ABOUT SISM

The logo: from SIME to SISM, and today

The Italian Society for Electron Microscopy (SIME) was established since 1956, but it was only in the 1985 first issue of the bulletin that a brand new logo appeared for the first time, and was used to represent the Society in all official events and publications.

Being SIME an electron microscopy society, the idea was to represent the heart of an electron microscope using the four characters of its acronym. The filament of the microscope that emits electron was then represented by a slightly deformed S. The characters M and E were put in a symmetric way in the logo to represent the left and right sections of the coils of an electromagnetic lens that deflect the electrons. Finally, the electron trajectories were represented in centre of the picture by a narrow intersecting line that reminds the character I.

The same unchanged drawing was kept as the official logo also after year 2003, when the Society changed its name from SIME to SISM (Italian Society for Microscopical Science) to welcome scanning probe and all kind of microscopy techniques. That was the logo until today.

Now, with a brand new web site, we thought that our historical drawing was no more effective when reproduced in official print or in electronic documents. Nevertheless, we all also felt that we were tied to our traditional logo and its meaning, and the same we thought for all members of our Society. The logo was still alive, it only needed a little restyling.

Here is the result. We deeply hope you’ll like it!