About MANTO’s Icon
When MANTO was created, we were mostly concerned about the data side of the project—we wanted to have a curated set of data that was reliable and meaningful to users—but we also realized that the database would be much more appealing and useful with an attractive and intuitive interface. In early 2021, when the public interface was about to go live, we decided that we needed an icon that would serve as MANTO’s logo. Fortunately, we have at UNH a fabulous student artist who had contributed show tiles for the Greek Myth Files, so we asked her if she could take a real image of a mythical figure, digitize and format it to serve as our icon. But which?
We had a lot to choose from, but since the end result was to be circular, it dawned on me that I had snapped a picture of the Sphinx in the Louvre in January of 2017. It’s a charming picture of the hybrid monster, with a somewhat disarming expression (is that a grin?), and it was simple enough to make a good line drawing in digital form:
Dish from around 600 BCE, found in Kameiros, Rhodes in the 1800s. Now housed in the Louvre (accession number A308). Image taken by R. Scott Smith 1/25/17.
Having chosen the base image, I contacted Allina Podgurski, who graciously accepted the challenge to play around with it and present us with some options. One of the challenges was to simplify the busy image, eliminating the orientalizing decoration and the radiating lines on the bottom. The image we wanted needed to be striking and simple.
An early sketch of one possible logo.
We of course thought that the full sphinx (with the lion’s tail) was the way to go, so Allina then set to work on the color scheme, choosing a striking light gold color to accentuate the dark lines of the original. One version had the tondo fit into a black square background, but it seemed too heavy. The final product:
We’ll never know what the original artist was imagining with the facial expression: perhaps the Sphinx is delivering the riddle, about to pounce on a victim. For us, at least, the image captures the enigmatic and complex nature of the data we’re collecting and trying to visualize. Great thanks go to Allina for her fantastic work!