SYMMETRY. Rotation by 180 degrees.
INSPIRATION. Commissioned by Michael Morton on the occasion of the wedding of his brother Evan Wakefield Morton to Rebecca Anne Derby.
STORY. I first became acquainted with Michael Morton (a.k.a. "Mr. Machine Tool" and "Harmonic Motel") when I sent in my registration for his shareware anagram program Ars Magna ("great art" in Latin, also an anagram for "anagrams"). We maintained an amiable email exchange, occasionally reporting choice anagrams to each other.
About a year ago Michael asked me if I could design an inversion for his brother's upcoming wedding. After many unsatisfying attempts to combine the couple's first names Evan and Becky, we decided to break the task into two steps. First I would give them a pair of inversions on just Evan and just Becky which they would use on their wedding invitation. Then at the wedding Michael would unveil an engraved glass plate with the first names in the middle and the full names around the edge. Inverting the first names was easy; inverting the full names took more effort but worked rather well. We settled on three repetitions of the names around the circumference, which makes it more obvious that the names are meant to be turned upside down than if there had been two or four repetitions.
Michael lives in Hawaii and my glass engraver has since quit doing engraving, so I recommended that he contact a local high-end department store and see what engravers they used. Immediately after my suggestion, a story appeared in the local paper talking about how local craftspeople were having trouble finding business. The person they profiled just happened to be a glass engraver! Problem solved.
As usual, I did my original lettering on paper, scanned them into the computer, and traced them in Adobe Illustrator. To curve the lettering around the edge I drew the names straight then distorted them with Letraset Envelopes, a plug-in for Illustrator. The little 6-lobed asterisk that separates copies of the names is made out of the top diagonal stroke in Becky.