Inspired

One of the benefits of being in a partnership of which half is in California is that there is always an excuse to go there when the daily grind seems to be taking over. There’s an opportunity to see new things and come back feeling inspired and recharged. I was over there a few weeks ago. Check out these huge painted hearts appearing all over San Francisco at the moment at www.heartsinsf.com. They’re like the ‘artist-painted cows’ that were all over London a few years ago, and I think the ‘I left my heart in San Francisco’ joke is great. It’s also inspiring when David Turner sends me the design projects he’s working on so that I can add my ‘two penneth’ to the solution. For example, the logo for Truce, a cognac/ vodka mixed drink. David was trying to represent this curious mix in a piece of type where the word interlocked perfectly with itself. It seemed impossible and we tried and tried. Eventually, David pulled it off, although to this day I don’t know how. I think it’s pretty amazing. I suppose we were influenced by the impossible drawings of MC Escher and Shigeo Fukuda, which had been in our subconscious for years, without realising it. So, following that logic we’ll probably do a design that uses giant painted hearts about 30 years from now.