WHERE IS THE GAMBIA?
WHERE IS THE GAMBIA?
ABOUT THE NAME & LOGO
ABOUT THE NAME
On my walk to school one morning, I noticed a magnificently blue-colored bird singing away in a tree above the road.
He had, at first, caught my attention because of the beautiful melody endlessly pouring from his little chest. Once I laid eyes upon him, though, I could not look away. He was the most fascinating mixture of every shade of blue imaginable and the high gloss of his feathers only made him more tantalizing to the eye.
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Coincidentally, I had been wracking my brain for days trying to think of a suitable name for my budding program. I wanted the name to be representative of the students and limitless potential they could have with a proper education. My mind kept going back to the word "star" because I wanted my students to reach for the stars. I wanted them to dream big so that they had a goal in which to work towards. No matter how I manipulated the word, though, the perfectionist in me was not satisfied with any name I came up with.

For some reason when I saw this bird the word "starling" came to mind. To this day, I have no idea if the bird in the tree was actually a Starling but the name stuck.
ABOUT THE LOGO
A few years later when trying to design the logo for the program I wanted to incorporate this story into one image to represent the program.
I wanted a bird sitting on on a branch just like my little friend had been on that fateful day. I also wanted to incorporate the idea of "reaching for the stars" but since a bird has no hands with which to reach I had to get creative. Instead, I had the bird in the logo singing to the stars above him; his head tilted upwards so that his line of sight was upwards.
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The stars, themselves, stumped me for a bit. How many stars is significant without over doing it? Then I thought of my students again. I decided on sixteen stars to signify the original sixteen students that I had first chosen to participate in the program. After all, they had inspired me to start the program; they deserved a place in the logo. I thought it fitting to represent them as stars because it is my hope that they will, in a sense, land among the stars in the future.
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The final puzzle piece was the letters of the program. There happened to already be three leaves on the branch waiting for me to realize the obvious choice for the letters. And thus the Starling Sponsorship logo was born.