About

Celebrating 70 Years

Welcome to Our Website

We celebrate our 70th anniversary in 2022 with three key goals:

– Increase our membership and outreach to a larger and broadened population
– Introduce new vocations programming
– Launch new communications

A website that informs, motivates, and supports the work of lay volunteers in promoting and encouraging vocations to the priesthood and religious life drives all three of these goals.

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As you move from page to page – some more developed than others, as we are a work in progress — you’ll learn about what we do and how we do it:

– The history of the Serra Club of Philadelphia
– Our leadership
– Activities as a club and in partnering with others
– Various communications media that educate, enlighten, and inspire a call to action
– An events calendar
– An events photo gallery
– Membership and other forms

We welcome your interest in our Serra Club of Philadelphia and hope you enjoy your visit to our website. Come back often!

Our Logo and Domain Name

This website turned around — from overall concept, architecture, design, and content creation to launch – in a little over five days. We were bound and determined to go live by mid-July in recognition of this very special month in the life of Saint Junipero Serra.

In addition to content and design, we needed a logo and a domain name. The obvious SerraClubofPhiladelphia construction was considered, but that string of words would be too long and not really consistent with current approaches to creating domain names. Besides, it spoke as too expected.

What about SerraClubofPhila, which floated for a few hours? Possibly, but not sounding and looking right, not catchy enough for a club moving forward with fresh ideas, new programs, and expanded membership . . . a name with maybe a slice of our characteristic Philadelphia atty-tude.

We believe SerraClubPhilly.org does it.
We hope you do, too.

Our logo was a build-on, build-up process, starting as all logo work does with colors to form a palette, fonts to say what we want to say and in what style, and then images to pull it all together as a visual identity for our organization.

How fortunate that we found this image of the Liberty Bell, so much a symbol of the City of Brotherly Love, to take the place of other Liberty Bell art that was almost chosen! Plus, the palette that we already developed from the Homepage colors — pulled from the dome of Philadelphia’s Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul and the office buildings behind it — aligned perfectly with the the bronze and verdigris in the Liberty Bell.

CATHEDRAL VIDEO TOUR

For our fonts, we looked to merge contemporary with late-18 th Century. We whittled the choices down to three serif (“squiggly feet”) and three sans serif (without squiggles) fonts. What emerged is what you see in the serif “Belina” Serra Club of Philadelphia above the bell — looking Ben Franklin-ish — which will also appear as headlines and other key message points throughout the pages. For the sans serif font, we chose the contemporary “Muli” shown in the Welcome to the Serra Club of Philadelphia message appearing immediately on our Homepage and on most of the built-out content.

This was meant to be, providential, a visual expression of the history of Philadelphia and the continued strength of the Catholic Church in Philadelphia as supported by the Serra Club of Philadelphia – all complementing the image of our city’s magnificent cathedral that one observer has described as “… the cradle of our Catholic faith in the cradle of liberty.”

We hope you enjoy our logo as much as we do in representing the work of Philadelphia-area Serrans in supporting and promoting vocations to the priesthood and religious life.