For those of you who have been with us since the beginning of this wonderful collaboration of legal and marketing types, known as DuetsBlog, you also know we have a mascot dubbed Duey — he’s depicted in the squirrel graphic at the top of this page. Here is his story, as told by Aaron Keller on behalf of his creative team at Capsule, who brought Duey to life.

Unsurprisingly, Duey is all about protecting his nuts and the nuts of those he cares deeply about, especially those of the clients he steadfastly protects. We have embraced the graphic as a nice metaphor of what we’re best at, but we’ve only told the complete story once before, as Duey is a relatively shy little guy, and actually we prefer to see the subtlety of the graphic communicate a metaphor instead of hitting our gifted readers over the head with a coarse tagline.

More to that delicate point, spending the week in Las Vegas — the city that knows no such thing as subtlety and proud home of the SHOT Show 2015 — has unearthed lots of blog fodder, so here’s the first we’ll share:

The harshly worded tagline reminds me of a topic we have talked about more than a few times here: The art of subtlety as compared to “hitting the consumer over the head” with an idea.

Subtlety is more often rewarded in the world of predicting the existence and scope of trademark rights, that’s one reason we favor suggestive over descriptive trademarks, and we have reminded marketing types to avoid the D-word at all cost.

Perhaps the one time when subtlety should be discarded is when you’re operating in the world of non-traditional trademarks, given the benefits of using overt “look-for” advertising.

By the way Duey, is coming up on his sixth birthday March 5th, right on the heels of his golden birthday celebration last year, any ideas on what he might enjoy doing this year?