You are very observant. ouno is the same right-side up as upside down, which engages various philosophical interests of mine as well as a general taste for looking at things from opposite directions. Mirror images and doubles are endlessly interesting. “ouno” is also a name in both Finnish and Japanese, two design traditions I particularly admire. In Japan there’s an ancient temple, a village and various anime characters named Ouno, seemingly of both genders. And since ouno is not a common name anywhere else, we (my original design partner and I – we came up with it together) thought it would be easy to search for online, which is particularly helpful these days. I don’t know the work of Scott Kim but I’ll look it up now. I designed the logo myself using Illustrator – I’m not even sure how I did that, since I barely knew Illustrator at the time, but sometimes the luckiest use of an application is by those who don’t know what they’re doing. I was aiming for enough repetition of the shape that the whole thing would approach abstraction, and the general symmetry of the word (the u and n are just inversion of each other, and they’re book-ended by two o’s) facilitated this. I was also aiming for a 60s typography look – in 60s type there was all that playing around with geometry, chunky, thick text as supergraphic art, so that was my intention. No one’s ever asked about this before, in 6 years! Since we started with the name ouno, several other companies have appeared with that name, and they have used some of the same typographic tricks – different enough not to be copies, but similar enough to irk me! Anyway, thanks for your interest!

I’m curious of your “ouno” logo. It has an ambigrammatic quality to it – I suspect deliberate? Are you familiar with the work of Scott Kim (and others)? There is an implied image of “burning the candle at both ends” extending the logo vertically and reading down o n u o – though I suspect that idea is in MY mind only.

Does the word “ouno” mean something specific?