Pavichevich.org - new design & new logo

Although I’m not officially a designer, I do take great pride in applying principals of good design towards any project I undertake. The underlying principal, for me, is that poor design can make something that’s tremendously useful completely unusable. Additionally, the user MUST be considered during development - how old will they be? What will they want to see right away? And so on.

When redesigning my Tech Priest Tumblr, with the hopes that I can use it professionally in place of www.pavichevich.org, it was important for me to come up with a theme that combined the two aspects of my professional life: Orthodox Christian Priesthood and Information Technology.

I sketched out a few ideas on my iPad via Penultimate, but none of those spoke to me. It turned out to be quite challenging to find a simple, elegant way to combine two distinctly different aspects of my life into one logo.

Then it hit me as I ran across an article about Sega (the video game company) - My first, favorite video game was “Alex Kidd in Miracle World.” Perhaps I could adjust that original character-sketch to something priestly. So I tried - but didn’t like the result. Still, I liked the idea, so I tried various 8-bit renditions.

Finally, I found a website (eightbit.me) with nice 8-bit character design. So I utilized fireworks to create my own 8-bit version of myself in that style, wearing my Cassock. Voila! I loved it. On to the font…

My wife is a designer and she’s instilled in me that font selection can make-or-break a logo. The font needs to communicate something about organization it represents. So after various iterations, all of them awful, I found some strange font in my library (“O8-b04,” or something like that) and it was perfect - it was a techie font!

Finally, the loading graphic at the bottom was added for a three-fold purpose: 1) to balance the 8-bit me with my title, 2) to make the word “Priest” standout (it’s underlined in black by the loading bar) and 3) to add to the “techie” feel. It’s not completely necessary, I don’t think, but it looks cool on the website. :-)

I’m happy with the result - any reactions to the look and feel of my site/logo?