All around campus, yellow duck feet are stenciled on sidewalks, a playful reminder that we are in Duck territory. Now an array of new stencils provides a different kind of visual cue — one that helps tell our academic story.

You've probably seen them this past week on your daily trek across campus: stylized squares with block-letter abbreviations. Some abbreviations seem intuitive — like, say, ECON. But some not so much. What, for instance, is REEES? Or AFR? What are they meant to convey?

          PHOTO GALLERY: Elemental theme gets concrete

This is the College of Arts and Sciences stencil project, which has branded selected sidewalks with an "element" for each of the 41 CAS departments and programs located on campus.

Unlike the duck feet, which were painted on, these stencils were power-washed. In other words, the CAS stencil effect was achieved by cleaning the sidewalk.

This is the latest application of the CAS design theme, "It's Elemental," which unites CAS departments under a visual motif that helps convey the elemental nature of the College of Arts and Sciences. Virtually all UO students take their core curriculum in the college and nearly 11,000 UO undergraduates are majoring in CAS fields at any given time.

"One of the challenges in helping students understand that they're part of the College of Arts and Sciences is that we have dozens of fields of study," said W. Andrew Marcus, interim Tykeson Dean of Arts and Sciences. "And we're in dozens of buildings across campus."

The stencil project celebrates that size and complexity. "It's a way of showing that we're everywhere, while also giving visibility to the individual departments that make up the whole," Marcus said.

Coming soon: a social media campaign that will invite students — both CAS and non-CAS majors — to choose their favorite stencil and enter a photo contest. (And by the way, REEES stands for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies; AFR is African Studies.)

—By Lisa Raleigh, College of Arts and Sciences