Who is MacPhoenix?

You’re question really is “why MacPhoenix?” Back when Styx was cool, there was a video game called “Phoenix.” It was very similar to “Space Invaders” and “Galaga,” but a young Jonathan fell in love with it because of its theme music. He didn’t know that it was “Für Elise” by Beethoven until a couple of months later when a sixth grader played it on piano at a school recital. He just called it the Song of the Phoenix.

He got pretty good at the video game, and, as was the convention, would get to put his initials up for brief posterity when he finished playing. The problem was, his initials were “JER,” just one little letter away from “JERK,” which is unbearable to a 10 year-old. Instead, he’d tag his skill with “PHX,” which he later learned was actually the real abbreviation for Phoenix, at least the Phoenix, Arizona airport. Any game that he became good at, of which there were but a few, he’d use the PHX moniker, if only because he’d notice that it was quite unique.

Times change, and memory-chips become cheaper. During the adolescent period of his life, Jonathan started a club called “Phoenix.” He learned a bit of Greek and Egyptian culture, and he discovered that certain video games could store more than three letters when you got a high score on them. All of these things began to solidify the identification of Jonathan as Phoenix.

The period of big dreams that occurred shortly after high school found Jonathan considering starting his own graphic design company. He wanted a unique name that would not be able to be confused with anything else out there. Since he’d become a Macintosh cultist, he felt it should also include his preference of operating system. So he just stuck “Mac” in front of “Phoenix,” and MacPhoenixDesign was born. This was still in the days that the Internet was a cabal of military and collegiate elitists, so Jonathan was still, himself, just Phoenix, not MacPhoenix. But as email and user names became ubiquitous, Jonathan strove to register the far-more rare (but not unique) nickname MacPhoenix in all his online endeavors. He’s been mostly successful in this quest. Thanks for asking!