Fisheries Logo Designer Tells All: Popular Trademark "Was Just a Doodle"

By: Jamie Creamer

Paul Lauenstein stood looking at all of the sketches tacked up on the Swingle Hall bulletin board, and he just couldn't believe it. He'd been certain that somebody would come up with a strong entry in the AU Department of Fisheries and Allied Aquacultures' logo-design contest.

But here it was, less than two hours till the noon deadline for submitting entries, and the many drawings displayed on the Swingle Hall bulletin board were, well, underwhelming.

"For the most part, they looked like those official government seals, except they said 'fisheries,'" Lauenstein recalled. "None of them inspired me."

Actually, they did inspire him. The AU fisheries graduate student tore out of Swingle, jumped on his bike, raced to his apartment and produced, in a mere 90 minutes, what became the winner in that 1977 design competition–and what to this day remains one totally cool fisheries department logo.

It's the word AUBURN, graphically designed in the shape of fish.

"The idea for the design started taking shape in my head on my way home," Lauenstein recalled recently, 26 years later, from his home in Sharon, Mass. "When I got there, I sat down and just started futzing around with a pencil and a piece of paper, and it came together."

Actually, Lauenstein didn't use just any fish in his logo. He used his favorite fish–the carp. Indeed, the carp was the word "Auburn" waiting to happen.

"His eye was the hole in the 'A,' and his pectoral fin made a great 'u,'" Lauenstein said. "It was perfect."

Although he had taken a studio art class in his undergraduate days, Lauenstein didn't call on that training too much in creating the winning design. According to Lauenstein: "It was just a doodle, more or less."

A doodle that has stood the test of time. The AU Chapter of the American Fisheries Society, which sponsored that logo contest, still features the clever insignia on all its apparel, which makes those T-shirts and caps big sellers year after year–even among folks with no connection whatsoever to Auburn or to fisheries.

That Lauenstein was ever in fisheries and ever at Auburn University were almost happenstance. The Boston-area native got a bachelor's degree in zoology from Swarthmore (Penn.) College in the early 1970s and then joined the Peace Corp. During stints working on fish farms in Nepal and, later, Israel, Lauenstein got hooked on carp and fisheries.

"When I got back home from Nepal, I got on a Greyhound and went around the country visiting universities with fisheries programs," Lauenstein recalled. "Auburn had the best program."

He admits, though, that when he headed south to the Loveliest Village, he brought with him an attitude.

"I was a snob from the northeast; I never expected I would get outstanding and challenging instruction from a southern school," he admited. "But I quickly learned how wrong I was."

Auburn rated right up there with the elite prep schools and small Ivy League colleges he attended, "and at a fraction of the cost," Lauenstein said.

After earning his master's degree from Auburn in 1977, Lauenstein managed a Colorado fish farm for a couple of years before going back to school to earn a master's in business administration. For 17 years he owned a printing company in Sharon before selling that last year. His closest connection to fisheries now is that he heads up water issues for a civic organization called Sharon Friends of Conservation.

Lauenstein said that, unless his memory fails him, all he won for his winning logo design was bragging rights–unless you count the logo-embroidered baseball cap that AU classmate John Jensen sent him a while back.

"But that's OK," Lauenstein insisted. "It's rewarding enough for me to know people are still enjoying it."

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