Every business in this state gets offered the same visual starter pack. You know the one. Navy and white stripes. A rope border. An anchor, usually set in a font that’s trying very hard to be nautical without committing to it. Possibly a lighthouse. Definitely at least one seagull.
The appeal makes sense. It’s instantly legible: anyone seeing it knows roughly where you are and roughly what mood you’re going for. That’s not nothing. Legibility is genuinely useful.
It’s also completely exhausted. Put an anchor on something in Rhode Island and you haven’t said “coastal.” You’ve said “we bought the starter pack.”
We do live here, and it does get into the work. Just not through any of those channels.
It gets in through color, mostly. Not blue-and-white. The actual colors, which are stranger. Fog, which isn’t gray so much as a kind of warm nothing. The specific dun of a beach in November. Marsh, which is green in a way that’s mostly brown. Everything here is bleached slightly and then warmed back up, and if you paint it accurately it doesn’t look like a postcard at all. It looks like weathered paper.
It gets in through pace. The season here is compressed and violent. Everything happens between May and September, and then it stops, and that pace is entirely visible in what people ask for and when. Nothing about a real coastal place is serene. It’s a nine-month wait and a three-month scramble.
And it gets in through the objects. Old things left outside. Painted wood that’s been repainted four times and is showing all four. Hand-lettered signs on the roadside. The genuine local visual language isn’t nautical at all. It’s somebody’s handwriting on a piece of plywood, and it’s much better than the anchor.
So this site is warm off-white and near-black with one loud orange, and the type looks more like a job ticket than a wedding invitation. That’s not a rejection of where we are. It’s an attempt to be accurate about it.
No anchors. Sorry.