1. WHY WE KEEP TALKING ABOUT DESIGN

We make pockets, so you'd be within your rights to wonder why half of these letters are about somebody else's work.

It's because this is what the conversations actually sound like when we're working out what our brand looks like and how we design the things we make.

One of us loves something and can't say why, so I go looking for the reason, and I come back with a story. More often than not it is about a woman, about reinvention, and about somebody deciding that the normal way of doing it wasn't going to work for them. Underneath all of it is the thing we go on about here every week, which is noticing, and giving a bit of respect to the people who got there first.

A couple of years ago I painted my son's bedroom. I put an enormous undulating line around the walls, letting the colour run off one wall and onto the next. I liked it. He liked it. I didn't think much more about it.

Then, when Sioux and I started working out what These Good Days should look like, I kept coming back to the same things. Bold colour. Geometric shapes. Things much bigger than you normally expect a pattern to be.

That is not a brief. It's a handful of adjectives and a hopeful look.

It also wasn't quite an accident. I'd been responding to a particular way of using shape, colour and scale for years without knowing where it came from.

So I went looking.

And found Barbara Stauffacher Solomon.

2. SHE HAD TO START AGAIN 

In 1955, Barbara Stauffacher's husband died. She was in her twenties with a small daughter to support, and in 1955 the expected answer to that was another husband.

She went to Switzerland instead.

She took her mother and her three-year-old daughter to Basel, where she studied at the Basel School of Design under Armin Hofmann. She was the first American student there.

She didn't go to study art, which she'd been doing happily until then. Art didn't pay. Design did. As she put it years later, she designed because she needed to eat.

Her whole first year went on drawing a single alphabet, over and over, until she could see every millimetre of the black against the white. She came back to California in the early 1960s with that rigour intact, and kept hold of it while everyone around her was creating psychedelic squiggles.

Stop work, it looks like a prison. Sea Ranch, 1965

The Sea Ranch was an ambitious new development on the Northern California coast, and the early architecture did not go smoothly.

The first design for the condominiums went back to the developers. The answer came by telegram.

Stop work, it said. It looks like a prison.

The architects reworked it, adding bay windows and courtyards to break up the boxes.

She had been hired to design the printed things, the logo and the brochures. The walls came her way because the architects had gone over budget on the swim and tennis club and had nothing left to finish the interiors. The interiors were bare, paint was cheap, and they asked her to make the spaces happy.

She was the only woman on the design team, and she painted the locker rooms with two local house painters in three days.

What they painted was not signage. Letters two storeys high, stripes and arrows in red, ultramarine, black and white, drawn to the size and shape of the building and running across the walls, around the corners and over the ceilings. When you stand in the middle of a place like this the room stops behaving like a room. The colour moves you through the space.

In 1967, the architectural critic C. Ray Smith gave that approach a name. Supergraphics.

She liked to say she broke all the rules. Look closely and everything Basel taught her is still in there. She changed one thing. The scale.

At that size the old rules stop being any use, so she wrote another set. The shape belongs to the thing it sits on. Colour is structure rather than decoration. And if it won't fit on one surface, let it carry on onto the next.

She didn't decorate the building. She looked at what the building was doing and made the paint join in.

Painted over, and painted everywhere

Life magazine put the work in front of the world in 1966. By her own account, she forgot to tell them who the architect was, and Charles Moore never spoke to her again. The murals were painted over a few years later.

Here is the part that gets me. A design can be removed and still change everything that comes after it. Within a few years supergraphics were turning up everywhere, on university corridors, shop interiors and record covers, while the walls they started on were white again.

A woman who remade herself out of necessity, then spent the rest of her life finding new ways to make buildings behave differently.

3. WHAT CHANGED FOR US

Scale isn't a matter of size. Past a certain point a pattern stops decorating a surface and starts shaping it.

A stripe on fabric is a pattern. A stripe that crosses a seam starts talking to the shape of the thing. A colour at the edge of a pocket can make the edge feel like part of the design rather than somewhere the fabric happens to stop.

So we design to the object. Every colour is chosen for the thing it's on, never added at the end. Most of our time now goes on a millimetre on a stripe, where a colour stops, the zip and its pull, the join, the border, the lining, the bit that disappears inside the bag.

Where to see this thinking in London

You can see versions of this way of thinking without leaving London. In the atrium of 1 Finsbury Avenue at Broadgate, Atoll has stood since 2019, a 7.5m structure by the British artist Morag Myerscough, with the outline of London terraced houses on it, six neon suns and a café underneath.

Get a coffee and stand under it for a minute. Look at how the colour, structure and building are working together. You can see Barbara's thinking in it.

If you go, send me a photograph, or tell me what you've walked past that does the same thing. I'd like to know.

The Square Mile I started out in did not look like this.

4. IN THE STUDIO THIS WEEK

All of this has made us look again at some of our own design decisions.

AI can now produce almost any visual direction in seconds, which is making us ask a slightly uncomfortable question.

Why this?

Why this colour, this stripe, this shape? And why does it belong on this particular thing?

We're still working that one out.

More on that another time.

Sera

These are the good days. Please don't paint over them.