My name is Laurelyn Sayah, and I am a long-time local who was busy over the holidays and just now read in The Mountain-Ear newspaper about the Nederland logo process that has been happening. Sorry I missed the community meetings, and would like to comment that it sounds like you did an amazing and creative job with those. Sorry to hear about the loud community disapproval of the logo you came up with... or more specifically, sorry if that stung for you, but it’s also kind of funny/sad/typical if you’ve been around Ned for a while, and I think therefore very informative of our character and indeed part of the process if you can stomach it. I would suggest what can seem like contentiousness and misanthropy is a quite varied collection of people who have in common a love of nature... an easier time being with nature than with people and so we are not in Boulder but still have to deal with each other, which most of the time is a good thing.

I have to opine that I don’t care for the logo either. My first thoughts were “what the heck IS that? Nothing I see around here! A rock cairn? An earring? Sisyphus eternally rolling a rock up the hill??” Actually, the obligatory winter activity up here, shoveling, can feel very sisyphean, as we continually have to do it again. I wonder if you had done this process in the warmer months if your experience might have been entirely different. I imagine a graphic of people with cabin fever throwing snowballs at each other, but let’s move on...

Being an artistic sort, ideas popped into my heart and I felt compelled to draw and share them, in case they help provide some ideas or elements that may be borrowed or modified to help with the process. I currently have no tools except colored pencils, which are not good at clean lines and erasures or drawing white on black, but made the sketches anyway with plenty of room for improvement.

What I drew is likely too graphically complicated, so I tried to subtract things and make a second.

What I was trying to represent is: light and dark, in the correct relationship to feel in balance... light over heavy, and with both of that duality radiating beneficially towards the town and reservoir in the middle, represented by a texture of lines that could be a mixture of varied architectural types, histories, characters as we are. The graphic celebrates the beauty of the place more so than any human aspect. Quartz are the crystals at the bottom because they do exist here and are a very recognizable graphic for the mineral kingdom. Their significance ranges from mining history to new age folks and everyone’s favorite store, the Rock Shop. The lowest slope is lower angle and straighter closer to the city, with overlapping ridges getting steeper and rougher towards Nederland, attempting to show cliffs, trees and Middle Boulder Creek. The small circles were inspired by bike wheels and a graphically simple way to show people enjoying mountains in many ways - hiking, biking, climbing, skiing, boating, fishing, hunting, etcetera. Above town the continental divide was drawn without even looking as a capture of the character of the local mountains, but could be changed out for some segment of actual skyline that works visually. A rainbow was added in at the last minute, as we have a lot of them. The 4 corners of the circle are bumped out to honor the medicine wheel shape used by many first nations. In the second attempt to simplify the graphic (I always tend towards realism, can’t help it), humans are even less visible, and a raven is added to represent the animal kingdom along with minerals, water, plants and sky.