It's been an exciting couple of weeks here at Tina Grecchi Studios. Good-bye, San Francisco ---> Hello, Portland, Oregon! The colors of the autumn leaves and the lush green plants, the mushrooms popping up after the rain and the magical mists have caught my imagination and my heart. It's garden gnome heaven - and here's a new design inspired by the gorgeous Portland autumn!

In my continuing exploration in the world of design, I've become increasingly fascinated with typography. The latent potential held within text is incredibly stimulating. I was thinking the other day about my love of world music and how, though I often do not understand the words being sung, the tapestry of sound they create in utterly captivating. My experience of the piece is then exclusively through feeling and intuition, without external suggestion. However, when I listen to music in my mother tongue, I am able to feel the music but it is additionally colored by the meaning of the song, it is almost a different part of my brain that experiences it. The idea of using text as a design element that creates an interwoven story that can be read or intuited on more than one level intrigues me greatly.

This recent play of text as imagery for the University of Arizona's Center for Latin American Studies was a first step in that direction. I wanted something that would convey the concept to a diverse, multilingual population and clearly display the information needed. As an evolving designer, it is great fun to document my work and watch it grow.