CNS Logo
So apparently the logo for our research division has been a long standing dispute.
We are the nuclear physics research section of the physics department and the graduate school of science (U. Tokyo, obv).
Before around 1998, this was the Institute for Nuclear Study (INS). For reasons somewhat unknown to me, this was closed down. So we were relocated to the national laboratory, and the name was changed to the Center for Nuclear Study (CNS). The logo, as is, it's just some variously sized Times New Roman lettering. I think it's actually not that bad, but I would also say it's not particularly good, either.
You can see the present logo on our website (upper right corner if you are blind).
So I threw something together with gimp, which I hosted.
According to my supervisor, maybe the circle could be smaller and the letters larger and more well defined. In principle the final deadline is the end of the month, so maybe I still have some time to correct it, but I submitted as-is for now.
It's probably better to look at it before reading my ideas describing it, that way you could give independent feedback if you wanted.
My original idea was to take a solar flare, make it symmetric, put a nucleon in the center, and have the flare also serving the purpose of a Bohr electron orbital. While this was not a serious problem to do, there was then no obvious place for any lettering. Rather by accident, it occurred to me that the flares themselves could be letters.
So in any case, taking a famous solar flare picture and some time in gimp gives a sun with solar flares in the (physically unrealistic) shape of letters.
Then I took a so-called diamond-ring eclipse picture and transformed it a bit so I could overlay it on the other. I made the white transparent for overlaying purposes, and erased in the center what could be considered nuclei, quarks, or particles (we do a variety of research, so it should not be clear which one these are meant to represent). I tried a few configurations, and was only really ultimately happy with the triangular arrangement, but it's not chosen for any basis other than how it looks (with the exception that a three-particle group could be like three quarks in a nucleon or a 3H / 3He nucleus).
Before overlaying the two, I changed the hue of the sun in the center to be blue. In principle blue is our school color, so it might be better if the whole image was monochrome blue (and also monochrome has some advantages to printing).
I don't know if it will be selected or not, but I think it looks pretty cool anyway. At least in the sense of the idea I came up with I think it was manifested reasonably well. From my own stand point, it's really cool looking, but could be too complicated for use as a simple logo. On another note, my gimping ability is mostly straight self-taught (rarely even read web tutorials), so I think it's a fairly decent demonstration of my gimping skill, or at least I can say I'm surprised that the flames look pretty good considering how much alteration was done to the images.
Of course my particular research group does nuclear astrophysics, so I'm kind of biased towards what I do (if anyone wondered what the hell the sun and an eclipse are doing in the logo). Also, as the higher energy groups (nucastro is low energy, for the record), things like quark-gluon plasma has cosmological implications for the hot big bang, so the eclipse circle could also be interpreted to be the universe I suppose.
We are the nuclear physics research section of the physics department and the graduate school of science (U. Tokyo, obv).
Before around 1998, this was the Institute for Nuclear Study (INS). For reasons somewhat unknown to me, this was closed down. So we were relocated to the national laboratory, and the name was changed to the Center for Nuclear Study (CNS). The logo, as is, it's just some variously sized Times New Roman lettering. I think it's actually not that bad, but I would also say it's not particularly good, either.
You can see the present logo on our website (upper right corner if you are blind).
So I threw something together with gimp, which I hosted.
According to my supervisor, maybe the circle could be smaller and the letters larger and more well defined. In principle the final deadline is the end of the month, so maybe I still have some time to correct it, but I submitted as-is for now.
It's probably better to look at it before reading my ideas describing it, that way you could give independent feedback if you wanted.
My original idea was to take a solar flare, make it symmetric, put a nucleon in the center, and have the flare also serving the purpose of a Bohr electron orbital. While this was not a serious problem to do, there was then no obvious place for any lettering. Rather by accident, it occurred to me that the flares themselves could be letters.
So in any case, taking a famous solar flare picture and some time in gimp gives a sun with solar flares in the (physically unrealistic) shape of letters.
Then I took a so-called diamond-ring eclipse picture and transformed it a bit so I could overlay it on the other. I made the white transparent for overlaying purposes, and erased in the center what could be considered nuclei, quarks, or particles (we do a variety of research, so it should not be clear which one these are meant to represent). I tried a few configurations, and was only really ultimately happy with the triangular arrangement, but it's not chosen for any basis other than how it looks (with the exception that a three-particle group could be like three quarks in a nucleon or a 3H / 3He nucleus).
Before overlaying the two, I changed the hue of the sun in the center to be blue. In principle blue is our school color, so it might be better if the whole image was monochrome blue (and also monochrome has some advantages to printing).
I don't know if it will be selected or not, but I think it looks pretty cool anyway. At least in the sense of the idea I came up with I think it was manifested reasonably well. From my own stand point, it's really cool looking, but could be too complicated for use as a simple logo. On another note, my gimping ability is mostly straight self-taught (rarely even read web tutorials), so I think it's a fairly decent demonstration of my gimping skill, or at least I can say I'm surprised that the flames look pretty good considering how much alteration was done to the images.
Of course my particular research group does nuclear astrophysics, so I'm kind of biased towards what I do (if anyone wondered what the hell the sun and an eclipse are doing in the logo). Also, as the higher energy groups (nucastro is low energy, for the record), things like quark-gluon plasma has cosmological implications for the hot big bang, so the eclipse circle could also be interpreted to be the universe I suppose.