Evening all! There is going to be lots of exclamation marks tonight! The SWC-P2 is finally completed, what a job, what a process! What a pen!
Over the last few years I have designed many, many pens, totally obsessing over my own work and that of other makers. Fundamentally it is a small stick you write with so without departing from ergonomic constraints there is little you can do. Which is why 99% of all pen design variations are found in the ornamentation not the shape. The first Schofield fountain pen was classical in style. Quite serious with the black acrylic and silver bands – a pen designed for yesteryear, a pen made for Sir Winston Churchill. This pen, the P-2, is the opposite, and I got there quite by accident. 2001 A Space Odyssey is one of my top films which led me to the Stanley Kubrik exhibition in London, naturally (on design high-alert) I was most excited about the 2001 section. Taking photos of the tiniest details; control panels, graphic insignia, perforations on HAL’s speaker, latches on helmets… you get the idea. I own a set of cutlery used on the Discovery 1 by Arne Jacobsen and it has not dated at all, but the pen by Parker has and it is from studying that design that I wondered what if Stanley asked me to design a pen for the film today! What would it look like?
