Archive for June, 2008
I’m loving the bubbly, engaging UI on the SAT Achieve More website from my friends at ArmChair Media.
Punisher: War Zone is in post-production. Iron Man‘s screenwriter co-wrote it and the casting is spot-on — Ray Stevenson as Frank Castle, Dominic West as Jigsaw (!) and Newman from Seinfeld as Microchip — but the trailer looks like a boring shoot ‘em up, so it remains to be seen if Marvel can capitalize on Iron Man‘s success.
Paula Scher/Pentagram’s updated identity for The Public Theater is, as always, typographically delicious. Redrawn in HF&J’s KnockOut typeface (bye, Akzidenz Grotesk) and set in 90° angles, the (now classic identity) is so very New York and inspiring and this year’s advertising is stellar (which makes up for ’04-07, which were less than stellar in light of previous years.)
My lovely and wise wife just posted what we’ve been referring to as her “Green Manifesto”, but what is more aptly actually titled Why Christians Should Care About Being Green. Quote, “How can we serve others by feeding and clothing them when we’ve done everything possible to destroy our means of making food and clothing?” She’s a smart one.
I made the decision to come back to NewSpring Church sometime in early November of last year. I actually started work as a paid employee in January. One of my contingencies of returning was that we would begin a very necessary rebranding, and then the main focus would shift to an accompanying ground-up re-strategizing and building of a new website. I think the arbitrarily-assigned estimate I threw out was “seven or eight months,” thinking we could get a good foundation of corporate identity and a new site up in that timeframe, and then start the “real work” of making the new site work for the myriad of messages, ministries and needs we have.
Has it really been almost six months since I started working here?
After a three-month-ish process of presenting more logos than I care to remember, we settled on a new logotype and color scheme. Then came the grunt work of choosing complimentary typeface families (within the constraints of a Church budget), refining icon sets, mapping out and laying out a wayfinding signage system flexible enough to handle multiple locations (the majority of which will be portable locations in the future) but cohesive enough to create an environment that feels branded, designing administrative collateral and dozens of other branding applications, sitemapping and wireframing a site that presented one church in multiple locations.
This week, we’ll put the big bow on a 40+ page Brand Standards Guide and a 10+ page Communications Guide. We’ll send letterhead, envelopes, cards and other printed materials to the press. And in the midst of that, I’ll continue playing massive catch-up with my developer friends working on the mark-up and video player for the www.NewSpring.cc (sneak peek) relaunch. I owe them many Photoshop files.
We’re going to look a lot different in the next few months. I think I’m past the design-second-guessing and back into task-mode, ready for this season to reach its close and make way for the next chapter in how NewSpring Church communicates, looks, feels and interacts with people. I love what I get to do. I hope it all works.
“We’re very excited to introduce a new generation to Papa Smurf and the other Smurfs in all of their glory,” said Columbia president Doug Belgrad.
I found this Wikipedia article via Jakob Lodwick who quoted some of this excerpt:
Skunk Works is a term first coined in 1943 by Lockheed…and widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.
I feel extremely lucky to work in an organization that 1. values autonomy, 2. values leadership, 3. tries their best not to get bogged down in bureaucracy and 4. trusts their employees (and volunteers!) to put their skills and effort into creating new solutions to help us move forward.
Oh, the secret projects we have up our collective sleeves…
Quote, “It’s hot, steamy food in your face right now.” Wearable feedbags for fast food.
37signals is hiring a designer. Quote, “You’ll have virtual free reign. We want you to take the lead. You’ll have a lot of influence here and across the web design and software design world.”
In case you haven’t been keeping up, here’s a recap of the entire ’07/08 Democratic Primary race condensed down to 8 minutes of well-edited and narrated video.
I wish political coverage was this succinct and engaging on television.
This sums it up:
[Battlestar Galactica] was about an apocalypse. The show opens with a genocide, an apocalyptic destruction of 12, count em, 12 planets. Billions of human lives are lost. The survivors heroically run away, fleeing an implacable enemy that is determined to destroy them no matter what, and they’re looking for a mythical place called Earth.
And the first place they go is the casino planet.
And therein lies the contradiction and the problem with [the original 1978 ABC show]. They were unable to square that circle. There was no way in that era of television that they could really play the premise. It’s a dark premise…I felt my obligation on some level was to do the show they should’ve made, the show that really honors the idea of what the show was about…[The current series] is a truer version of Battlestar Galactica in some ways than the original. — Wired Magazine interview with Ron Moore
I’ll put it plainly, if you’ve never seen the new Battlestar Galactica, you’re missing out on one of the best shows on television. If you rent the mini-series and you don’t get hooked, I’ll be shocked.
Nine Inch Nails has a free sampler of MP3s of all the opening bands for their upcoming tour.
1. Seeing the first tomato of the season growing in our garden
2. Today’s mid-morning nap
3. Using conditioned air
4. Finishing all the rebranded wayfinding signage for NewSpring Church’s campuses
5. Realizing after beginning this post that it is actually Saturday
“We Are Curious about design, communications, people, storytelling, art, music, sensory experiences, delicious meals, customer service, craftspersonship, the internet, & everything in-between. We will join you on the internet soon.”
Dotcomrades at The Barbarian Group have released a fullscreen, borderless browser for client presentations called Plainview.
Straight from the Barbarian’s mouth: “We Barbarians give a lot of presentations. A lot of speeches. A lot of Dog and Pony shows. People want to see our work. And the work we do is on the Internet. And, until now, we really had two options for showing our Internet work: we could capture it all to Quicktime, and throw it into Powerpoint or Keynote, so we could present in a nice full-screen mode that looked professional, or we could try to show it in the browser, and have all that ugly chrome distracting people from our beautiful sites.”
Plainview has a few options (hotkeys, bookmarks, presentation mode for collecting sites into groups, multiple windows, etc.) but mostly it just gets out of the way and shows off your work in a completely functional, distraction-free browser environment. Oh, and it’s completely free.
Love those Barbarians.
It’s awesome to see my friend Matthew Wahl getting some well-deserved attention for all the understated, typography-based graphic design work he’s been quietly cranking out for Sovereign Grace and New Attitude for the past few years.
I’m digging Jeff’s new site layout at We Will Be OK. The graphical display of time information is a nice touch for info organization.
Does it matter what you call yourself? If you believe in the divinity of Jesus, then you’re effectively a Christian. Perhaps you want to run away from the Christian stereotypes, but the fundamental beliefs are the same…Just say it. You’re Christians. Stop with the “We’re not Christians. We’re not part of a religion. We just believe that Jesus Christ died for our sins.”
— Hemant Mehta (aka Friendly Atheist ), excerpted from Oh, I’m Not Religious
