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I decided to make a scalable version of the Dabney minimalist crest one day, just for fun. I did the whole thing using free software. The license statement at the bottom of the page applies to these images, but see below for exceptions.
Note: These files were created by me, but I did not design the Dabney Crest. The "full crest" is the coat-of-arms of the Dabney family; the minimalist version is by Kaihsu Tai. See Historical Notes below for full information.
I tweaked the postscript version to automagically center the image in the page. The size of the page is specified at the top of the file, so you can edit it for different paper sizes. The PDF version was created with ps2pdf from the postscript version. The EPSI version was created using ps2epsi, and the EPS version was created by removing the preview from the EPSI by hand.
In case you want to know how the crest was made:
First, I scanned my Dabney minimalist crest t-shirt with xsane. This produced this mess.
I deleted everything except the crest using the scissors tool of the GIMP, which works like the "magnetic lasso" tool in Photoshop. I did something that I don't remember to get rid of the fuzzyness around the edges; I believe it involved some combination of posterizing and edge-detection.
I ran the result through autotrace, which converts raster images to vector graphics. It did a pretty decent job, but since the original was, after all, a t-shirt, the result was still kind of lumpy and not very useful. I tried making autotrace trace the centerlines instead of the edges, which was interesting, but still too squiggly.
So I decided to do the logical thing, and manually trace over the autotrace output with sodipodi. The result is above. But it's somewhat amusing that it, in a roundabout way, came from my shirt.
The full crest was created by manually tracing an image on the Dabney website. I used potrace to do the letters in the motto, because I thought it looked better than my attempts to trace them by hand. It's a bit rough; if you want to improve on it go ahead.
I will consider any use of these images by members of Dabney House for house activities and house merchandise to be "fair use," even if no attribution is given. For example, if you use one of these images on a Dabney T-shirt, you do not need to print my name on the shirt. That'd be silly.
I received the following email:
From xxxx@xxxx Tue Feb 6 19:30:27 2007 Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 17:37:54 +0000 From: Kaihsu Tai <xxxx@xxxx> To: Tom Quetchenbach <q at ugcs dot caltech dot edu> Subject: scalable Dabney House minimalist crest Dear Tom, I am the old darb that drew the first minimalist crest on the Dabney House courtyard with a piece of chalk. I am glad to see the scalable vector graphics thereof. Just saying hi, and peace.
So the minimalist crest is not as old a tradition as one might think. Anybody with information about the origin of the "full" crest, feel free to contact me. I'm always glad to find tidbits of Dabney history.
In response to the above request for more information, I received the following:
Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 10:10:14 +0100 From: Kaihsu Tai <xxxx@xxxx> To: Tom Quetchenbach <q at ugcs dot caltech dot edu> Subject: Re: blazon for the Dabney coat-of-arms Dear Tom, At http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~q/dei/crests/ you said: > Anybody with information about the origin of the "full" > crest, feel free to contact me. I'm always glad to find > tidbits of Dabney history. For your information, I supply the following, which you may want to post on the webpage cited above. Peace, Love, and Dabney House. ----- Forwarded message from Kaihsu Tai ----- > From: Kaihsu Tai > Subject: Re: blazon for the Dabney coat-of-arms > Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 17:34:37 -0700 > To: Snoogums <xxxx@xxxx> > > From the president's box o' stuff: > > History of the Dabney Coat-of-arms > > The coat of arms is of the house of Dabney (Daubeney). the description > of the coat of arms is Gules, five fusils in fess argent, each charged > with a fleur-de-lis azure, chief three martlets, or, Crest -- and the > elephant's head erased. The motto is "Fidelis et gratus". The family of > Daubeney was originally French and in the 17th century they came to > America. Thereupon, they changed the name to Dabney primarily to > eliminate reference to nobility. In 1890, the family again became > nobility conscious and resurrected the family coat of arms. Upon careful > study, it was shown that the coat of arms is somewhat of a mixture of > French and english in that the one branch of the Daubeney family was > driven out of France for various and sundry reasons, none of which the > family is proud of, whereupon this branch of the family secured interests > in India. It is because of this Indian influence that the crest is an > elephant of Indian type, not African. The green of the elephant is for > decoration and bears no relation to the Irish. The shield is red because > of the courage of the Daubeney family and chiefly for all the blood they > spilled in brave actions. The martlets upon the coat of arms are of a > very rare bird that ceased to exist in France in approximately 1300. They > also indicate the interest of the family in sports as prior to 1300, > martlets were highly prized as a game bird. Fleur-de-lis are on the coat > of arms by virtue of crown grants. Why there are five, no one has been > able to tell. The motto "Fidelis et gratus" leads one to suspect in the > absence of proof that the family was held in great esteem and were shown > great fidelity by their serfs and that the family was always high in > showing gratification for anything that came their way, whether honestly > or dishonestly. > > signature: Donald Slelard(?) > 14 October 1959. > > Kaihsu Tai, 2000-12-03 17:44:54-0800: > > Rectify as necessary: > > > > Dabney House, California Institute of Technology. > > > > Gules, five fleurs-de-lis sable on lozenges argent conjoined in fess; on > > chief three birds passant or. Surmounted by a tusked elephant head vert > > with neck tortilly argent and gules. Riband for the motto to base argent; > > motto: FIDELIS ET GRATUS sable. ----- End forwarded message -----
So there you have it.
In the unlikely event that you find content here, it is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License, unless otherwise noted.