Best logo ever, secondary education division

"Yes, our spirit will conquer all …"

My pick is my alma mater, Cabrillo High School, Lompoc, Calif.

Yeah, I'm biased. Also — one wouldn't break a sweat arguing — lazy. But I'd wager a lot of hard searching would transpire before one found a better high school logo.

To start, it's unusual. Of all the violent, oppressive mascots one could conjure to represent secondary education, few could measure up to Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and the conquistadores. Only one other California high school, in Long Beach, calls itself Cabrillo High. Though named after the same guy, the Long Beach school chooses as its mascot the jaguar. Huh? Cabrillo College in Aptos, Santa Cruz County, is home of the Seahawks. (Strange typeface, too.)

Wimps.

Of course, Cabrillo High in Lompoc has eviscerated, stuffed and prettified the conquistador for safe student use, so that he's no more a threat than a cuddly Disney™®© pirate. But I feel sorry for the students of so many other high schools and colleges, with their cookie-cutter mascots. Lions and Tigers and Bears. Oh, boring. I attended Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, a university world renowned for many majors (none of which I studied); its mascot is the Mustangs. Boring and bland.

Secondly, the Conquistadores mark has gone remarkably unchanged and untrammeled since 1965, when the Lompoc school began, named for the Spanish explorer and destroyer of worlds who sailed the coast nearby.

(I guess that's why the high school is so named. My junior high's mascot is the Minuteman, and since it's the school serving an Air Force missile base, I'm guessing it refers to the nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile, though the figure is a revolutionary war hero. The missile would have been funnier and more fitting.)

As with the Monterey Bay Aquarium logo, this mark's maker is unknown, but I'd like to meet him/her. Long before I thought about illustration and graphic design as something to do, I was drawn to this logo's conquistador in profile, with stark shapes in white to define the face in a black mass, and just enough detail to delineate the helmet and plume.

This is the full mark (above), with a variation on the Spanish crest (castle and lion). I'm not sure about the four stars; they might have filled an otherwise large dark space in the mark.

We used USC's "Conquest" to celebrate touchdowns,
but the band rocked it …

Here's the conquistador's profile in the school's marching band logo (right). Some color is added to the black and gold (seriously awesome color combo, by the way!), and the shapes have been sharpened, but the mark maintains its integrity. The typeface is a bit different from the main mark, but doesn't deviate much.

(The marching band used to wear conquistador helmets as part of their uniforms; now I notice they're more like black vaquero hats …)

My point is, Cabrillo has stuck with the mark throughout the years, rarely getting off track. Even my junior varsity baseball cap bears the gold elongated C on a black field, nearly a quarter-century after the school began. The school's web site displays the mark prominently.

It's almost as if Cabrillo has a graphics standards manual, like many businesses have, dictating the do's and don'ts of their logo's use. I doubt one exists, but I give credit to my old school for respectful and consistent use of its marks.

(I'm sure it wouldn't take long before someone showed me that Cabrillo has muddled the mark on its uniforms and other uses, but don't bother; leave me to my delusions.)

The graphic integrity of Cabrillo's mark, I'd bet, is the exception.

More common is the school where my children attended, El Camino Fundamental High School in Sacramento, home of the Eagles (all but one of the high schools in the San Juan Unified School District are saddled with alliterative nicknames: Mira Loma Matadors, Casa Roble Rams, Bella Vista Broncos; yawn …).

Don't mess with Boston College!

Maybe there's a reason
this eagle is screaming …

El Camino is older than Cabrillo by far, but has no visual center. Any and all eagle graphics, and every conceivable typeface is used for whatever manner and need arises. Apparently, Boston College put down the legal hammer and forbid uses of its mark, which meant El Camino, even though it had changed the B to an E and red and gold to green and white, had to stop using the mark. The football team's helmets still bear the same eagle that adorn the Philadelphia Eagles' helmets, so I'm not sure what's going on there.

El Camino has since unveiled its own mark, created by an art teacher, that combines the E and C into the shape of an Eagle's head. You can judge for yourself how it turned out (above, right); the eagle looks like it's been skinned alive, giving it a sort of Freddy Krueger look (left).

Robert Mott created this for all his fellow fogies assessing progress
on their long-ago dreams and plans.

My friend and high school classmate Robert Mott, who went on to run his own stellar graphic design shop, designed the mark for our 30th reunion (I didn't attend); though it's the farthest afield, graphically, that I've seen the Conquistador mark, Robert maintained its integrity while re-purposing it (man, I hate that neo-word) for this one-time use.

Robert was true to the logo and to his school.

One big walking pimple*

Such a happy, deluded kid …
Is this vaguely R. Crumb-y?

Lengthy correspondence with a friend from high school long ago (thanks facebook!) forced me to reckon with the fiery trial through which we pass: Junior high (or middle school, if you insist, though a different name doesn't improve that hell) and high school, especially the Making Our Way in the World part.

The memories led me to confront my sophomore year at Cabrillo High (best mascot ever, as long as you ignore the genocidal pedigree; unbelievably awesome aquarium and graphic design lab, long after my time, sadly; remarkably considered and consistent use of logo elements), when my uniform looked like this (left):

1. A Greek fisherman's hat, worn every single day. I got it at Fisherman's Wharf  on an eighth grade trip to San Francisco because (honest to God!) I saw an ABC After School Special in which the teen-aged protagonist treasured the Greek fisherman's cap given him by his late father. My dad was quite alive.

[Note: I make tangential connections to the world. The reasons I'm a San Francisco Giants fan, for example, are that one of my aunts has lived in and around the Bay area — mostly around, in Marin County and the south Bay — and I found the place exotic and fraught with adventure, and because an older cousin, nowhere near the Bay Area, could imitate Flip Wilson doing his Geraldine character shouting, "Hit that ball, Willie (Mays)! C'mon, Willie, hit that ball!"]

Tabbed for your convenience!
Just clip it out and clad me to recreate
an exciting night at Huyck Stadium!

2. A rugby shirt. Even though they're typically long-sleeved, I insisted (to myself) on wearing a short-sleeve version, because I read that drug users like to hide the needle tracks on their arms with long sleeves, and I didn't want anybody thinking I used. What a full-out weird kid I was. I had several of these, and occasionally wore a collarless polo shirt (there was a name for these, but I've forgotten it) to break up the monotony; you could get them from Miller's Outpost (anybody remember that place?).

3. Jeans, but not real ones, not even real denim. My parents usually bought from JC Penney or the Vandenberg Air Force Base Exchange, and found less expensive bluish looking, kinda stretchy pants that resembled jeans, from a distance.

3a. Sometimes I wore corduroys. Anyone remember corduroys? Where did they go?

4. Those shoes you got at K Mart. They must have had a name — someone told me they're "Clark desert boots" though I think the name may have been (knockoff) Wallabees  — but I call them, "shoes you got at K Mart." They were high-topped (mid-ankle) the uppers made of tan suede, and the soles made of "crepe" if that's what bright, hardened layers of rubber cement means. A ridge of fabric ran from the top of the shoe around the toe, holding the three pieces of suede together. Usually they had only two or four lace eyelets. Everyone wore them at the time. I haven't seen them since.

5. On Friday nights during football season, I wore the same thing, except I added a backbreakingly heavy ivory colored Irish fisherman's sweater, to complete the evening ensemble. It would have kept me warm during a hearty gale, if we ever had one. It did protect me from the fog so common on a Lompoc evening, and any girl who may have even accidentally entertained a molecule of thought about going out with me. I really thought I was something, with a style neither imitated or duplicated, probably with sound reason.

I was, quite plainly, a plain dork. I think I must have seen myself in a mirror or a photo, and decided by junior year to lose the uniform.

But I give myself credit for daring to exhibit what I thought passed for style. My body had thinned from the junior high pudge (think Bobby Hill without the buzz cut), from a lot of running around Mission La Purísima where I grew up (I was hoping to make either the 1976 or 1980 U.S. Olympic team. Honest to God! Don't tell me a rich fantasy life has no benefits!) and I wanted to exult in my sleek form a bit, celebrate a la Walt Whitman. And I credit my parents for not calling me out (maybe they thought it looked good, but having seen their old stepping-out photos,  I don't see how they could). Mom drew the line at a Navy pea coat; that fell into the "get a job and buy it yourself" category. For the most part, my parents let me find my own way; I remember once my mom let it slip that my dad had a conversation with her along the lines of, "No son of mine is going to draw and paint …" but my dad never discouraged me directly from exploring art.

Thanks for coming along on my catharsis …

* Thanks to Carol Burnett for her concise definition of adolescence.