Oregon” sign. In an earlier post, they wrote: “I suppose that it is already a giant billboard right now, but it's a pleasing billboard. It's simple. It references the industrial uses of SE Portland. It's just plain better looking than a Burger King or Prius ad.” I agree.

Some readers disagreed wondering: “Why is one company's large testament to commerce better than another company's large testament to commerce? This wasn't a mural being painted over. Just some pretty boring words.” and sarcastically stating “Wow, 20 years. Clearly an icon.” 

I think those commenters missed the mark. The sign had more value than that, especially when viewed against what’s replaced it. Here’s why: The Portland Storage Company is a locally owned small business, part of the neighborhood it does business in, and in that way, the sign fit with its surroundings. There was a connection and a bond between the business, their signage, and their neighborhood. It was anchored to the Southeast.

But that anchor broke. The new sign is disjointed from its surroundings. It’s a foreign object that first tried to sell us airline tickets and has now moved on to telling us flatly that “Quest Is Now CenturyLink.” The sign has gone from being a part of our community to being imposed on it. Instead of being harmonized with the area, it creates a dissonance.

In addition, there was more intrinsic value than might be immediately apparent. The building was originally built for the John Deere Plow Co. in 1906, and the original sign featured their brand. When Portland Storage Co. later occupied the building, they painted their sign in reference to what went before it, following its lead closely and retaining its visual characteristics to the best of their ability. In doing so, they maintained a continuum and created a conversation between the two signs, a conversation that took place over the span of a century.

The only significant change that Portland Storage Co. made was in the typeface, replacing John Deere’s wide sans serif with a condensed Gothic No. 13. It was a good choice. Gothic No. 13 was cut by R. Hunter Middleton in 1942. He based it on Morris Fuller Benton’s gothics that defined early 20th century American industrialism. They stripped away the ornamentation of Victorianism and helped to usher in the beginnings of the modern era. 

The sign once employed the aesthetic of no-frills, hard-working, industry that, it could be argued, has defined Portland’s branding style over the past decade from Aaron Draplin’s DDC to OMFG Co. to Produce Row and a host of other design shops located in that Central Eastside Industrial District. The sign was so large and projected such a message of clarity and industriousness that it was a background presence in shaping the past ten years of Portland’s branding aesthetic, certainly through osmosis if nothing else. I find it hard to imagine that “Quest is Now CenturyLink” is having that same impact.