About Our Name

Spyrian is an Old English word meaning to enquire after or into, to seek to know about, to investigate, examine. Technically it is pronounced /spyr.jan/ – but to make life easier for all we just say /speer-e-n/It is a name we came up with back in 2000 (how was that 20 years ago?!) when we saw the dotcom bubble about to burst and were contemplating what to do (hint: always take the money). Since then it has been the namesake for the business that we would start “someday”, because once you have the entrepreneur bug you never really get away from it.Well finally, that “someday” is now and Spyrian is real.

Our Logo
aka our name in color

A while ago I came across an article about a woman who sees letters and numbers as colors. Her name is Bernadette Sheridan, and she has a form of synesthesia called grapheme-color synesthesia. Synesthesia is a rare sensory trait shared by about 4% of the population, and it comes in many forms. People who “see” or associate letters and numbers with specific colors have grapheme-color synesthesia, and it’s the most common form. Other forms of synesthesia involve seeing or feeling musical notes as colors or textures, having visualized representations of time, and in rare cases, even tasting words.To share how she visualizes words she created A SYNESTHESIA PROJECT BY BERNADETTE SHERIDAN, which is a site where you type in your name and it translates it into the colors she sees.After reading the article I (of course) immediately went to her website to “see” what my name looked like and I loved it!!!

I don’t want to admit how long I spent typing in different names and words.

Of course, I had to try “Spyrian” since I knew it would be the name of my business someday and again I just loved it. So, when we started planning out the website and marketing we used it as our stand-in logo. Then a funny thing happened, see no matter what else we came up with, nothing stood up to what we had. So I reached out to Bernadette and she was gracious enough to approve us using it as our logo.

I highly recommend checking out her site to see what your name looks like, and if you love it like I did you can buy a print from her Etsy store. You can also follow Bernadette on Instagram or Twitter / X