The logo for our Rediscover Green project is based on some concepts that you might find interesting.
First of all, it's based on the green and blue Library logo designed in 2000. Our "Open for Discovery" tagline becomes "Rediscover Green", recognizing that we've all been involved with environmental initiatives and ideas in the past. Like so many things in the Library, this project is about both tradition and innovation.
The new logo's fern, of course, represents the natural world. But look more closely at it: this is a fractal fern. Fractals are geometric shapes; each portion is a reduced-size copy of the whole. Each "leaf" on the fern is a smaller version of the fern itself, and each leaf is made up of many smaller but otherwise identical versions. With a large enough picture of the fern, you could see an infinite number of smaller and smaller replicas of the whole fern.
Fractals occur in nature: many natural objects approximate fractals, from clouds, coastlines, & mountain ranges to snowflakes, broccoli, and ferns.
Besides being self-similar, fractals are recursive. They can be built by doing the same thing over & over again, which is one thing that computers do really, really well. And that's how our fern logo was built: using a computer program.
The fractal fern is thus about technology: an important part of everything we do at Red Deer Public Library. It also represents the Community Development processes we're using in our project. We work together as a community to build something, and that community is made up of human beings, with many common dreams and aspirations. Fractals are talked about in Chaos Theory, and those of us involved in Community Development work know that it can be messy, if not always necessarily chaotic. But it's often very satisfying as well.
There's something else you'll notice about the logo: the fern breaks through the logo's box. We hope that our project will take a look at challenges in a new way, and that we can break away from old ways of thinking when we need to.
So there it is: our self-similar, recursive, algorithm-driven, natural-world, Community Development-based, out-of-the-box-thinking logo.
Though it's also a pretty green fern.