← Back to all work
Wallpaper / Art & Graphic Design — 2009 · Private Client

The SEED

A desktop wallpaper that is almost entirely white: a 1280 by 800 field carrying one small drawing low at the centre, where a dark green seed outlined as a rounded square sits on a thin green ground line with its rootlets below the line and sends up a fan of hairline filaments and curls into a large dark green comma that leans and curls over at the head. Inside that head is a concentric target of white, light green, yellow, orange and a red centre, and green rings and dots of mixed sizes float loose around the form. The ground rule runs the full width of the field and breaks at the right to carry revival design+vfx studios set into the line in light green, and www.revivalgh.blogspot.com is letter-spaced below the line under the seed.

The first version of the studio’s seed device, published in October 2009 as a desktop wallpaper: a fan of hairline filaments rising from a sown seed into a dark green comma crowned by a concentric target of white, light green, yellow, orange and red, set almost alone on a white field. The post carries no text at all, so the single plate here is that file and the studio’s three labels are the only words ever written about it.

The entry is an image with nothing said about it. Its title is “the.SEED.v.1.0 - SIMPLE WALLPAPER”, it went up on 1 October 2009 and was revised the same morning, and its only words are the three labels the studio filed it under: illustrator, photoshop and wallpapers. There is no client, no brief, no designer credit and no description, so the listing carries a Private Client and the bare Ghana the studio works from, and everything else on this page is read off the artwork itself.

The version number is the part worth keeping. The studio called this drawing v.1.0, and it did not stop with it: every frame of the 2010 GOIL rebranding proposal already on this site is signed with a white lockup that carries the same rounded seed square and the same curl inside it, stamped THE.SEED.1.1..2010 above the studio address. That makes this wallpaper not a one-off illustration but the first published state of a signature the studio put on its work, which is why the two listings point at each other — see Goil Rebranding.

The drawing is deliberately sparse. A seed outlined in dark green sits on a thin ground line with its rootlets below it, and from it a fan of hairlines and small curls rises into a large comma that leans over at the head; inside that head is a target of white, light green, yellow, orange and a red centre, with rings of mixed size floating loose around the form. Almost the whole field is left white. The ground rule runs edge to edge and breaks at the right to carry the studio name set into it, with the blog address letter-spaced beneath the line, so the signature is part of the composition rather than a mark laid over it.

It belongs to a short run of wallpapers the studio posted across 2009, of which Out of Darkness is the other one listed here. That post came none of the three, so this page claims none of them: no author is named, nothing is said about how the file was distributed, and the software row records only what the labels state. Seen beside it the two are the same device inverted — Out of Darkness draws the same rounded square and the same curl inside it out of a black ground in rim light, ringed by red orbital curves, with the address letter-spaced underneath — which is the clearest evidence that what the studio was iterating on in 2009 was its own mark, not a subject.

One plate, at the file’s full 1280 by 800 pixels — the size this studio drew its wallpapers at, and the whole upload rather than a rendition of it. Nothing about the work is dated from the file’s own metadata, which carries only a Google encoder tag; the date is the publish stamp, and here the two agree to within hours.

The source post is on blogspot — the.SEED.v.1.0 - SIMPLE WALLPAPER, 1 October 2009.

A desktop wallpaper that is almost entirely white: a 1280 by 800 field carrying one small drawing low at the centre, where a dark green seed outlined as a rounded square sits on a thin green ground line with its rootlets below the line and sends up a fan of hairline filaments and curls into a large dark green comma that leans and curls over at the head. Inside that head is a concentric target of white, light green, yellow, orange and a red centre, and green rings and dots of mixed sizes float loose around the form. The ground rule runs the full width of the field and breaks at the right to carry revival design+vfx studios set into the line in light green, and www.revivalgh.blogspot.com is letter-spaced below the line under the seed.