About

Black Plum is a design company with the mission of uniting the functional and the evocative. Smart and purposeful with a love for color, shape and expression, Black Plum creates products that harmonize form and feeling.

What does this mean? Not abandoning functional ideals while empowering the expressive. It is not frivolous to evoke an emotional life, but a sign of strength and purpose.

For the Mechanical Flourish series, Black Plum explores utilitarian motifs found on heavy machinery, graphic compositions that celebrate the often overlooked designs and details at work in the city.

These designs are not found in nature but in the functional world of the urban environment. Meant largely for use by machines to solve practical problems, these designs are a means to a workaday goal.

Nevertheless, these motifs bear the mark of the human hand and mind and are communicative of aspirations, intentions and ethics. They embody a social functionality as much as a utilitarian functioning.

The mechanical flourish project honors this connection between utility and expression in designs that are vibrant elaborations on the mechanical details we find all around us.