Laura King | Art Design & Product Development
two cents
Product Design & Development
The National Archives wanted to grow their line of jewlery and accessories that would also appeal to men. Since the Archives audience includes a substantial group of government-affiliated shoppers with strong opinions, I decided to create a line of items that supported healthy personal expression. "My two cents" (2¢) is an American idiomatic expression, taken from the original "to put in my two pennies worth." By deprecating the opinion that follows, suggesting its value is only two cents, the user of the phrase hopes to lessen the impact of a potentially unpopular statement.
A two-cent piece was produced by the Mint of the United States and was in circulation from1864 to 1872. Blackington created for us a reproduction of the two-cent piece made of solid brass and stamped from a steel die, capturing the subtle details of the coin. The coin is then gold plated, resulting in a brilliant gold color, and was developed into the following gift items:
red tape
Product Design & Development
By the end of the American Civil War, the practice of binding important documents with red ribbon was common throughout the western world. Civil War veterans' records were bound in red ribbon, and the difficulty in obtaining those records to file pension claims led to the modern American use of the term "red tape." The National Archives in D.C. had a big bag of original red tap and no clue what to do with it.
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It seemed a natural solution to combine the red tape with ephemera taken from the time period the tape was in use. I connected with Kevin Clark, conservation biologist, science educator and fabricator at 'Bug Under Glass', and inquired if he would be interested in creating non-insect related pieces. Here's how we turned some relatively bland and faded red ribbon into a compelling, top selling program for the National Archives:
