About the PAR-Projects Logo

From time to time we're asked about our logo. It's straightforward. It's fairly simple. And rightfully so, a lot of people assume there's a bit of meaning behind the few marks representing our brand.

So, for the curious, here's a bit about our marks.

Starting with the basics, the "PAR-" which sometimes lives alone (mainly on social media) is more significant than just the first few letters in our identity. It's an acronym, representing Professional Artistic Research, but it also includes our important little hyphen. From a visual standpoint, the hyphen allows us to brand these three letters. It also allows us to incorporate our energy into future projects. In other words, "PAR- Education" is already under our organization's umbrella. But what about "PAR- Dinners" or "PAR- Portfolios" or even just Team PAR-? These examples are only mentioned for fun but, especially with the final example, the hyphen helps us to distinguish ourselves from Caddyshack or all things  PGA.

Moving to the two symbols found in our loge, thinking about mathematics is a great way to start seeing our brand mark a little differently. The practice of collaboration — or the act of working with others to produce or create something — is extremely important to our identity, so we like to think of our "X" as a multiplication sign. Visually, it's displayed as a two color symbol because we often make efforts to be connectors of things that don't necessarily look or function in the same ways. But on a broader scale, we like to think incorporating creative thought into projects (artistic or not) adds a little something extra to each elements, essentially multiplying the value of the assembled parts.

This brings us to the second symbol and the last major component of our logo. If we consider the first the collaboration graphic, this second would be considered the vision graphic. And when both symbols are paired together, you get something like "Please allow us the help multiply your conversations with a little creative vision." 

Naturally, the boldness of our graphics were designed to be simple and easily drawn by hand. But if you notice, they were also designed to work as a stencil. As many know, we have a history of working with shipping containers and creating pop-up spaces. So, in a nutshell, we needed a brand mark that was easy to duplicate and easy to produce on a larger-than-life scale.

And to simply bring this explanation to a quick close, the "Est. 2010" represents the year we founded our blog and began creating projects throughout The Greater Cincinnati Metro area ...prior to forming our non-profit ...just a few artists trying to create change with visual statements.
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Thanks for reading along.
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