Archive

It is the pride and honor of every designer to have the opportunity to work on something that is truly profound. Such opportunities, like designing the Jüdisches Museum, Berlin or the Tube Map for London’s Underground, seldom grace the life of a designer. But, the opportunity to design a country, is one that almost never happens.

That is, until Dutch designer Daniel van der Velden was commissioned in 2003, to design money, passports and stamps for the abandoned water fortress off the British coast, proclaimed to be the independent micro-nation of The Principality of Sealand.

As disputed and controversial as this nation status may be, the project to conceive Sealand’s visual identity was not without complexity. Part and parcel to ‘The Sealand Identity Project’ and the uniqueness of this man-made, self-proclaimed nation, was the internet, as global archive.

In a press release in 2003, Van der Velden is quoted as saying:

The consequences of the internet’s daily usage, its universal vastness and its potential to blur the boundaries between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’, will be key operators in the design methods employed.nettimes.org

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Being at loss of words lately, has led me down some strange paths of distractions, none of which ended at this blog. I’ve been wanting to get back in the swing of things for while, blogwise, but I’ve just found myself at a complete lack. Of interest? Of energy? I’m not really sure.

Yesterday I started a post and mistakenly obliterated everything I had written (and yes, I should draft my writing in a word program, but I don’t) when I was interrupted and failed to successfully hit ‘⌘ + T’ to open a new tab, and navigated away from my post page. Fortunately, I hadn’t saved anything (it wasn’t going anywhere worth while).

So, instead of starting over, I started mucking around with refining my search results page. They had been left half finished months and months ago.

Anyway, this leads me to my point. While making these refinements, I was testing a few random searches and one these queries happened to be for the term “hair“.

I realize I’m setting myself up to be shrinked, especially given the title of this post, but “hair” was simple and easy to type, and that’s why it came out. The title, it was simply carried over from the previous post (completely different topic, of course) I managed to lose.

Back to what I was saying, I was in all accounts, completely expecting my query for “hair” to return zip. But it didn’t. In fact, it returned 3 posts. Now that’s not a lot by any means, but hair, when have I ever written about hair? I was curious, so I checked. And what do you know, I was writing about hair. More precisely, about pulling my hair out.

I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before, but you might say it’s a sign. Vacation anyone?