Brand Identity
Palomino
Pool Hall
A pool-hall identity designed to feel inherited, not installed.Palomino occupies Gainesville’s former Pontiac Sales & Service building, where the surviving ghost sign gives the space an immediate sense of history. The project centered on a Master-chalk-inspired wordmark, a full-façade mural, and a scratch-off game built around the language of luck.
Scope
Identity design, environmental graphics and game concept
Deliverables
Custom wordmark, exterior mural and scratch-off ticket
The building’s surviving Pontiac sign gave Palomino a visual history before the pool hall opened. Rather than overwrite that character, the new work was conceived as another layer: bold enough to establish Palomino from the street, but familiar enough to feel native to the site.
Chalking Up a Familiar CueMaster chalk offered a reference that was immediately familiar to players, with the authority and visual character of a long-standing billiards brand. The Palomino wordmark draws from its red-and-white palette and blackletter rhythm, creating a mark rooted in the game without defaulting to generic cues, racks, or eight-ball imagery.
Photo courtesy of Brandon Session
The Building Became the BrandThe facade is the identity’s largest and most public application. The mural follows the building’s stepped architecture, combining the wordmark with supporting insignias and a repeating geometric pattern inspired by the shape of cue chalk. The red, white, and blue palette extends the same reference across the full exterior, giving the building rhythm, visibility, and an immediate connection to the game.
Oversized forms and a limited color system helped the mural feel less like a contemporary brand installation and more like a layer of signage that might have accumulated there over time.
Photo courtesy of Brandon Session
The Mural Left the BuildingThe mural quickly became more than signage, giving visitors a recognizable backdrop for photos and a new way to interact with the space. Its later inclusion in a local Trader Joe’s mural offered an unexpected measure of its reach: Palomino’s facade had become part of Gainesville’s visual landscape.
Good Luck. You'll Need It.The first run put 5,000 scratch-offs into circulation, with 1,700 winners and 3,300 ways to come up short. Prizes ranged from a free beer or hour of pool to a cue, a T-shirt, and one very unlikely year of free pool.
Losing tickets answered back with lines like “Good for Nothin’” and “Swing and a Miss!”, giving the promotion the same mix of chance, swagger, and friendly abuse as the pool hall itself.
Palomino did not need an expansive identity system. It needed a few memorable gestures executed at the right scale: a wordmark rooted in the rituals of the game, a mural that gave the building a public face, and a scratch-off that invited customers to participate.Together, they made the identity feel less newly introduced than rediscovered.