Coffee Beans and Soft Serve

Most design writing hides where the idea came from. Organic forms. An exploration of silhouette. A study in proportion. Those phrases do one job, which is to sound like thinking without committing to anything.

I name the actual thing.

Smoothy is a task light for Gantri and it came from soft serve. Koffy is a bottled iced coffee for Paris Baguette in Korea, and the form is the coffee bean, because every other brand in that aisle had settled on a nostalgic milk bottle and the problem was finding a shape that was genuinely unlike them.

There are two different things called a reference and they get confused constantly. The one a client brings is a taste brief. This is the register, this is what good looks like to us. It tells me what I am working in. It does not tell me what to make. The other kind is where the form actually comes from, and it usually has nothing to do with the category. Treating the first as the second is how you end up with a product that looks like the moodboard.

The other honest part is that the reference usually shows up late. Helix is a pendant for Rodina, two flexible light tubes spiraled around a support, and the tidy way to write it is that I started with hair braiding. I didn't. Slim LED had collapsed into the straight extrusion, and the search was about giving shape to something that thin and finding a material that could bring softness to an architecture that is otherwise hard and cold. The braid is what the search produced. Design writing runs this backwards almost every time, because a reference at the start sounds like inspiration and a reference at the end sounds like work.

Sometimes there isn't one at all. Steelfire is a griddle for Solo and it came out of standing in real backyards watching people cook. Griddling turned out to be social, and the big rectangular format puts the cook behind a wall with the guests on the other side of it. The racetrack plan is not styling. It is the shape that puts people around the cook.

Naming the reference is a small risk, and that is the point. Say a light came from soft serve and someone can go look at soft serve and decide you are wrong. Say it came from organic forms and there is nothing to check.