Creating a Logo for “Stars in Europe”
Four schools from four European countries together start a project. As a group of schools, (one of them is yours!), we need a logo for our project. A logo shows what a project is about and it should be memorable. Like the white and blue sky behind the propeller of a company that once made engines for planes, even though today you know it for the cars BMW now produces.
The following text is meant to give you ideas on what our project is about. If stars turn up in the logo, or our four countries within Europe or one of the machines we will use or produce, this would be fine, but it doesn’t have to. There are one or two things down in the description I wouldn’t know how to turn into an image- but you might?! Find your logo for our project. Each school can put forward up to three ideas for logos and at the end we will find our joint logo for “Stars in Europe”. Maybe yours?
‘Stars in Europe’ is a project on the significance of stars in a physical and metaphorical sense.
Stars are the guiding lights at night. The nightly rise and descent of stars changes during the year. Very much like our own star, the sun, rises and descends at different times and to different heights in the course of the year, creating equal lengths of day and night twice a year like Hipparchus showed to us. The stars at night give us the zodiacs and the navigators and astronomers used the stars to find their exact position on earth. Without a watch, during the day, looking out for the position of the sun at the sky was the safest information on what time it is, and with a clever trick of Eratosthenes the real size of our earth could also be found out by the size of the sun’s shadow at noon and Iktinos probably even used the stars when designing his temples.
Life depends on our star’s light- but what happens with too much light when nature is not accustomed to it? Light is wonderful but at night it becomes as much a pollution as dust or sulfur dioxide. And nightly light is different by the sea, in the mountains, in a forest, close to a city or far off from any human settlement; is it just the amount of light or does the kind and direction matter to us? Could we do anything about this kind of pollution?
Stars were used for guiding ships on long voyages; but for many of us, stars, male or female, are also our guides through life. They are role models, they set paradigms for our lives. And as our lives are different, so might be the stars we admire, so might be our image of the heroes and heroines in novels that we read. Fame fades fast, but some stars have become immortal. Different ones in different times and circumstances. What creates fame, what does it say about us, about our neighbors, about our ancestors who admired politicians or composers more than football players or singers?
With GPS and the clocks in our mobile phones we have forgotten to look for ourselves what the sun can tell us about the time of the day or the direction to south, east or west. We assume that the same people are famous everywhere and for the same reasons, but fame is a fickle friend and tells you more about your own set of mind than you sometime care to admit.
So, this project is about observing stars, physical or human, and understanding how and what they can tell us about our time, our times and the directions we might be heading for. Have you found an image you could use to give us a logo for our project?
Logo 3 won! Congratulations!