Wit and beauty When it comes to design, sometimes it?s all about sweating the small stuff. Or so says Nick Cronan, a cofounder of San Francisco design and branding agency Branch. With a focus on advanced craft, and a penchant for intelligent work, the studio is giving home tech products exceptional form alongside their futuristic functions.
?Design in home tech is now table stakes,? adds Josh Morenstein, the other cofounder of Branch. ?The home is a place where people typically surround themselves with objects the love. Poorly designed home tech will quickly become trash and without design, companies run the risk of never even getting a foot in the door,? Morenstein explains.
For the Branch team, this focus on the timelessness of an object?s look and feel is as much about benefitting the next generation as it?s about a reverence for the past. The studio tries to ?balance new interactions, new technologies, new ideas, and, ultimately, new solutions,? says Morenstein. For his part, Cronan says he was reminded by his daughter Sophia, who recently spent the day with him at Branch, of ?how much of my childhood was spent drawing and building things at my parents? design studio, where I learned to constantly challenge assumptions.? (Morenstein, too, has a parent in design; his father was an industrial designer and metal foundry owner in the 1960s.)
And this heritage is evident when you consider their work, and their philosophy. Recently, Branch?which was founded in 2013?move...