Y. Chao
08/02/01
A CASA Logo Attempt
Rationale:
General
philosophy:
There are 2 extreme approaches to making a logo: to project a simple and distinct image for quick name recognition, such as adopted for most commercial purposes, or to convey extensive background information for anyone having the time to slowly discern or even decipher (and to derive some pleasure from it), such as taken by universities, government organizations, etc. The division is of course not a clean one and one finds the whole spectrum in both types of logos. My personal belief is that the CASA logo should be pushed in the second direction. This resulted in the possible impression of a “busy” logo as you will see. But it is really no worse than those of many universities and government organizations as mentioned, or Toronto’s 2008 Olympics bid, or the Led Zeppelin emblem. All of the latter are respectable logos that I have grown quite accustomed to.
The existing strawman design does not seem to uniquely define CASA, its mission, its focus, what it does everyday or where it stands in the scheme of things. I am making a very remote shot at addressing these points that I consider important in a logo of this type, and I am sure I have done a poor job. This is not my ideal product with a fluid and coherent statement, but I think it is closer. It should be treated as a conceptual design with very crude elements outlining the idea. Short of fancy graphics software, this is only presented as the zero-th order iteration. I suppose I can put this on Jaynie’s PC and crank out a much more artistic (and less dense?) rendering of the same concept.
Explanation
of the logo examples:
The next 3 pages show 3 versions of the same design, with slight variations in borders, orientation of insets, JLab logo, etc. With each version are displayed a blow-up view, a letterhead sized view, and a gray scale view.
Colors:
Originally I intended to limit the colors to red & blue only, because we are tied to the Jlab logo with only these 2 colors (and black). Pretty soon I had to violate this rule partly due to inability to fine-tune the colors of mathematica outputs and the crude graphics manipulation tools I have on my PC, and partly because I find it not totally repugnant to include a dash of other colors for a more modern and informal look. But fundamentally the colors are still red & blue.
Jlab logo:
By certain dictate the Jlab logo must be included. Its rounded lines somewhat do not blend well with the straight lines elsewhere. In the 2nd & 3rd variations I either replaced the Jlab logo with text or rounded the other edges.
Graphic insets:
I tried to use the graphs to convey some message, maybe without succeeding in a fluid & coherent way. The first block is a play on the theme of a recirculating linac, which is the focus of activities at Jlab and a source of inspiration for many of the CASA members and will continue to be. The other blocks contain graphics pulled from many places, including contour lines from a compounded 4-quadrupole system, 3-D tracking of an ensemble of particles near a resonance (actually a 3D picture), and solutions to a matching problem. Are these representative enough? That’s a good question. The idea is to symbolize what we are doing with these graphs, which we have hundreds of and which really give us an edge in terms of impressive looking pictures. I was trying to create a coherent picture here strongly emphasizing the fact that we deal with all sorts of interactions between EM fields & charged particles. This may not be as coherently and effectively done as I would like, but I would start from this. The one remaining block contains an image of a leaf (maple?), picked outside the ARC building and immortalized by a scanner. This gives a geographical anchoring of the CASA logo. In the second version it is rotated by 45 degrees.
My personal preference is the 2nd version, which is shown in blown-up B&W in the last page as an interesting alternative by itself (i.e., the logo itself is in B&W).
Alternative insets
Some possible alternatives to replace the graphs shown here can be found in
LOGO_Gallery.doc
in the page
http://www.jlab.org/~chao/CASA_LOGO
They are more or less similar to the ones shown here.
