Carnivorous Plant Nursery New Logo
Carnivorous Plant Nursery develops new logo.
In the early 1980s while teaching at Key High School in Carroll County, Maryland, I was taking photographs to use in my classroom. My Biology classes were starting the unit on Botany and in the past, I was often hit with students' yawns and comments like: "Oh plants, how boring." I was intent on using carnivorous plants to change that. There are a few things you can put in front of students and they immediately start asking questions; spiders, snakes, and a venus flytrap. Students immediately start asking questions about them; how they work; why they're carnivorous, etc. What a great way to develop hypotheses and begin investigations. The unit was a hit.
While arranging a nice Venus Flytrap trap for closeup photography, an Elder Borer Beetle from the oak tree above, happen to come visit the trap. I was able to catch his demise on slide film. I always thought that image was so representative of carnivorous plants that we began working with the idea. There was first a simple black and white .gif rendered in Photoshop from a scanned image of the slide. Versions of this were used in one of the pages in the CP Coloring Book, and in our early letterheads. This lead to design ideas that simplified the insect. We were interested in preserving the academic side of CPs and not using cartoon imagery that reflected human like behavior. Mom was helpful in simplifying the bug concept. We consulted with an artist, Sean O'Grady (Forgra Design) in Ireland and he provided some nice layout foundations, shape and border. Colin and I then spent hours working on an .ai file so that we would have great flexibility with the final image. We smoothed, tweeked, varied colors, and tried lots of combinations until the current logo was born.
Did you notice the bullets between the words "Carnivorous" and "Plant Nursery." They are renditions of the seeds of the Venus Flytrap, Dionaea muscipula.
The logo first appeared in our ad in the ICPS Journal, March 2011.
