Sibley/Peteet Design, Austin, created all the graphics for Design Ranch, including this poster.

THE SCENE
It’s April in Texas Hill Country. The air is cool, skies are clear, and spring flowers are abloom. Mornings offer that vague sensation, “What in the hell happened last night?” A dull din thumps in your head while the smell of paint, ink, glue, markers, cement, fixer, horseshit, and stale beer perfume the air.

Lo, there! Sweet young designers sleep beneath the picnic tables, down by the river, under the truck, face down, third stall on the left, a-dreamin’ of guitars, cattle, and two-steppin’. So innocent: dime-store cowboys with $2 hats and second-hand riding shirts with matted fringe. Do they know the difference between a gelding and a mare? Can they hitch a bridle? Mend a fence?

Who cares? Fresh air! Fresh ideas! Fresh meat! Ladies and gentlemen, grab your hats, your fertile imaginations, and your headache powders. It’s Design Ranch time once more!

WHERE COWGIRLS GET NO BLUES
Historic Camp Waldemar is a girls camp comprised of cedar-and riverstone-constructed craftsman-era buildings surrounded by more than 1,600 acres of beautiful countryside. The small campus is nested around a central green overlooking the oak-lined, somnambulant Guadalupe River. There, you can swim, hike, horseback ride, horseshoe toss, paddleboat, canoe, or just sit on a bench and sleep. It’s what your idea of a summer camp would be. Setting is important to Design Ranch, and none could be lovelier than this. On a gustatory note: Waldemar’s talented Chef Johnny’s cooking kept everyone full and satisfied with three squares a day.

THE EDUCATION
This year’s ranch featured much of what we’ve come to expect: the unique opportunity to learn technique and craft from some of the best in American design and the usual opportunity to stagger home drunk at a reasonable price, in a beautiful setting, among kindred spirits. Here are the highlights:

SEAN ADAMS (AdamsMorioka/Los Angeles), who taught “A Map of Your Life,” asked students to employ collage, hand lettering, and other techniques to reveal a little about thy self. The resulting life maps often revealed more than Professor Adams had bargained for: “The only revealing I do is in the privacy of my home,” he says, “and that’s limited to the contents of my refrigerator which happens to have glass doors. The level of emotion some revealed alarmed me.” Adams vowed to never try this exercise on strangers again.

JOHN BIELENBERG (director of Project M/Maine, cofounder of C2/San Francisco) led “Think Wrong,” a thinking exercise that helped participants break through self-inflicted, predetermined, linear thought patterns while simultaneously wishing they could have back the hours between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. of the previous evening. “Damn,” complained one stricken ranch hand at a chilly first session, “not only do I think wrong, I feel like shit.”

STEPHEN DOYLE (Doyle Partners/New York) demonstrated that being married to the creative director of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia offers more than just a beautiful, intelligent wife, two smart children, and jaw-dropping home décor. It allows you to take up weird hobbies. Take Doyle’s class, “Alchemy, Well, Almost,” for example: Also called “Faux Bois” (think Wilma Flintstone meets Martha Stewart), it involved covering household junk with skin-slicing wire, slathering it with cement, then taking fork tines to it to create a “faux” wood pattern that lends beauty and enduring appeal. Really.