When talking about Fermilab’s distinct visual and artistic aesthetic, it’s impossible not to mention Angela Gonzales. The artist – Fermilab’s 11th employee – joined the lab in 1967 and immediately began connecting the lab’s cutting-edge science with an artistic flair to match. She picked a color palette of bold blues and oranges and reds that would go on to adorn the campus’ buildings, and illustrated hundreds of posters, signs and report covers for the lab.
She also designed the iconic logo and a beautiful graphic that has become an unofficial seal for the laboratory, most commonly found on the back of T-shirts. But what do all of the symbols mean?
Explore the symbols in this piece of Fermilab artwork
- Wilson Hall
- Logo
- Tracks
- Accelerator complex
- Prairie symbols
- Quarks
- Leptons
- Bosons
- Mesons
If all this symbolism isn’t enough for you—or if you’re a part of the coloring book craze and want to shade in a science drawing—fear not. Gonzales made an expanded version of this graphic. The buildings (clockwise from the top left) are the Meson Lab (now the Fermilab Test Beam Facility), the Geodesic Dome (now part of the Silicon Detector Facility), the CDF building (now part of the Illinois Accelerator Research Center) and the Pagoda (a small building that hosted a control room). She also incorporated four of the outdoor sculptures on the Fermilab site (clockwise from top): Tractricious, the Mobius Strip, Acqua Alle Funi and Broken Symmetry. You’ll also find some of the particle symbols from the core graphic, along with the symbols for π mesons, K mesons and gluons (g).
Download a high resolution version of the expanded artwork.
