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Downtown Bend’s disc, dated by its own file
Downtown Bend Business Association · November 15, 2006
In the story: 6. The emblem outlives the club, 1930–2010.
The largest and earliest-dated modern drawing of the emblem on hand: a gold BEND on a dark green disc, from Downtown Bend’s own website.
The file is 1260 by 1255 at 300 dpi and carries embedded metadata naming Adobe Photoshop CS2 on a Macintosh and a DateTime of 15 November 2006, 14:14:33. The Internet Archive captured it on 14 October 2011 at an upload path dated December 2009. Three dates, and only the first is about the artwork.
An Exif DateTime is written by software, not asserted by a person, and it is wrong whenever the machine’s clock was. It is nonetheless the earliest date attached to any modern drawing in this collection, and it moves the capital-N drawing’s first known appearance from March 2011 back to November 2006.
Measured, it is the narrow capital-N drawing. Read at each drawing’s own letter cut it scores 0.90 against the Bend Store sticker and Deschutes Brewery’s roundel, which is the same-artwork neighbourhood; at the global cut, where the ring dominates, those same pairs fall to 0.35. A research pass first read this file as the museum’s drawing. It is not: against the O’Kane glass it is 0.30, and against the 1912 impression lower still.
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 914 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
- 1.004 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
- 0.307 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
- 0.419 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.
- Grayson Graham collection, gold, 2022 0.759 — a family resemblance, not the same cut
- Downtown Bend gold roundel 0.752 — a family resemblance, not the same cut
- Deschutes Historical Museum, 2012 0.747 — related letterforms, clearly redrawn
Least like it: Bulletin business directory, August 1949, at 0.126.
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 0.91 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 0.91. At the global cut the same pair scores 0.37, which is a number about two rings. Neither score says which drawing came first.
- 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 0.39, which is a number about two rings. Neither score says which drawing came first.
- Measured 0.87 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 0.87. At the global cut the same pair scores 0.35, which is a number about two rings. Neither score says which drawing came first.
- A question Visit Bend takes the commercial file?. Visit Bend carried the arched-n roundel from 2001 to at least 2008 and the capital-N drawing by March 2014. Every character of its 2014 roundel matches the file Downtown Bend held in 2006, and the bureau has never published a statement about either drawing. What would settle it: Visit Bend’s own answer to who drew the mark it adopted, and the artwork file behind the 2014 site theme. The captures between 2008 and 2014 carry the roundel too small to read, so the web cannot close this on its own.
Compare this drawing with another · The board · How the drawings were measured