Logo

They look like crafty celestial streaks, heavenly halos and bolts from the blue. Like Saturn's rings, racing clouds or brilliant beams of light, they orbit in and around our lives with alarming regularity.And everywhere you look, you find them: from your sneakers to your coffee cup to your phone book to your daily Internet surfing. They are the pre-millennial graphic equivalent of "have a nice day": omnipresent smiley faces of a logo-obsessed, icon-driven world.Meet the swoosh.Swoosh? For lack of a better name, we'll call them swooshes.

A federal judge has denied a request by the Ravens to throw out a jury's finding that the team copied its helmet logo from a design by an amateur Baltimore artist.At the same time, U.S. District Court Judge Marvin J. Garbis gave the artist's attorneys permission to seek employment records related to the claim of a former Ravens employee. The woman has come forward since the trial to say she saw the artist's submission at the team's offices last year.The jury ruled Nov. 3 in favor of Frederick E. Bouchat, the amateur artist and security guard who worked at a state office building.

NEW YORK -- Major League Baseball is considering selling small patches of advertising on the uniform sleeves of its players as a new way to increase team revenue.Baseball's tentative plan, one company official said, would probably have teams sell the advertising patches to local corporations. When revenue reached a certain level, it might be shared with other clubs. Only companies in the tobacco, alcohol and broadcast businesses would be barred from the program.Until now, baseball has allowed uniforms to bear only the manufacturer's logo.

A federal jury found yesterday that the Baltimore Ravens copied their team logo from a Pigtown amateur artist who submitted his drawings hoping to get an autographed helmet, but who might get more than $10 million because of copyright infringement."

The $10 million question posed in Baltimore's federal court: Who designed the Ravens football team logo?A Pigtown amateur artist claims he did and is suing the Ravens and NFL Properties, the football league's marketing arm, saying they stole his sketches. The copyright infringement trial began yesterday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore."This is a very, very important case because [the Ravens' and NFL Properties'] reputations are at stake," said George Beall, an attorney for the defendants.

The $10 million question posed in Baltimore's federal court: Who designed the Ravens football team logo?A Pigtown amateur artist claims he did and is suing the Ravens and NFL Properties, the football league's marketing arm, saying they stole his sketches. The copyright infringement trial began yesterday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore."This is a very, very important case because [the Ravens' and NFL Properties'] reputations are at stake," said George Beall, an attorney for the defendants.

Baltimore's expansion CFL team lost its name in court before its first game. It also lost merchandise that could not be sold because it bore the banned name.But it seems to have a winner of a logo -- a stylized horse head with flowing mane.Now the merchandise is nickname-less, but it doesn't seem to have hurt sales."I think sales have been pretty steady," says Tom Renedo, manager of licensed merchandise. "The logo's going to stay."He says the biggest sellers have been T-shirts, media guides, coffee mugs and lapel pins.

As our children grow into their teens, dating is obviously one of the experiences they'll encounter. It is an exciting time in their lives as they experience all kinds of new feelings and experiment with the boundaries of new-found freedoms. And the decisions they face are sometimes overwhelming.It is an especially challenging time for girls, who, though more world-wise than their counterparts of generations past, are still vulnerable to the same problems and face the same choices that have forever challenged young women.

South Carroll High students Todd Parks and Rebecca Aura each received a $50 gift certificate from Cranberry Mall at the Carroll County Board of Women in Business and the Trades meeting Thursday for logos they designed.The logos were designed for Nontraditional Employment for Women, a federally funded program to place women in occupations dominated by men. Program participants will be chosen through the county Job Training Partnership Act.Program objectives include training 17 Carroll County women for nontraditional work and successfully placing 12 of them in nontraditional occupations.

The Baltimore Baseball Club logo from 1892 appears on the ends of all aisle seats, and the batters in the logo will face the playing field.

If the Orioles really want to turn things around, maybe they should start with their upside-down-and-backward apostrophe. The team's players sport two caps, one with a bird and one with a typo. The latter is on the "alternate cap" that's usually worn once or twice a week. It reads "O's," with the apostrophe flipped so the little round part - the "ball terminal," typographers tell me - is at the bottom instead of the top. It should be "O's." Baseball is a sport steeped in tradition and nitpicky rules.

A Baltimore man has sued the Ravens for copyright infringement, alleging that the franchise continues to profit from a logo that he designed in 1995. Frederick E. Bouchat, a security guard from South Baltimore, filed suit last week in U.S. District Court. The amateur artist has long claimed that he created and copyrighted the franchise's original logo. He says the Ravens copied the image and gave him no credit. In the lawsuit, he says the Ravens have continued to show the logo in various films featuring clips from the 1996, 1997 and 1998 seasons.

The prestigious art school that spent a year studying a comma has devoted another to three lines. The art school formerly known as the Maryland Institute, College of Art, and currently known as Maryland Institute College of Art, has, with help from a renowned international design firm, come up with a logo that makes its debut today. It amounts to three straight lines, inserted between the letters M-I-C-A. A word to anyone out there from The-Emperor-is-Buck-Naked school of art criticism, the ones who think their toddlers can splatter as well as Jackson Pollock: These are not just any lines.

Good morning--Under Armour --Your logo on the walls at Wrigley Field? No sweat.

In old Hollywood movies, the stylish set all shopped at Saks Fifth Avenue. Women with gloved hands peered into windows accented with the store's signature script signage and dreamed of filling hatboxes and shopping bags with elegance and luxury. But few women wear gloves to go shopping or have much use for hatboxes anymore. As the times have changed, so has Saks -- becoming gradually more contemporary, while holding on with great determination to its upscale heritage and image. So how best to indicate to the world the department store's complex personality: New but familiar.

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s campaign altered its newest television advertisement yesterday after officials from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation complained that the ad's use of its logo might give the impression of a political endorsement. The 30-second advertisement, which began appearing in the Baltimore media market Wednesday, quotes the foundation as calling Ehrlich's work on behalf of the bay "the most significant environmental initiative in a generation." Above those words, the foundation's logo appeared, which its spokesman said could appear to be an endorsement.

CHICAGO -- The United Airlines name is visible across the country this week, trumpeted as part of a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign, seen on commercials and discussed on talk shows. It is all part of a publicity onslaught the airline is trying hard to avoid. United 93 debuts tomorrow in movie theaters across the country. It tells the story of one of the four airplanes hijacked the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Although the film has drawn harsh criticism from some who feel it reopens emotional wounds, United Airlines has worked to stay neutral, neither criticizing nor praising the film and its producers.

Any company that broadcasts such shows as Jackass and Beavis and Butt-Head can't get overly worried about controversy. But Viacom - the corporate giant behind CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon and numerous other networks and media properties - might be taking its biggest TV programming gamble yet with Logo, the long-awaited gay cable channel. Today, the media giant will roll out the network in roughly 10 million U.S. homes, making it the first widely available, advertiser-supported channel for the community known by the acronym LGBT - lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.

People aren't just "googling" at Google.com. They're also ogling, thanks to the artwork of Dennis Hwang. Hwang redesigns Google's logo on special occasions, turning the search engine's familiar four-color logo into fresh eye candy. For instance, to commemorate Leonardo da Vinci's birthday last month, Hwang changed the logo's colors to the chalky red tones of da Vinci's sketches, and replaced one "O" with a smirking Mona Lisa. Though Hwang, a former art student at Stanford University, likes celebrating artists best, his tweaked logos also have given birthday nods to Albert Einstein and Ray Charles, among others.

The first network for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered viewers has unveiled a roster of programming and a start date: Feb. 17. LOGO, the newest digital cable network from MTV Networks - with the motto "different together" - will "reflect the diversity that is our community," said Brian Graden, head of MTV and VH1 entertainment. "We know there is going to be a backlash," says Matt Farber, executive creative consultant for LOGO. "We're prepared and we believe that all we're doing is reflecting an audience that does exist."