05/26/2026
A lady that I'm doing some vectorization work had me take on the Sterlington High School "S" logo since I didn't already have a hi-res version of it and I needed one to have on hand anyway. What I had never noticed because I never really looked at it that closely, is the Panther is almost a dead-on match for the Florida Panther's "Leaping Panther" logo, last used by the team in 2016. I'm not sure the origin of this logo or who created it, but I feel pretty confident that the panther portion of the logo originated from one of those CorelDraw sports logos clipart CDs that were popular in the late 90's and early 00's, and are probably still being used by a lot of apparel shops today. Those clipart packages did have quite a bit of original artwork in them, but they were also well known to take pro sports teams' logos and tweak them very very slightly to fall under Fair Use laws. So for recreating it what I did is just take the Florida Panthers' logo as-is, break it apart so the pieces matched up with the SHS logo, recolored it to black and white, and there ya go. The font used in the "S" is "Varsity Regular" and there's been no changes to skew or kerning applied, someone literally just selected a font, typed out an "S", and called it a day. And sometimes, that's all it takes. I think both logos could work in tandem, with the original on the right working in smaller applications where detail would be lost and my update working for larger applications where more detail could be seen. One thing I'd never noticed before is the piece of the panther that dips below the "S". Not sure why this was left in here. On the Florida version of the logo that's the panther's lower abdomen, but that logo has legs attached and you can see the bigger picture, here it almost gives the effect of a hornet/panther hybrid, but since my task was just to vectorize and clean it up some I left it in there since this isn't my original creation. These types of vectorization projects are always really interesting to me because it gives me a chance to dissect and analyze the artwork in a way that I never would otherwise, and then share it here because perhaps someone else would find it interesting as well.