Where the social record starts
Visit Bend · May 12, 2013
In the story: 7. They got there, 2011–2021.
Two photographs on one day in May 2013, and the beginning of everything this archive can see on Instagram.
The visitor bureau posted twice on 12 May 2013. One picture is a round disc, close up and slightly out of focus: an off-white face, a bright green outer ring, and BEND in grey capitals standing clear of the ring. The other is two people holding a tandem bicycle over their heads in what looks like a shop, with a large circular emblem on the wall behind them, mostly hidden by the bicycle.
Neither caption says what either object is — a sticker, a sign, a painted wall — and neither has been identified since. What they establish is a date. Before this, the earliest emblem sighting anybody had located on Facebook, Instagram or Threads was October 2025. These two posts move that back more than twelve years.
The green ring is the interesting part. Every other bureau mark in this archive is gold, blue or plain, and green appears nowhere else. That is a treatment rather than a construction, so it says nothing about family; it is recorded because a colour nobody else used is the kind of detail that identifies an object if the object ever turns up.
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 398 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
- 1.000 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
- 0.397 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
- 0.398 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.
- Vintage Bend profile rendering 0.466 — different drawings
- The same 1912 advertisement, from the page render 0.455 — different drawings
- Bend Park Company, July 1912 0.455 — different drawings
Least like it: Bend Rubber Stamp & Printing, at 0.206.
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.
Compare this drawing with another · The board · How the drawings were measured
Seen in use
2 dated sightings, 2013. Each is a record of this object or this drawing somewhere else, and where a picture is hosted it is a documentary crop of the object, credited to whoever holds it.
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May 12, 2013 Visit Bend · Close-up of a round BEND disc, probably a sticker or sign Photograph of the object · instagram.com Visit Bend; documentary reproduction at documentary size for commentary, with attribution and a link. Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/ZOQj7wE1K2/ - May 12, 2013 Visit Bend · Large circular wall graphic behind two people holding a tandem bicycle Photograph of the object · instagram.com A different object from the disc this record is pictured from — a wall graphic in the same shop — largely hidden by the bicycle, and the frame is of two people. No picture is hosted.
