Steel Bridge Team Logo - Spring 2012

In Spring 2012, I participated for the second time in the annual Carolinas Conference for civil engineering students. Our NCSU team had no official T-shirt, and I volunteered to design something cool. The wolf silhouette is based on a larger bit of clip art I found and heavily modified by clipping the wolf away from its background and changing the color to black. The typography with our college name was inspired by the truss design that our team used to reduce the bridge’s total weight.

A bit more about the competition

Each year, NCSU’s civil engineering students are eligible to participate in a regional competition called the Carolinas Conference, which is an offshoot of the American Society of Civil Engineers® (ASCE). One of the much-looked-forward-to events is Steel Bridge. The design specifications change a bit each year, but the general rules remain the same. Each team must design a bridge that matches a specified scale and spans a certain distance. The bridge is constructed in parts that must be assembled on site the day of the competition. A cost function is used to approximate real world conditions when additional materials and construction hours would increase the bottom line of the project. After construction, each bridge is loaded to test its strength. Deformation beyond an acceptable tolerance would be considered equivalent to “failure” that would prevent further use of the structure.

In addition to designing our team shirt, I also helped grind slag from the plasma cut bridge parts we used that year. Our team didn’t win, but we all gave it our best!