I have been trying to reconstruct the UNB Faculty Of Computer Science Crest from the lapel pin which I received several years ago. Please examine the attempts referenced below. If you would like to make an attempt, I suggest that you e-mail me before you spend any significant amount of time to avoid duplicated effort. I will add a note of those volunteers working on the project to this page.
I used the flatbed scanner attached to the Windows machine in the Computer Science Multimedia Lab to scan my lapel pin.
cscrest1.gif through cscrest6.gif are successive refinements of the raw immage.
Possible further experimentation:
From: "Bernd J. Kurz" <bjkurz@unb.ca>
John et. al.:
I have put copies of my EXPERIMENTAL CS crests in
research-groups/datacomm/cscrests on www.cs.unb.ca.
[Note: because that directory no longer exists, I have moved those
images to my file area. John DeDourek.]
Unfortunately,
I played around with your crests with the idea in mind to use it in
some pages. I put two more versions into the subdirectory:
The problem I ran into is the following:
the crest is not suitable for reduction in size because there is too
much detail in the original which identifies the crest as CS's. If
this detail is lost by size reduction, we have left an
unindentifiable smudge of a crest.
Can anybody identify better the "relevant" features of this crest
that still show up in a size-reduced version ? Or can anybody modify
the original crest (artificially) to possess such a feature. I know,
this borders at image processing, but I won't be able to do this now.
Bernd 16 May 97 11:45am
The CS Crest actually appears to be the old UNB Crest with the red border containing the words "UNB Computer Science". Someone with the appropriate experience with one of the good graphics editors should be able to put this together pretty quickly. Ideally, this would be done with a "drawing program" rather than a "paint program", i.e. as a line drawing. This could then be scaled to whatever size desired and then converted to an appropriate pixel image at the required resolution. (Of course, we could use the art work for the UNB crest, if that were available, as a starting point.)
In order to have something of approximately the same size as old UNB Crest I produced two more attempts:
The latest attempt is still not extremely readable on my high resolution AIX display; it's not too bad on my old VGA resolution display; perhaps we could use a brighter color against the black of the shield.
At Bernd Kurz's suggestion, I adjusted the colors in cscrest10.gif. He suggested a brighter red to give more contrast to the black "UNB Computer Science." In fact, I adjusted almost all the colors to the "Netscape 256 Pallette".
Explanation: The video adapter in a desktop workstation generally determines the number of colors which can be simultaneously displayed on the screen. Common specifications are 16 colors (old VGA standard), 256 colors (8 bits per pixel), 65536 colors (16 bits per pixel). The gif format allows a picture to have up to 256 colors.
For 256 color adapters, each color is specified by giving three 8-bit numbers (0-255), representing the brightness of red, green, and blue, respectively. Thus 0,0,0 is black; 255,255,255 is white, 255,0,0 is bright red, etc. This scheme also holds for the colors contained in a gif picture.
Thus, a gif picture is always displayable on a display with 256 simultaneous colors or better by setting the screen display colors to be those of the gif picture.
Unfortunately, under a modern GUI operating system, the screen must be shared among several applications, one of which may be a WEB browser. And the web browser may be displaying several gifs simultaneously. On a display adapter with many colors, each application attempts to get a pixel value for each color required by a gif picture and then maps the pixel numbers of the picture to the pixel numbers actually required on the display to get the correct rendering. On a display with only 256 colors, all of the colors available may be used for the first picture displayed. The second picture would have to be adjusted to use only the colors being used by the first picture; if there is a large difference between the pictures, e.g. the first picture uses many shades of red, the second many shades of green, the second picture would look awful.
On a 256 color display, netscape uses the following technique. It attempts to obtain pixel values for exactly 216 colors. This leaves 40 colors for other uses, e.g. I think Windows reserves 20 colors for itself. The colors netscape uses are those by using the six values 0, 51, 102, 153, 204, 255, in all combinations for red, blue, and green.
I modified the crest to use only netscape colors.
Comments anyone?
I conducted an e-mail poll of the Faculty to obtain information on the origin of the crest. Here are a selection of the responses.
From: "Uday G. Gujar" Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 12:40:10 -4 Subject: Re: Faculty of CS Crest I think John is referringto the pin which I distributed just before going on sabbatical leave. That was put together by the then CSA executives. They had a little contest for the logo. I am not sure if FCS ever adopted it as an official emblame - but it could be considered a defacto one in the absence of any other. I do not have the art work. Duncan Campbell handled the thing and is still interested in it. He now works in Ottawa. I could try to get in touch with him if the need be. Nursing Faculty has a pin and it was thought that a pin of our own would be moral booster for our students. FCS could (and in my opinion should) distribute each of these pins to the graduating students.
From: "Arlene Stocek"
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 09:50:57 -4
Subject: Re: Faculty of CS Crest
Hi John:
I have a lapel pin which the CSA had made up in 1994 (I
think). Duncan Campbell made the arrangements. I think
it is the same pin I have. It's on my desk if you want to
see it.
Arlene
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Revision:
11.0 2023 August 15