Some School Heraldry in Las Vegas

While we were in Las Vegas, taking care of some business for my mother, we found the following bit of heraldry at an intersection.

Challenger School (well, there's three of them in the Vegas area (and 22 others through five western states), so maybe it would be more accurate to say Challenger Schools) caters to pre-school, kindergarten, elementary and middle school (what we used to call "junior high" back in the olden days when I was growing up) students.

They're really proud of their curriculum, as you can tell from their logo: a coat of arms-like device with an painter's palette and treble clef in the first quarter; an open book and pair of compasses in the second; a globe of the earth in the third; and a microscope and a laboratory beaker in the fourth.  The motto scroll says "Scientia * Opus * Virtus"

Once again, this is the sort of thing that you get when you let a committee (one with little or no experience with heraldry) design your logo; what I have come to call the "kitchen sink" school of heraldry, one where they try to throw in everything about themselves, including the kitchen sink.

So, yeah, it's a little bit like heraldry, but totally misses some of the basics of real heraldry: simplicity, good contrast, quick and easy identifiability. (I like the rule of thumb suggested by former State Herald of South Africa Frederick Brownell. He said to take a design and shrink it to the size of a postage stamp. If it's still identifiable, it stands a good chance of being decent heraldry. If it's not particularly identifiable when shrunk to that size, well, it needs some simplification.)

Once again, here we have a case of, well, yeah, it's nice that they're trying to use something like heraldry for their logo, but the result is a bit less than satisfying.