Bend Emblem

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Six years of one sticker

Carstickers.com · July 25, 2020

In the story: 7. They got there, 2011–2021.

A hand holding a round sticker: a pale disc with a heavy black ring and the word BEND across it in narrow black letters.
The physical sticker, photographed in hand in March 2021. Carstickers.com · documentary reproduction Examine the original

A Bend sticker company has been selling the same emblem sticker since 2020, and photographed it three times.

Carstickers.com is a Bend business that prints stickers and decals, and among the 1,588 posts on its Instagram account it has shown a BEND disc three times: a promotional graphic in July 2020, the physical sticker held in a hand against pines and snow in March 2021, and a water bottle in a snowbank in July 2026, testing how well the vinyl holds up. Every one is the same product.

The deliverable that found these called the drawing an “arched-capitals” family of its own, on the strength of the letters' rounded tops and bottoms. Read against the matrix here it is not a new family: narrow letters standing clear of a heavy ring, a notched B, a notched E at the same height, a capital N running the ordinary way and a last letter that runs down at one thickness. That is the Downtown file's construction. What is different is the ring, which is heavy where the Downtown file's is usually thin — and the ring is a treatment, recorded per drawing and never used to separate one family from another.

The sticker is also the cleanest modern rendering of that construction in this archive: printed vinyl, photographed close, in focus.

Measured

The Downtown file, the notched construction. The same narrow letters and notched E as the bureau roundel, with a capital N.

Read at high confidence from 407 px of letter, which is an upper bound: this drawing's letters run into its ring, and no cut separates them.

Each drawing is reduced to the same thing — the letters BEND, cropped to their own ink, rasterised at a common size — so two of them can be compared by shape alone.

Device aspect
1.000 The roundel’s width divided by its height. 1.000 is a true circle; anything else is an oval, or a photograph taken at an angle. 0.977 – 1.048 across the collection
Word aspect
1.032 The same ratio for the block of BEND letters alone, once cropped to their own ink. 0.927 – 1.862; the high end is lettering set wide rather than stacked
Figure ink
0.459 How much of the drawing is ink rather than ground. A heavy ring and fat letters push it up. 0.169 – 0.728, median 0.493
Coverage
0.371 How much of the normalised square the letters fill once every drawing is reduced to the same size. 0.198 – 0.576, median 0.456

What it most resembles. Two digitisations of a single printing score 0.975, so that is what “the same artwork” looks like as a number.

Least like it: BendEmblem.com common master, at 0.191.

Resemblance is not descent. A high score means two drawings have the same shape. It does not establish which came first, or that either was copied from the other.

Compare this drawing with another · The board · How the drawings were measured

Seen in use

3 dated sightings, 2020–2026. Each is a record of this object or this drawing somewhere else, and where a picture is hosted it is a documentary crop of the object, credited to whoever holds it.

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