As the 100th anniversary of America’s involvement in the Great War approached, we were asked to create a new logo for the National World War I Museum and Memorial. Seeking to go beyond what everyone “knows” about the war, we wanted to express the constructive as well as destructive energies it released.

We used intersecting lines to evoke the stakes upon which barbed wire was hung in no-man’s land, the railroad tracks that fed men and munitions to the fronts, the factories where new weapons were created—and the shattered villages where they were used.

Just as readily, we can discern larger, more hopeful themes: the intersection of individual lives and entire peoples; the creative chaos of old cultures meeting new ways of thinking and living and, finally, a glimpse of the startling art forms that emerged in the aftermath of the conflict.