Accenture: From “Accent on the future.“ Formerly Anderson Consulting, the name was proposed by an employee during an internal naming process.

Adobe Systems: From Adobe Creek located behind the house of co-founder John Warnock.

Arby’s: The enunciation of the initials of its founders, the Raffel Brothers.

CVS: Originally Consumer Value Stores, CEO Tom Ryan has said he now considers “CVS” to stand for “Customer, Value, and Service.”

Kinko’s: From the college nickname of founder Paul Orfalea, called “Kinko” because of his curly red hair. The company was purchased by FedEx in 2004.

Nabisco: Formerly The National Biscuit Company, changed in 1971 to Nabisco.

Pepsi: Named from the digestive enzyme pepsin.

Skype: The original concept for the name was Sky-Peer-to-Peer, which morphed into Skyper, then Skype.

Sprint: From its parent company, Southern Pacific Railroad INTernal Communications.

Verizon: A portmanteau of veritas (Latin for ”truth”) and horizon.

Volvo: From the Latin word volvo, which means “I roll.”

Yahoo!: A word first appearing in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a “yahoo” is a member of a race of brutes who have the form and all the vices of humans. Yahoo! founders David Filo and Jerry Yang jokingly considered themselves yahoos.

Source: Wikipedia

Here’s to a merry Christmas and a happy new year! Please help yourself to a set of printable bottle tags, fun for dressing up wine or champagne for new year’s parties. Download the PDF right here, print at 100%, and cut out the gift tags.

May your 2012 be happy and blessed!

I appreciate the generosity of the many artists who share little morsels of their work with the public. One example: illustrator Camilla Engman has turned her charming series of Studio Morran Forrest posters into free, printable gift tags we can download for the holidays. Get her PDF of quirky woodland creatures right here.

Today Pantone, the provider of color standards for the design industry, announced that Tangerine Tango is the color of the year for 2012. Orange is my favorite hue, so I’m delighted to learn that all the homemade cookies I mailed to the Pantone Color Institute paid off. Better luck next time, khaki! We can expect to see manufacturers of consumer products producing plenty of tangerine goodies in the next year. To add more of this red-orange hue around the office, check out these fun products, clockwise:

Three-ring binder from Russell and Hazel, Exacompta refillable journal, Orla Kiely leather satchel, Uni-ball gel pen, and Pantone’s official Tangerine Tango mug.

My portfolio website has undergone a makeover. While I love minimal designs and lots of white space, it seemed helpful to offer more information about what I do, show larger work samples, and add more ways of navigating through projects. A huge thank you goes to Jenn de la Fuente of Rosebud Designs who turned my Photoshop layout into this new-and-improved site!