BRAND VOICE
After my work at The Flying Joe, one thing was clear: I knew I needed to find somewhere to work that shared my values and perspective. I couldn’t go back to working a job I didn’t believe in. Shinola Detroit not only shared my values and perspectives, but enabled me to grow in each of the positions I’ve held during my three years with them.
Finding a job that truly resonated and worked with me made it simple to adapt the brand voice in a way that is warm and relatable while remaining professional.
The following content contains materials/images from Shinola’s website/files as a sample of work inspired by one of my favorite timepieces.
A Brief History of the Moon Phase
By: Bri Gibson
There are few things as universally alluring as the cosmos.
Despite being perhaps a bit terrifying in its endless expanse, there are few people who don’t gaze up at the skies in solemn contemplation and admiration from time to time. When our ancestors looked for a measurable indicator of time passage, it wasn’t the Earth itself that they searched-- but the sky.
As a foundation for modern time keeping. they measured time using the same celestial bodies observable to us today.
Before time was measured and kept by sundials or Argonite movements, it was calculated by observing celestial bodies like the sun, moon, and constellations.
By documenting the synodic period of the moon (a full lunar cycle) early humans grouped days into months and conceived the first primitive lunar calendar. The origins of Horology date back to these first primitive calendars, which depended heavily on time measured by the Earth’s Lunar Cycle.
Aurignacian Lunar Calendar carved on the bone-tablet from Dordogne, France
29 days, 12 hours and 44 minutes.
Early Sumerians (and later, Babylonians) were the first known civilizations to use what we now recognize as a Lunisolar calendar.
By the 21st century B.C. the Sumerians had come up with a solar year consisting of 360 days:
12 lunar cycles (354 days),
which were rounded up to 360,
forming 12 months at 30 days,
or 29 days, 12 hours and 44 minutes.
The natural integration of two-dimensional calendars into three-dimensional ones wasn’t too much of a leap for the next generation of humans.
Dating back to ancient Greece (c. 100 BC-205 BC), the earliest known example is the Antikythera Mechanism— a Grecian ‘computer’ which consisted of 30 bronze gears inside of a wooden case. Used to calculate and display information about astronomical phenomena, the mechanism is the only known physical survivor of a long tradition of mechanical astronomical displays.
Among its notable calendric features, the Antikythera mechanism also had a sophisticated epicyclic gearing and slot-and-pin system to mimic subtle variations in the Moon’s movement across the sky— resulting in an articulation by a half-silvered ball that displayed the lunar phases.
First evidence of the Moon Phase complication being incorporated into stand-alone clock was in the 16th century throughout Germany and England, at which point most of the other parts of the complication outside of the Lunar phases were shed.
It was very briefly eclipsed until the late 19th and early 20th century when it reappeared on pocket watch dials.
Later in the 20th century, the Moon Phase landed on the dials of wrist watches and rocketed to the top of most folks’ wish lists.
It’s hard to blame them.
Our ancestry is steeped with generations of sky-watchers, navigators, and timekeepers that looked to the moon.
As a unit of measurement, its cycle has become an irrevocable part of the history of humans and our ever-lasting pursuit of keeping time. To wear a Moon Phase movement is to take part in an observance as old as human notation itself.
