The Digital Michelangelo Project logo was designed by Marc Levoy in November of 1996, to provide personal motivation for pursuing this seemingly impossible project. It contains a scanned photograph of the David and a CDROM, and a rendering of a fragment of a polygon mesh. The mesh is not from our 3D model of the David.
People have asked whether the design of our logo implies that our models are available on a CD. Unfortunately not. The logo was designed before the project began. In fact, if we had performed a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation, we would have realized that, at the resolution we envisioned scanning these statues, our data would exceed the 500 megabyte capacity of a CD by three orders of magnitude.
As it turns out, the total quantity of data we acquired during the project was 250 gigabytes. At present (Winter of 2002), our largest single 3D model is of Michelangelo's unfinished statue of St. Matthew. It contains 372 million polygons and occupies 3.7 gigabytes. This model would fit on a DVD, but not a CD. On the other hand, our growing archive also contains several low-resolution models. For example, we have a 1,000,000-polygon model of the David that occupies only 10 megabytes. At this reduced resolution, we could fit the models for the 10 statues we scanned onto one CD. Unfortunately, we haven't assembled all these models yet.
We are also not yet distributing our data as widely as the logo might imply. At present, our models are available for free, but only to scholars. For more information, look at the web pages of the archive.