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The museum’s emblem artwork, 2012
Deschutes Historical Museum · February 27, 2012
In the story: 7. They got there, 2011–2021.
Print-quality emblem artwork, public on the museum’s own website since 2012.
Broad shaped letters filling a solid disc, in blue and gold, at 812 pixels square and 300 dots per inch. This is not a web graphic; it is artwork prepared for printing, and it had been sitting on the Deschutes Historical Museum’s public website for eight years before this project went looking for it.
It moves the museum’s use of this drawing back from 2020 to 2012, and it is the oldest dated example of the broad-serif family — the family the common master belongs to.
Measured
The museum rounding, the rounded construction. The same rounded construction as 1917, with the last letter run straight down at one thickness instead of tapering.
Read at high confidence from 682 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
- 1.000 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
- 1.012 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
- 0.465 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
- 0.470 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.
- Downtown Bend gold roundel 0.962 — very close; the same drawing, or one traced from it
- Grayson Graham collection, gold, 2022 0.954 — very close; the same drawing, or one traced from it
- Downtown Bend Business Association badge, 2018 0.820 — a family resemblance, not the same cut
Least like it: Bulletin business directory, August 1949, at 0.167.
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 One artwork, two files. The museum’s February 2012 file and the roundel on Downtown Bend’s history page score 0.962 against each other and hold that score at every device cut. Which file came first is not measurable.
- A question Redrawn from the 1912 or 1916 cut?. Every character of the museum’s drawing matches the period impressions - three-armed E, capital N, letters to the edge - and none matches the narrow families. It scores 0.70 against the 1912 cut, which is family rather than copy. What would settle it: The Deschutes Historical Museum’s source file and its author, asked of the museum directly. A working file with a 1912 or 1916 scan under it would settle a direction the measurement cannot, and the museum is the first known holder.
Compare this drawing with another · The board · How the drawings were measured