Home / Archive / December 16, 2016
The City’s roundel, standing alone
City of Bend · December 16, 2016
In the story: 7. They got there, 2011–2021.
The first capture in which the City’s roundel stands by itself rather than inside the woodcut badge.
A cream roundel, 80 pixels across in a 339 by 86 header file, with CITY OF BEND set beside it. The drawing is the same one the landscape mark carried: narrow letters clear of the ring, a notched E and a notched B at the same height, and an arched third letter.
What changed is the framing. The round mark was not adopted to replace the landscape identity; it was taken out of it. The header image on the City’s previous site was injected by script and is not retrievable, so what the archive shows is the woodcut before and the roundel after, with the change falling somewhere in between.
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 64 px of letter, which is the letters alone, at this drawing's own letter cut.
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
- 1.025 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
- 1.000 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
- 0.392 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
- 0.306 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.
- Modernisation reference made with ChatGPT, 2026 0.502 — related letterforms, clearly redrawn
- Carstickers.com BEND sticker 0.477 — different drawings
- City of Bend identity 0.460 — different drawings
Least like it: BendEmblem.com common master, at 0.128.
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.
Ties touching this drawing, each in the class of evidence it has:
- Measured 0.93 at the letters cut. Read at the smaller of the two drawings’ own letter cuts, where neither mask holds a ring, these two agree at 0.93. At the global cut the same pair scores 0.46, which is a number about two rings. Neither score says which drawing came first.
Compare this drawing with another · The board · How the drawings were measured