Design Kompany | Brand Marketing by Graphic Design studio in Seattle

Earlier this spring Design Kompany went to Boston to be on the East Coast for a bit to get some inspiration.

You might remember my lament about Dunkin’ Donuts.

Wanted to share some other things from that same trip. Like this picture. We wandered into a museum on the Harvard campus that features a lot of really intricate glass representations of the reproductive parts of many kinds of plants.

And other things, like this sculpture, and also a bazillion butterflies and beetles.

I have to admit my own favorite thing to see was this mobile, also on Harvard’s campus:

We went in to find a bathroom, but this turned out to be a lot more exciting. It was especially nice because we were just getting started on a branding project for some very scientific folks, and the nerdiness of the place got us all in the mood to think about structure and form. Revelation: It was okay to talk about chemistry and math here! I could geek out about sine and cosine curves or Mandelbrot or the Carnot cycle or Bernoulli or crystalline structures or how to math model the Saint Louis Arch. I actually did talk once about how I’d find the formula of the parabola of that arch once—during some interviews that went so well I won a 4-year college scholarship.

Yay for nerdiness!

But that was a long time ago. Back to the Boston report.

Advertising

You start noticing every kind of ad there is when you are in the graphic design biz. So here are a couple snaps from moving around on the T that we thought were kind of interesting:

Since when did you see this kind of cross-promotion? Reebok sneakers in Kool-Aid colors? Hmmm. Dodgy, I’d say.

This is one of those instances where I want to say, “What do you mean, ‘enhance?’” Enhance. An ad for a graduate school with this word doesn’t make me want to go there. Well, wait. Maybe I’m being too quick to say that. Let me try it out again.

Enhance.

Okay, I still hate it. Enhance. Sorry, no.

This is more of the kind of thing you would expect Design Kompany to take visual notes on. Especially because Akira took a million photos of graffiti art in Manhattan on his solo trip there for inspiration.

Other parts of Boston

It was a big deal for me to get to South Boston and check out some of the Irish scene there. This was a couple of days after Patrick’s Day, so there were still some bright green tinsel things hanging outside of people’s front doors. But I really liked these stars and flowers:

Also made it to Jamaica Plain, supposedly the up-and-coming hipster part of town.

I read this article about how Google got sued for putting up some kind of live cam streaming thing to some people’s pool or something. I hope the owner of these boots doesn’t get mad at me for posting this—

I do have a thing about Google being all voyeuristic and all that, to be fair.

Here’s that BBC article accusing Google for privacy invasion.

See more Design Kompany field reports under our “Reports from the Field” category in the right-hand column of this page.