Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-188432-20130304024346/@comment-188432-20130307151757

There's celery in every story featuring Five; half-moon glasses appear in an extreme minority — despite what Time Crash would have you believe. (Plus, One wore half-moon glasses, too — and in more stories — so it's hardly clear whom they'd represent.) If you show a celery stalk, to people who have even casual knowledge about the old series, of course they'll think about "Peter Davison's Doctor". Plus, a stick of celery is relatively easy to portray in outline, in monochrome. Cricket is not actually that associated with Five, certainly not televisually. I know that BF have made a bigger deal about his cricketing, but if we stick to television — and I think we must, in order to keep the casual user on side — he doesn't even mention cricket after his first season, and we only see cricket once. Celery is by far the most constant single feature of the era.

The point about Bessie was simply that it is not immediately obvious in the graphic currently provided what it is. It's too detailed, and it's shown head-on, which isn't awfully clear. I rather suspect you won't buy that critique, because as you've worked with it, you've lost the objectivity of a first-time viewer. You know it's Bessie, so that's what you see. But it took me a few seconds of staring at it to even see a car — much less Bessie. Your basic problem is that it's got so much detail it's not recognisable. The key here is to not just be monochromatic, but also to be simple — virtually an outline.

It seems to me that the UNIT logo is such an image. As for whether it's "fair", well, it's fairer than Bessie. I mean, just about every story that has Bessie by necessity also has UNIT/the Brig. And there are more stories with UNIT that don't have Bessie. UNIT is definitely "home base" for Three, from Spearhead right through to Spiders.