The website for Common Dogs isn’t even officially up and running yet, and already it’s logo is receiving critical acclaim! AskLlora has included the Common Dogs logo in their Extreme Designs of the Week. The other cool thing about this logo is that it uses Candy Script, one of my favorite fonts.

Go check them out and support palmateerDesign at the same time!

Passed Up is a Hip-Hop duo based out of Las Vegas. They also have excellent taste when it comes to design as evidenced by their selection of my logo design as their winning logo in a recent contest  on the site that shall remain nameless. Make sure to check out Passed Up as they are sure to be blowing up; especially now that they are properly branded! For now though you can see them on MySpace here.

Isn’t it time your branded your company properly? You need something that stands out from the crowd. Toss out that old piece of clip-art that you have been using as your so called logo and get a distinguishable mark that will set you apart from the competition.

Head on over to the sale page and See what all the fuss is about.

Get yours today before they are gone!

A few years ago I read the book by Dan Brown entitled The DaVinci Code along with millions of other people. That led me to the book’s prequel, Angels & Demons. In the prequel there are several graphic word marks called ambigrams representing the four primal elements; fire, earth, air, and water. You can see them here at the master of ambigrams, John Langdon’s website. The guy is amazing and I can only hope to emulate his genius.

Per Wikipedia, an ambigram, also sometimes known as an inversion or flipscript, is a graphical figure that spells out one or more words not only in its form as presented, but also in another direction or orientation. Basically it’s a word that can be read in a few different orientations. All the ambigrams that I have created so far are readable when rotated 180 degrees.

So I thought that these were about the coolest things ever and I initially started out creating an ambigram of my first name and then moved on to other words and phrases. Only recently have I really started refining any of them, but some of the more successful ones are on this page in my portfolio, the most refined of which being my last name; Palmateer. Check them out. The all read exactly the same way if you rotate them 180 degrees!

I feel a bit stupid now. After reviewing my last post about my logo, I decided to check out RIT’s website since I had mentioned it there. The first thing I noticed on their site is that my old design professor, R. Roger Remington was just inducted into the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. Apparently that is the Graphic Design equivalent of the Nobel prize.

The reason I mention this (other than out of reverence for my former instructor) is because the class that I first doodled my logo (get your mind out of the gutter) was a class taught by Remington. It was an information design class. The class was broken into studio sessions and lecture sessions. The class where I first “conceptualized” the logo was one of the lecture sessions.

Don’t get me wrong. Roger Remington is an excellent teacher. I was probably just zoning out that day. By no means do I mean any disrespect to him. Just to give you an idea, Remington joins an elite group of designers with his recent induction, including the likes of Walt Disney, Andy Warhol, Saul Bass and Paul Rand. How cool is it that one of my teachers is now grouped with those dudes?!

Congrats Roger!

Some of you may wonder about my logo. I wonder about it too.

Ya know how you draw and scribble when you are on the phone or in a meeting, or anywhere else you’d rather not be? You don’t scribble during those times? Well I do and I started drawing this in late 2001 while I was a senior at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). I would estimate that I have scribbled this bad boy at least 1,000 times over the years. When it came time to decide on a personal mark I couldn’t think of anything better than this. I really need to come up with a name for it though. It’s similar to a Yin Yang (sp?) so maybe the Pin Pang would work (you know, play of the P from Palmateer).

Anyway, when some of my coworkers saw it, they said “Oh, I get it. It’s a P and a D for palmateerDesign”, so I guess that works to. If any of you have any thoughts as to what I should call the thing, like Nike’s Swoosh for example, drop me a line in the comments below. I’m always open to suggestion.

There you have it. That’s my logo. No deep thought process involved in the creation of it. Just the result of pure boredom while I was sitting in a random lecture in college.

So yeah I am a little obsessed with graphic design and fonts most of all. I am so obsessed in fact that my wife bought me a font for Fathers’ Day. Yes, that’s right. Some dads get ties for Fathers Day, others get golf clubs. I get fonts. My gift was Candy Script. It’s an awesome open type font. If you don’t know what open type is, check it out here or here. I highly recommend it over plain old TrueType.

Anyway, Candy Script isn’t appropriate for every job, but it certainly is a fun, playful font and due to the multiple characters and ligatures, and all other advanced typography options, I often turn to Candy Script whenever I have an offbeat and fun project to tackle.