I’ve been publishing a lot of design posts lately. Might as well get them out of the way, eh?

This particular logo (see below the jump) came to me in a dream. Oddly enough, in the dream, it was the logo for a milk distributor whose television commercial featured people in a conga line singing “Musa, Musa, Mu-sa!”

I don’t claim to make much sense in my sleep. Continue reading →

A few days ago, while signing into some security-conscious website, I was presented with one of the most awesome CAPTCHAs ever.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, let Wikipedia explain it:

A CAPTCHA (an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”), a trademark of Carnegie Mellon University, is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human.

They’re those graphics with the squiggly writing you have to figure out to log in.

Well, this time, the CAPTCHA I got was “MAKITCHA PRECINCT,” which I thought would make a great title for a novel. To prove the concept, I quickly threw together a couple of book cover ideas, one for a sci-fi interpretation of Makitcha Precinct and one for a thriller.

And yes, the promo quote is supposed to be funny. Meh, I try.

I haven’t posted a logo design since the Skrew Werks Hardware logo, although I have had a few ideas.

One that has been rolling around in my head for a while is based on the graphic beauty one of my favorite Arabic words, قنبر or qunbur (pronounced to rhyme loosely with “run burr”), which is a colloquial term for larks.

I thought it would make a catchy name for a corporation that does work both in the Arab and Western worlds, and would lend itself to a nice clean, semi-symmetrical logo, something with a bold look and simple color scheme.

Also, as with many companies that cross the Arabic-Latin literary divide, it would require two versions, one in each alphabet. Here is what I came up with: Continue reading →