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Downtown Bend’s earlier circle device
Downtown Bend Business Association · October 14, 2011
In the story: 7. They got there, 2011–2021.
Seven years before its commissioned badge, Downtown Bend was already using a BEND disc.
The association’s 2018 badge by Chad DeWile is already in this archive. This is what came before it: a red DOWNTOWN wordmark beside a dark disc with BEND in broad shaped letters.
The file’s upload path reads 2009, which is suggestive and is not evidence — the repository has written that rule down before, about someone else’s logo, and it applies here too. The capture date is what we can defend.
Measured
The Downtown file, the notched construction. The same narrow letters and notched E as the bureau roundel, with a capital N.
Read at medium confidence from 54 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
- 0.977 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
- 0.345 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
- 0.268 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.
- Deschutes Brewery, Born in Bend 0.406 — different drawings
- Visit Bend, 2022 0.404 — different drawings
- Vintage Bend profile rendering 0.397 — different drawings
Least like it: The City’s roundel at 135 px, 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.
Ties touching this drawing, each in the class of evidence it has:
- A question The same drawing, one letter changed?. Every narrow drawing on hand, civic and commercial, carries a notched E and a notched B at the same height. The only difference that is not weight, tilt or colour is the third letter: arched in the civic uses, a capital N in the commercial ones. What would settle it: Downtown Bend’s own answer to who made its earliest file and from what, and the artwork attached to the 2011 LogoTournament brief, which the public contest page does not carry. Either would show whether the capital N was cut into an existing drawing.
- 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.
Compare this drawing with another · The board · How the drawings were measured