Have you seen the image on the left before? I see them all the time on pickup truck windows here in Texas. It’s a stylized buck. But for the longest time I thought it was a dance studio logo, or a Kokopelli. I couldn’t figure out why Kokopelli’s were getting popular here… until I finally saw the image of the deer. Ah, the driver of the truck must be a hunter! It’s funny that I’m a visual designer but I sometimes have a hard time seeing what logos actually represent. Take the logo below on the left for instance.
When discussing the logo with my friend, he told me quite plainly, “It’s a wolf.” But what I saw was the image on the right (enhanced in Photoshop for explanatory effect). I thought it was a pretty messed-up drawing of a wolf on a rampage. It just swallowed a woman whole and her shoe (in red) got flipped in the air, for goodness sake!
Some days later, I saw the true image of the calm wolf and it made sense. I guess I must have looked at it in a different light, so to speak, or a dim light, or a new angle and the true image made itself clear. (For the record, I love Wolfman Luggage! I have one of their tankbags on my bike.)
It’s kind of like when you are listening to a song that you have heard a thousand times before, but you come into it at a different measure, or the volume is just a little too low to make the song out clearly, and you hear a different melody… or actually it’s the same melody, but with different timing so it sounds like a totally different tune. Has that ever happened to you? Or maybe it’s just me?
