Long, long ago, when I designed things for Target (for 27 years 😳) I was almost always designing in Red and Shiny, not two of my favorite elements. I am very much a green, peeling, rusty person. The environment there at HQ was very red too, but I was fortunate that I had a private studio over the downtown Minneapolis store where I and a few people I adored worked. We had big old metal Barney Miller desks, which I loved, and lots of plywood. We had to indulge in red, but I made a huge plywood wall above my desk, and it became a sort of shrine for me, a tribute to things that I loved that were red. It had pigeons living up on top, because I love pigeons.
Traveling a lot for my work there, I would always watch for lovely small red things for my wall. China was a great resource for unassuming, pretty red objects. When I left Target for good, I left the vast majority of these items behind, in their well-earned spots, to haunt the space in my absence, and brought with me only a very few with great sentimental meaning.
Also, I had this enormous print of this note that I bought at a Maira Kalman exhibit in SF, about Marcel Proust’s cane, because I was always losing my cane at work.
