Logo contest: PhET Interactive Simulations

What we do:

PhET (http://phet.colorado.edu) creates high-quality interactive simulations for teaching and learning science and math, and makes them available for use worldwide for free. A PhET simulation is uniquely open, interactive, exploratory, and dynamic with intuitive, inviting interface and rich science and math representations.

Simulations like Energy Skate Park, Circuit Construction Kit, and Lasers create animated, interactive, game-like environments in which students learn through scientist-like exploration. They emphasize the connections between real life phenomena and the underlying science, make the invisible visible (e.g. electrons, photons, field vectors), and include the visual models that experts use to aid their thinking – design features which help students build their own understanding and skills. Using research studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the team of scientists, software engineers and science educators optimize the simulations for student engagement and educational effectiveness.

In the past year, over 40 million simulations were run from our website worldwide, and across grade levels from elementary through college.

Students, teachers, and life learners of all ages, races, nationalities and so on. We are a completely free open educational resource that welcomes all users.

Thus any logo needs to be gender neutral, and neither be too serious/old nor too youthful.

The current "PhET" logo has bright yellow lettering, we'd like the new logo to carry over this yellow in some way - for instance, the word "PhET" could continue to be a bright yellow.

The logo must look good on a black background and a white background.

The logo does have a few requirements:

-- 1. The word "PhET" should be the primary element of the logo. The "P" "E" and "T" should be uppercase and the "h" should be lowercase.

-- 2. "PhET" should be perceived as a single word that reads "fete" - e.g. through uniform font weight / color.

-- 3. We are looking for either a pure wordmark with some embellishment integrated into it or "PhET" with a mark/graphic to the left.

-- 4. The words "INTERACTIVE SIMULATIONS" should appear below the word "PhET" in a significantly smaller font size and will likely work best in all uppercase lettering. The logo should work with and without "INTERACTIVE SIMULATIONS" , so although these words will appear in the complete logo, the logo should also work as a standalone with just the word "PhET".

-- 5. The "PhET" logo must work at a variety of sizes - including working at a reduced size down to about 50 pixels in height on our simulations on iPads.

-- 6. The fonts used should be sans serif.

-- 7. Things to stay away from: - NO "science fiction" - too male, too niche, too specific ... we do math too. - NO vertical logos -- we work in vertically constrained spaces so anything that gets tall is a problem