word on the street 43 Hello! Who are you? Alex Longson, I co-founded Command+i, with my partner Cameron Prentice. What’s Command+i? The concept of the magazine is really simple: we present colour samples inspired by the natural landscape, via Cameron’s beautiful photography. How did it start? As a joke. We were travelling through northern Skye and we came across this beautiful mountain-scape. It had really rich reds and greens and snowcapped mountains that filled the entire car. Cameron said to me, “Wow – we should Command+i that!” That formed the core concept for our creative project. Could you explain the name, for non-design geeks? Those of you in the design community might recognise ‘cmd + i’ as the shortcut for the Eyedropper tool, which samples colours so artists or designers can find out the colour codes. Basically, we just sample things. How do you want it to be used or read? The idea is that we create palettes that can be used across a range of industries including brand design, fashion design, product design. People sometimes use the palettes to design their bedrooms! We also want to promote the idea that there’s a depth and range to the colours found in nature. Plus it was an opportunity for Cameron and I to explore Scotland, our home. There’s such a depth and range of colours just within this small country… and that was really evident when we started to go through all the photographs from various trips that we’d taken throughout the years. How did you do the first issue? Over the space of only a few days, we were able to narrow down our favourite ‘Command+i’ is a masterclass in a well-executed yet simple idea. SAMPLE SALE 25 images, 25 beautiful combinations that were all unique. Then we wrote descriptions of the locations and little bits of insight about how we can see the codes being used in a practical application. And now? After about six months, the magazine can be found in over 25 cities across four continents. And the initial feedback we were getting was really positive, especially from lots of independent shops, magazine store owners, as well as places like speciality coffee shops. How has it gone down? The most rewarding output was when customers and readers started to write back and send images of things they’d designed or artistic projects they’d worked on that had been inspired by our colour combinations. It’s connections like that between physical design and the natural world that we are trying to promote.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODY1ODQy