Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

One of the doctors I work with runs a surveillance journal for rehabilitation research–essentially a Reader’s Digest for medical researchers and professionals. I stupidly shot my mouth off about the somewhat lacking design of the journal’s website and got myself into an honor debt. As I’m sure you all know, I never back away from honor. Creditors and people larger than me, absolutely, but never honor.

So I ended up designing a new logo for the journal based off the doctor’s family crest (his idea). Designing the crest logo required getting intimate with the Pen tool, among other things (write your own joke), and in general I’m very proud of the results. I’m less proud of the rest of the design, as I threw it together quickly and didn’t really think it would end up on the public site. I think it’s nice, nonetheless.

This got me interested in family crests, coats of arms, and heraldry in general. To my surprise, there does appear to be a Dobres family crest. If you run a quick search, you might find that your family has one as well.

At left is my interpretation of the Dobres family crest, built mostly from a textual description and some cautious use of Wikipedia. I also textured the shield a bit to make it look more interesting. The only other image of the Dobres crest I could find is this one, and that’s got to be wrong, for several reasons. First, my crest is Polish in origin. This agrees with my family history. Polish crests are notable for their simple, often purely geometric designs. It’s the more well known UK crests that tend to go nuts with the ribbons, lions, helmets, and unicorns. Furthermore, the Dobres coat of arms is described as, “A red shield with a silver runic ’s-like’ symbol.” As near as I can determine, the runic “S” is the one I’ve got in my version (it usually represents the sun). The one in the other version is obviously Roman, not runic. The shoddy research is not surprising. Most of these heraldry sites are more concerned with hawking mugs and polo shirts than anything else.

Crests can change over time, by the way. They’re not archaeological artifacts frozen in time, and can be altered to reflect just about anything you’d like. The Rehab in Review logo, for instance, adds a lamp of knowledge, a pen, and a typical medical caduceus to the shield. We also decided to remove the cat that originally sat atop the helmet, purely because it looked weird. The original red cross was a lot thicker before I changed it to make room for everything.

I’m tempted to make a new Dobres crest that incorporates a flat-panel monitor and a ninja. Thoughts?