PHP

print/identity system

Power House Productions is an organization located outside of Detroit, in Hamtramck MI. They take abandoned houses in their neighborhood clean them up, and then sell them (for no profit) to someone in the art community. When they clean up the houses, they also remove them from the grid and connect them to the main house, known as the power house which is completely solar powered.

I created an identity system for the organization. My goal while designing this system was to make an exciting design that sparked interest, and communicated the seriousness as well as the playfulness that PHP represented. During my extensive amount of research I came across an interesting thing that PHP did to protect the abandoned houses from squatters, and people trying to steal the precious metals from inside the house. They took an idea from WWI called razzle dazzle, or dazzle painting. This was a method of camouflage for war ships so the other ships looking at the vessel wouldn’t be able to tell which way it was facing. PHP used this interesting pattern and painted it onto triangular sculptures which they had jutting out of the windows of the abandoned homes in which they were in the process of fixing up. This was meant to keep the house safe, and alarm any negative person looking to squat or steal. I thought that this pattern was not only interesting aesthetically, as well as historically, but it also represented something beautiful. It represented the safety that PHP was creating within a neighborhood that had been lacking it in parts. It represented the amount of selfless care, and effort that these people were putting into these houses. So I used my own version of the dazzle painting within the system which turned out to follow the ideas I had in mind the whole time, an exciting design that sparked interest, curiosity, seriousness, and playfulness.