The back story on the inspiration and
creation of the Lion of Judah JESUS logo.
Let me introduce myself, I am Norb Novocin, married to my awesome wife, Marie. Here is the story:
33 years ago, on the morning of Wednesday Nov. 30, 1993, the NFL announced the Jacksonville Jaguars as a new franchise in the NFL, and the city went absolutely crazy. That night I was at a Wednesday evening church service at Christian Life Church on the Westside. After the service was over, while driving south on I-295, I found myself praying and wishing folks would get as excited about Jesus as they were going nuts over the Jaguars, that's when I saw in my mind's eye a logo, the Lion of Judah logo, just like the Jaguars logo, except a lion and the name JESUS above the Lion. As soon as I got home that night, I immediately started working on it.
The first thing I did was look up the words, "Lion of Judah" in the Bible, which lead me to Revelation 5:5. Wanting to confirm that I was thinking correctly on what I was seeing. Then going to my handy Macintosh computer, using the Adobe Illustrator program, started to create the logo, trying to make it as close as I could to the Jaguars logo, without actually being the Jaguars logo. It took me that evening until the early morning hours of Thursday to finish it.
I knew right off the bat, I was going to make apparel. That was the only thing that made sense to get it out for the public to see it.
That Thursday, December 1st, I called a friend of mine the owner of three Christian book stores in the Jacksonville area. When I described the design to him, he agreed to buy 12 shirts unseen, (I assume just because he was a friend.) A few hours later I faxed over a black and white copy of what the logo looked like and he immediately upped his order to somewhere around 6 dozen shirts, based on the look. I then got some full color prints made from a computer color print shop and ran them over to him. He put the prints up by his cash registers along with a yellow pad where people could sign up to pre order shirts. Within two days he had over 200 orders from people signing up for them and we were off and running.
We made arrangements to start producing the shirts at a local screen printing shop and contacted every Christian bookstore in the Jacksonville area. Within a week we were in almost every Christian bookstore in the Jacksonville area. Keep in mind this was just a few weeks to Christmas, and during the time up to Christmas we sold THOUSANDS of shirts. It was a crazy three weeks.
That was the start of sales that ended up going across country and branching into embroidered work, bumper stickers, license plates, mugs, you name it. It was a pivitol time in our lives, full of much joy and excitement and a lot of work. In fact during that time our second son was born and we named him, Judah.
The response was overwhelmingly positive. We downplayed the Jaguars initial connection, unless someone directly asked. Our market was to the Christian who was proud of Jesus. This logo has always attempted to be an inspiration, to whoever is wearing it or even seeing it on someone else.
Now 33 years later we thought it would be a good time to revisit the old school Lion of Judah JESUS logo, praying it would continue to be an encouragement and inspiration in today's time.
