¿quién coño es cyberseraphic?

Welcome to the new design! If you’re reading this through a syndicated feed such RSS, Facebook or whatever, then head on over to cyberseraphic.com and let me know what you think!

I’ve been maintaining cyberseraphic for nearly 6 years now – an eternity in Internet years, which are kind of like dog years but at a much higher ratio; long enough that some of my pages attract a slow but steady stream of traffic through search results.

As you do, I once put cyberseraphic into a Google search, and was interested to see a result where somebody on a Spanish blog was asking “¿quién coño es cyberseraphic?” which translates as “who the hell is cyberseraphic?” From what I can gather, the free hosting service I used to use had a DNS problem, and one of the blog’s followers noticed that my site was showing up instead of his. The blogger made some pithy remark about how unfortunate it was that he had to play the part of a Christian fundamentalist for the 2 days that it takes for a DNS change to propagate! This just goes to show that the old “Crosses at Golgotha” image was doing me no favours, and that cyberseraphic was sorely in need of a redesign, one which better reflects who I am.

The first thing I wanted to do was to create a logo, so I sat down and wrote out a bunch of things that I thought describe me (sorry they’re upside down and partially chopped off in the scan), and a few other thoughts on the “concept” of cyberseraphic, then started brainstorming various designs:

 

You can see that I was leaning pretty strongly towards the “mouse with halo tail” concept. I was also adamant about having wings in there – I really like wings – so the next set of sketches set out to refine that idea:

 

The one in the top-right corner was pretty much the end result. The concept was that the wings would double as motion trails, giving the logo some movement. I then asked a good (and talented) friend of mine to help with the final execution, and gave him the unenviable task of trying to make it not look like a penis. He was also the smart cookie who let me know that the mouse tail doesn’t actually come out of the back of the mouse, but the front :-) He was also kind enough to suggest some typography for the name as well. Maybe it’s the symmetry of the design, but this vertical lock-up works better than the horizontal one:

So that’s the logo. I’ll do a post about the other stuff tomorrow.