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All in the Family

At The Discovery Orchestra, we are 100% dedicated to helping individuals develop an ever-deepening emotional connection—through perceptive listening—with classical music. But we cannot do this alone. And that is why award-winning graphic designer Palmer Uhl, pictured here, has been a highly valued member of our Discovery Orchestra extended family since 1999.

At the start of the 13^th season (1999-2000) of the Philharmonic Orchestra of New Jersey—The Discovery Orchestra’s predecessor organization—we were looking for help in visually branding an upcoming Discovery Concert. The program, The Four Seasons of Hunterdon County, had several components. As you might have guessed, the music was Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, which would be treated interactively in our typical “Discovery” fashion.The members of the Hunterdon County Camera Club were invited to submit transparencies of spring, summer, autumn and winter scenes, photographed in the bucolic county in which they lived. The “winning” slides would then be projected on a large screen at two performances—one at Vorhees High School in Glen Gardner, and alsoat the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. We were referred to Dana Communications in Hopewell, New Jersey and Michael Dana Prewitt, one of the co-founders of that company, introduced us to one of his designers … Palmer Uhl.

Palmer went on from that first project to designing season brochures for us. The first of those, of course, still featured our former name. After the 2006 decision to alter our mission from strictly performing classical music to that of teaching the listening skills that enhance one’s connection to classical music and to rebrand our orchestra with a new name reflecting that new mission, Palmer’s subsequent brochure designs helped us to visually transmit our new mission.

Somewhere along the way, the term “Palmerize” was coined and became a fixture in our office. What that meant was … come up with some semblance of a listening guide, and then submit it to Palmer, who would then turn it into something clean and polished to look at … Palmerize it.

I won’t show you what our first drafts look like. Sometimes they’re mostly words with a few bits of musical notation added and perhapsa drawing of an instrument here and there. I think you can see why we are so happy with the Palmerized versions of our listening guides. They became the standard, and a part of our brand.

We are so grateful to have met Palmer Uhl in 1999. Her work for the Philharmonic Orchestra of New Jersey and now for The Discovery Orchestra has been a tremendous asset. Having founded her own firm in 2000 in Princeton––Palmer Uhl Design––Palmer has won awards for her work as a graphic designer, art director and project manager.

Among her current and past clients are such diverse organizations as The Princeton Festival; Northeast Organic Farming Association of New Jersey; The Actors Fund (now the Entertainment Community Fund) with offices in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles; and America’s oldest professional theater company and largest theater owner on Broadway … New York City’s The Shubert Group. The Discovery Orchestra is proud to be “among the company Palmer keeps.”