Home / Archive / March 3, 2011
The City’s landscape mark at 633 px, 2011
City of Bend · March 3, 2011
In the story: 7. They got there, 2011–2021.
The clearest picture of the drawing the City carries: the roundel in its landscape mark, at 135 pixels.
The same mark as the 2002 capture, served nine years later at 633 by 937. At that size the roundel at the foot is 135 pixels across, with about 95 pixels of letter, and it is the best reading of this drawing anywhere in the collection.
Every character reads. The two bowls of the B meet in a notch on the right. The E is rounded and notched at mid-height, with no separate middle arm, and its notch sits at the same height as the B’s. The third letter is an arch: two stems joined over the top, with no diagonal. The letters stand clear of a heavy ring.
That combination — the two notches level, and an arched third letter — is what separates this drawing from the capital-N file the stickers and breweries use, and from the 1912 cut, whose E has a middle arm and whose letters run into the ring.
Measured
The bureau roundel, the notched construction. Narrow letters, a notched E and a notched B at the same height, an arched third letter, and rounded corners.
Read at high confidence from 136 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
- 1.014 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
- 0.997 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
- 0.420 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
- 0.331 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.
- Tin Pan Alley painted panel 0.368 — different drawings
- Modernisation reference made with ChatGPT, 2026 0.366 — different drawings
- The council chambers disc 0.361 — different drawings
Least like it: Downtown Bend's earlier circle device, 2011, at 0.162.
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