Poynter's logo almost looked very different. Here's how we landed on the dot. - Poynter

"When Nelson Poynter created a nonprofit school to inherit his newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, he named it the Modern Media Institute. That was a pretty good name and an even better abbreviation: MMI. On a T-shirt, a newsroom wag created a funny logo: Two em dashes followed by an eyeball. MMI. No one knew exactly what the school would teach."

"I was the first full-time faculty member at the school. The second was Dr. Mario Garcia, a charismatic Cuban immigrant who began as a copy editor and moved to college teaching. I will profess, without fear of contradiction, that in the following half-century, Mario became the world's most creative and influential news designer. He has not quite reached 1,000 product designs, but I bet he will. His most famous involved the introduction of photography and color to the once vertically gray Wall Street Journal."

Nelson Poynter established a nonprofit school to inherit the St. Petersburg Times and named it the Modern Media Institute (MMI). A newsroom T-shirt joke used two em dashes and an eyeball to represent MMI. Poynter died in 1978 and it was renamed The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, creating a longer, awkward abbreviation. The first faculty hire moved from the Times newsroom into a converted bank building. Dr. Mario Garcia, a former copy editor who later taught, designed a ball-and-staff logo signifying P and I and later influenced newspaper design, introducing photography and color to the Wall Street Journal.

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