Design Kompany's Around Town
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Ira Glass on trusting the process to find your creative voice


Ira Glass: Stuff at first will not be good, but you have killer taste.

Creative Process of a Painter

I met Malo, a painter from Columbia, this past weekend. He was a delight to talk to, and had a lot to say about his process, his burgeoning visual art career (he was previously a fashion photographer, he told me), and the art of relationship-building that it’s based on. All the stuff DK is always [...]

In Search of Meaning (35): Ozu and the soft and calm

Can’t stop thinking about this cinematographically tight, ace story by master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, last mentioned by me when we met logo designer Kiyoshi Inoue. The film is called “Sanma no Aji,” which translates as “The Taste of Mackerel,” but for marketing purposes to English audiences, they called it “An Autumn Afternoon.”

How an ex con becomes an inspiration


Photo of Otis Lyons courtesy Scenes From My Lunch Hour, from this article on Otis Lyons

When he was 12, Otis Lyons‘ mother told him to leave home. “My mother was on drugs every day,” he said to a group gathered at the Durham Rotary Club’s meeting downtown yesterday.

Turning to gangs and the rough life in poor neighborhoods of Durham, he was thrown into jail and sentenced for 30 years for being “influential,” he said. Some of that time he was in solitary confinement. But the sentence was overturned, and in 1994, Lyons was released. With a new lease on life, Lyons committed to an abstract idea. Giving kids hope. “Every kid has some good in him.”

The Artists are Present in Durham this Saturday

Something new.

Improv art show.

Sidewalk sale. Sharpie tattoos. Us. You.

7 photographers DK loves and recommends


A video by Seattle videographer Patrick Wright

Sometimes we need to hire photographers. It could be for events, for portraits, or for our clients’ web site imagery.

Here are some people we’ve gotten to know personally, and whom we love working with because they’re professional, talented, and probably most important: fun to be around. (Who wants to work with cranky artists? Not me! Yet, there are so very many…)

In Search of Meaning (34): ‘You often need a lot of new input’


To Buda or Pest?

DK makes a Sharpie slideshow for Fuzzy Quantum Pop talk








SELECT CLIENTS



Avenue Medical Products
Allied Arts of Seattle
Atlantic School of English
Barka Lounge
Blitz
Bonanzle
The Broader View
C'ODA Architects
Case Design + PM
Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce
Celtic Ross Hotel
Cleveland-Holloway Neighborhood
Counting Stars
D+A Studio
Dragon Search
Duke University
Good Dog Art
Home Alive
Flow
Fuse IQ
Green Plus
Group3 Architects
Gupta Insurance & Financial Services
Hindsight Veterinary Care
Honshu Wolf
Japanese Language School of Raleigh
Key Microfinance
Kikokugo
Little Green Software
Loom Foundation
Maekawa Japanese Restaurant
Matchbox Mobile
MD Systems
Million Monarchs
Joji Minatogawa Architects
Miyabi Japanese Restaurant
Modern Business Training Services
MyVoucher
New Hope Acupuncture
Northwest Asian Weekly
North Carolina Community Shares
North Carolina State University
The Pink Goonies
Real Science
Red Pill Strategies
Revolt
Row House Cafe
Salon |e| Aspire
Seattle Central Community College
Skibbereen Tool Hire
Snaptotes
Spaccarotelli
Spectator Magazine
Swoon Spa
Vibrance Nutrition + Fitness
WRP Associates
Wedding invitation design
West Cork People
Wonder Puppy
World Beer Festival
Write with Meaning
Zenovation




DK in 20 seconds



Welcome to Design Kompany.

We exist to help you realize your fullest potential as a small business, using dialogue as a key tool to discern your clear, authentic brand message.

If you value thoughtful conversation, accuracy, and exquisite solutions arrived upon through solid design thinking, you might like DK.

We've done naming, branding design, and message design to help people express a strong core identity. But it has to be based on passion. Smaller companies are a great match for DK, because we love talking marketing and strategy with those owners, whose values and affinities often set the company culture's tone.

We work remotely with people anywhere in the world who are: aware, awake, curious, and respectful of the design process, which we think sets the stage for great design when done well. Talk to us! We're listening. -Dipika


Things we like to write about? Travel, art, architecture, museums, and cafes. Design, materials, design thinking, but more than anything else, process. We like to say, "Trust the process." It really makes a big difference if you start with a fresh page, and think together with us on where and what you can become.

Trains are good, too. Small comments on parenting, or what other people are doing, and what other people are saying about creativity, and the creative process, and a shift from the industrial way of thinking towards more free-form association that jogs new waves of thought --- all of that is DK's beat.

Plus we'll write about people we meet, things we learn, and all the cross-cultural and multiple dimensions of interpretations. We have another blog getting going just to consider dialogue design.

But to make this blog easier to sift, here are the topics we're slotting our blog posts within:

TOPICS

Categories

CONTACT DK

Design Kompany is in Durham, NC.

PO Box 1512
Durham, NC 27702
@designkompany facebook.com/designkompany
o. 919.886.6332
c. 206.778.5136 My status | email