Scott Kim

Scott Kim 2000

SYMMETRY. 180° rotation.

INSPIRATION. Commissioned as a wedding anniversary present for a couple whose first names are Scott and Kim.

STORY. Although I have been creating inversions for twenty years, it wasn’t until this year that I finally created a proper inversion on my own name. A fellow from Colorado emailed me wondering if I had an inversion on Scott Kim that he could use as a wedding anniversary present for friends whose first names are Scott and Kim.
     I was not too surprised to hear about a Scott/Kim couple. Both my names are quite common. In school teachers often reversed the order of my names. Kim is overwhelmingly the most common last name in Korea, my country of ancestry: much worse than Smith in the USA, though not as bad as Jorgensen in Denmark, where the government will pay you to change your last name. I receive quite a bit of email addressed to other Scott Kims. There was even a Kim Scott in the Stanford computer science department at the same time I was a graduate student.
     Although I’d imagined a couple different ways to invert my own name, I had never done a finished design. So I took the opportunity to give it a whirl. The results are the two designs shown above. Both designs use the same ideas, but with different visual styles.
     Technically, the biggest challenges in this design are creating the S out of the final stroke of the M, and creating the I out of half of the O. The bottom of the S wants to curve left, but that creates an odd sharp corner on the M. The I wants to be straight, but the sides of the O want to be curved. In both cases I compromised. I am pleased by the centrally placed dot, which belongs to both the I below and the I above.