I don’t know about you, but Hollywood directors never seem to call. Clint Eastwood doesn’t write. Ridley Scott must have lost my fax number. So I’m thinking about changing my name to Tim Girvin.

Oops, that name already belongs to one of Seattle’s most

successful graphic designers. A guy so cool, he sounds like a Pre-Raphaelite poet composing free verse in sumi ink.

“I’ve been washed by wild dreams – renderings of disruption, from a night cast of winds stripping the hillsides of everything, leaves cast up the hill.”

I’ve known Tim Girvin for years, but not well. So I wasn’t sure what to expect when we met for lunch at Wild Ginger. What I found, is that he’s a funny guy, when he isn’t sailing off into uncharted waters he alone can see.

Tim is a wanderer. According to his bio, it’s a metaphor for his life. So I asked him, how did you get here?

“My dad was a surgeon. My mother is a painter. I was this strange amalgamation of them both. I didn’t do well in any conventional education environment. So they sent me to a private school where I studied Latin. It was an awakening.”

It wasn’t the language that captivated him, it was the letter forms. They were a bridge to civilizations, architecture, art and literature. And he made it his business to learn to draw any script from any period, anywhere in the world. Which led to a call one day from Francis Ford Coppola.

“He saw my work in U&lc (the award-winning journal of graphic design) and asked me to design the title treatment for his new movie, Apocalypse Now. It was my first film.”

Since then Girvin has worked with a long list of  Hollywood heavyweights including Tom Cruise, Jerry Bruckheimer, Ridley Scott and James Cameron. Creating identities for hundreds of movies including Braveheart, Titanic, The Matrix, Gladiator, The Last Samurai, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Beowulf, Star Trek and Iron Man.

Tim is also the founder of one of the most highly-respected design firms on the West Coast. They do incredible work for all types of clients. Even more reason to change my name.

But since Tim Girvin is taken, I’m going to try Jim Carrey. Mr. Eastwood, call me. Let’s do lunch.

To find out more about the professional side of Tim Girvin, visit http://www.girvin.com/ Or for a fascinating look at Tim’s writing and illustrations, visit http://tim.girvin.com/