Davis' Place

THE FIRST CUT IS THE DEEPEST. When you're starting a business, I've learned that clients will turn into friends quicker than a friend will turn into a client. I've known Gifford from afar through mutual friends and family for years, but I hadn't gotten the chance to know him until I started working with him when he hired me to design his menus. There's an invaluable lesson that I learned in our last sit-down meeting about seven months ago that's stuck with me. 

When you're on the path of a self-fulfilling pursuit, we find ourselves waiting for the moment for everything to click. Maybe business will pick up, maybe someone will believe in you just enough to make everything feel like you're doing something right. Maybe you'll even believe in your own cause. But, maybe you won't. And maybe nobody else will either. Albeit it, family, friends, or, most devastatingly, yourself.  But the individuals that I see whose success means something larger than the immediate mission at hand have something in common: there's a security in uplifting others.

There's a confidence that rages on that wages the cost of a pursuit through value: that value is self-assuredness. There are people that won't be supportive. We'll have to forge our own path, and we have to sail our own ship. We make our beds, and we have to lie in them. But the profoundness of tearing down other people who are trying to make their way and rise higher in their endeavors is remarkable. Yet, Gifford is standing for something larger. In an idealistic society, everybody wins. That's not always easy to see when America is divided by identity politics on both aisles, the news constantly lying to you, and confusion of the everyday survivability that we face. Persistance.

We make it known that we have a mission, a goal, a value proposition, a positioning statement, and a code of conduct that we use to communicate ourselves to the world by. Not a virtue signal (though, that is most of perception management), I'd argue that the ones who have the best intentions and always uplift others through a belief of uplifting others are the winners. When everyone is against you, you have to sit with yourself, think about how you treat others, and what that means. 

BEHIND THE FINISHED WALL there is a second building running on a different clock — deliveries before six, waste after nine, plant access on a Sunday. It has its own doors, its own signage, and a wayfinding logic nobody ever redesigned because nobody photographed it.

The interesting design work is almost always there. It is the part that has to work under load, without an audience, for twenty years. When it is done well the front of house looks effortless, and the effort is credited to the wrong floor.

A GROUND FLOOR KEEPS a record of every decision made above it: the width of the pavement it stole, the loading bay it required, the shadow it accepted at nine in the morning. None of that is legible from a vantage point.

So the section works both ends. Height for sequence, street for consequence. A piece that only has one of those is half a piece, and the half that is missing is usually the one with the cost in it.