Design History

January 27, 2013 earliest file on the website, uploaded by Cord.

Wade-Larsen Logos

In early 2014, an effort was made to create a new logo in a collaboration between Wade Larsen and Jeremy "Jher" Swartz. A number of logo designs were proposed, and eventually the decision was narrowed to three main logo images. Each of the logos made use of illustrative elements to depict the words The logos depicted a tree, representing Eugene, a gear representing Maker, and a cube representing Space. Several other logo candidates had used similar illustrative devices to achieve similar goals, with one using a squirrel to represent Eugene. A new typeface was used as well, now rendering all parts of the name in a single typeface which featured a more friendly feel, with a cleaner, more modern vibe.

Mixed adoption and practical concerns

Over the next few years, adoption of the Larsen-Swartz designs was uneven across the organization. Banners and signage in the shop showed one logo, business cards and webpages showed another. Some places used both. Online usage had begun to settle into using the 'unified cube' logo, but When many social media sites (such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Meetup.com) began enclosing userpics in circles as a matter of course, the elongated hexagonal shape of the unified cube logo meant that most sites would cut off the logo.

In Spring 2018, efforts began to try once more to wrangle the shop's growing 'who does this belong to?' problem. A number of tools and pieces of equipment were identified that had either been donated or abandoned, and those that were desired to be kept as shop property we wanted to mark as such. At some point in the past, someone had stuck a "Gear" logo sticker on the shop's beloved Vacuum Former, and the idea of doing something similar utilizing the vinyl cutter, caught on.

Unfortunately, the 'Unified Cube" logomark utilized 5 colors, with no way to easily render the logo in a simple 'black ink on white paper' application. As such, the logo could not easily be made into a stencil, or a single-layer vinyl sticker. By contrast, the original "Gear" logo could manage this effortlessly.

"Fusion" Redesign

The front window of the shop had, at some point, received a large vinyl application of the text "Eugene Makerspace" as rendered in the Larsen-Swartz logos. Keeping that font, while utilizing the more print/circle friendly "Gear" logo was a solid plan. With the mixed use of both logos in the shop and online, attempting to bridge the gap between the designs seemed like a perfect solution. Leaning on the bolder 'green/black/white' notes from the Larsen-Swartz logos, the final design effectively assembled itself.

2021 Remastered Logos

After several years of casually resizing raster graphics on an 'as needed' basis, the need was finally acknowledged for a 'standard' set of vector-graphic source files, so that logos could be rendered not only at any size that might be called for, but with a more consistent approach to colors, spacing, and layout. An additional set of "Color on Black" logos were created when the 2022 website redesign called for logos to appear on a black background for mobile users.

Below are the vector graphic files created during this effort, in Adobe Illustrator (.ai), Encapsulated PostScript (.eps), and Scalable Vector Graphic (.svg) formats, as well as some relatively large rasterized (pixel) images in Portable Network Graphic (.png) format.

EMS Logo

Contents

Design History

Wade-Larsen Logos

"Fusion" Redesign

2021 Remastered Logos

Gear Logomark

Two Words - Long Header

Two Words - Split "Double" Header

Three Words - Landscape

Three Words - Portrait

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