Where did East’s Wildcat logo come from?

     A lot has changed since East first opened its doors to students in 1996, but one symbol has remained constant through it all, embodying the school’s uniquely defiant spirit for nearly three decades: the Wildcat logo, with its snarling maw, bristling whiskers and single hungry eye.

     Except, it isn’t quite that unique. As with many public schools in the United States, East’s signature logo is actually identical to a popular piece of clipart.

     In fact, the Wildcat that is now so synonymous with our school’s branding has a history which begins 100 years ago in Daytona Beach, Florida.

     In 1923, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune’s Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls merged with the Cookman Institute for Boys in Jacksonville to form a new co-ed high school which, after a series of expansions and developments, would eventually become Bethune-Cookman University.

     With the influx of boys in the 1920s also came a greater focus on team sports and, according to the Bethune-Cookman University Digital Style Guide, created by former B-CU Associate Athletics Communication Director Andrea Wheeler in 2016, Dr. Bethune took this opportunity to select the school’s mascot.

     “Dr. Bethune and her team chose the Wildcat and its untamed characteristics as representative of the fighting spirit of her young students,” according to the Style Guide.

     Rudimentary versions of the B-CU Wildcat logo appeared on cheerleading uniforms as early as the 1960s. In its earliest form, B-CU’s Wildcat had very little in common with East’s, but as the institution evolved, so did the design of its logo.

     In the early 70s, B-CU adopted its first standardized logo design when “Coach Wesley Moore decided to place the Wildcat on the football helmets.” This 70s-80s logo can be found on various pieces of B-CU media from the period.

     The image was again revised in 1991, marking the introduction of the familiar Wildcat design we know and love. Despite the “Blood Maroon” and “Florida Sun Gold” color gradient, the base image is unmistakable as the same one used at East.

     Though listed on SportsLogos.Net as B-CU’s “2000-2015” logo, B-CU’s official Style Guide says that it was “designed in 1991,” five years before the opening of East.

     Since then, B-CU has again rebranded, now using a “sleeker and much clearer design” created at the same time as the Style Guide under the oversight of Wheeler. But, even beyond East, their 1991-2015 Wildcat logo has become a nationwide clipart staple.

     For instance, a more detailed version of the same design is available for purchase under the name “Bobcat” through both CSA Images and Custom Ink.

     Plus, across the country, more than a dozen schools have all used near-identical art for their logos. The colors, orientation and line weight vary from place to place, but again, the base image is unmistakable.

     Indeed, this particular snarling wildcat can be found everywhere from Wayland Union High School in Michigan to Salida Middle School in California.

     According to East graphic design and art history teacher Jeff Bowers, the practice of repurposing logos in this way is common among schools built in the past few decades.

     “A lot of these logos you see are literally clipart,” Bowers said. “I’m not saying they’re from Microsoft Word, but it is stock imagery that multiple construction companies… go and find, rather than have each school design their own.”

     Chapel Hill High, for instance, uses an unmodified copy of the University of Missouri’s Tiger logo as its own. Likewise, Carrboro High’s logo is a recolored version of the one used by the Jacksonville Jaguars.

     Bowers says that the alternative strategy, allowing students to create their own logo designs, was more popular in the 1980s and 90s, when “people started thinking they could do ‘graphic design’ from their computer.”

      “It was all bad,” he said, “but it was charming bad. It looked like students made it themselves, which made it cool. And we lost that in the 90s to 2000s. I would say now we’re just kind of trying to cookie-cutter off the fame of more famous NFL and college teams.”

     Regardless, East chose the B-CU Wildcat logo as its own, and it has remained largely unchanged since first being selected under the leadership of former superintendent Neil Pedersen and East’s founding principal Dave Thaden.

     The Wildcat mascot itself was chosen to thematically match the Chapel Hill Tigers, and our original school colors of black, white and silver were picked as a mirror of CHHS’s black, white and gold.

     Today, the logo appears on posters, sports apparel, official publications, vending machines and, of course, painted large in the eponymous “Wildcat” atrium outside the gym and auditorium. According to social studies teacher Dominic Koplar, who was a freshman at East during its inaugural 1996-1997 school year, that latter instance of the logo was there from day one.

     Despite minor modifications over the years, such as the creation of a scalable vector version by yearbook adviser Gregory Davis and the addition of a bold outline by athletic director Randy Trumbower, every generation of East students has known this logo as the definitive East Wildcat.

     Other designs have also occasionally appeared on merchandise and official materials for the school, but none has been as enduring or ubiquitous as the “original” from 1996.

     The largest shift in the history of the school’s branding has actually come this year, with Principal Jesse Casey’s introduction of light “Carolina” blue as East’s fourth school color, based on votes among students, staff and community members. The color received 34.7 percent of votes among students and staff, and 41.6 percent among the community at large.

     The 2022-2023 yearbook lists the shade PANTONE 279 C as “East Chapel Hill High School Blue.”

     Various new articles of merchandise incorporating this color have already been produced and distributed, including a T-shirt design with this year’s “Loved, Respected, Connected” compass rose crest.

     At the same time, Davis, Bowers and others have been working to standardize the school’s visual style, with a proposal for consistent and com-plementary color values to be used in official communications.

     In one draft of their “ECHHS Color Guide,” the hexadecimal color formulas #F9F9FA, #799ED3, #808183, #46484B and #BCBDBF were proposed for white, blue, grey, black and silver, respectively.

     But for now, the only consistent aspect of East’s branding remains the Wildcat logo, a symbol which embodies both the nationwide trend of unoriginal stock imagery in public schools and a core pillar of East’s style as envisioned by the architects of its identity.

     Bowers, for one, says he’d prefer that East design its own unique logo, even if it does end up “charming bad.”

     “I’d love to have students work on making a new logo… but I haven’t been approached and I don’t have the resources,” he said.

     Koplar, on the other hand, says East should stick with the tradition of the existing Wildcat logo.

     “Change for the sake of change is not inherently good,” he said.

     For their part, 68.3 percent of respondents to the ECHO’s December Student Survey said they liked the Wildcat logo, and only 24.6 percent said they didn’t.

     In the end, our Wildcat logo is just one example of the fact that a school’s culture is derived from a thousand different sources, like a piece of clipart from a school in Daytona Beach, Florida, a new principal from Henrico County, Virginia, or the countless students and staff who pass through its halls each year.

Photo courtesy of UCF Libraries