The City of Bend’s seal, and what it is not

The City’s own mark through this period is a seal with a landscape in it, and no BEND letters at all.

It is easy to assume a city called Bend has always used the Bend emblem. Its website says otherwise. From the earliest capture in November 1998 through 2012, the City of Bend’s own marks are this landscape seal and plain wordmarks — forty-nine archived images, and not one letter device among them.

That makes the seal useful in the way an exclusion is useful. It sits beside the emblem family rather than inside it, and it dates the City’s later letter mark from the far side: whatever that mark is, it is not on the City’s own front pages through 2012.