Archive for July, 2010
I believe that the BP oil spill could have even bigger ramifications on our country than we already realize.
If this disaster exits the public consciousess without there being a 1:1 ratio of fault to accountability, then we as a nation will have demonstrated to our government (and the corporations whose interests they protect) that there is nothing we won’t tolerate—that under any circumstances of wrongdoing, even one without moral or religious debate, we can be manipulated and made to forget. And if we allow that precedent to be set, there will be no turning back. They will know something no democratic government ever should: that no matter the circumstances, they can always fall back on the people losing interest if they can be distracted long enough.
Think what you will about the source, but this is some apt social commentary.
Posting ’round these parts has been sparse of late, as my day job has kept me busy. Our “web team” is a team of two, and in addition to other duties, myself and Mr. Spooner have been todo-list-ing our way through a complete top-to-bottom overhaul of the NewSpring Church website for the better part of the last 10 months. The previous version of the site was launched two years ago, and served us well for that season, but I’m turbo-excited about the new site’s potential.
With Spooner’s skillful bending of ExpressionEngine to our will, we added a Stories section to the site to take advantage of the exceptional content a rather large church makes possible. Taking visual cues from some talented people exploring editorial design on the web (mainly The Bold Italic, Laura Miner‘s Pictory, and Jason Santa Maria) we developed templating system that enables fairly quick turn-around (2–3 hours for design, typically less than an hour for coding/publishing) on new stories without sacrificing unique visuals and layouts. For example: Zac’s story, Kacie’s story, and Neicy’s story are all from the same “visual family,” but unique members nonetheless.
Some of the changes were big. We retooled the sermon series pages to give more flexibility on bringing the series branding to life in a bigger way—page designs like Practical Atheist and Identity Theft weren’t possible on the previous iteration of the site. I look forward to exploring and designing for that canvas in the future. We also made sections like Watch & Listen much more about search and discovery, and improved general site search as well.
Some of the redesign process was more about small improvements to existing pages and userflows. Previous pages on the old site had way too much visual prominence, when they only served as a sort of pass-through or filtering page. For example, Ministries doesn’t need a huge visual of people “doing stuff”—I likely just want information about a certain Ministry and I want to get to it quickly. We don’t make a big deal out of singling out individual campuses, as we tend to stick with church-wide events, so we combined all the location and service time information onto one page. Anywhere we could simplify, we tried to. And the places where we felt like visuals could make a more appropriate, succinct impact, we made flexible.
There is still much to do. A website, at least a good one, is never finished, only launched.
But man it feels good to launch it.
They would have to sing better songs for me to learn to have faith in their Redeemer.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
[bo-cur-i-ous] — adjective
1. the state of simultaneous boredom and curiosity
[Origin: 2010, coined by Lauren From Texas]
People used to mock my theory that Disney romances are as detrimental to future relationships as pornography. But I believe it now more than ever.
Lookwork, a soon-to-launch image-bookmarking service, looks quite nice from the teaser video. After all, if my beloved Ffffound! had tags and decent naughty picture filtering it would be dang near perfect for curating/collecting aesthetic.
Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
—Victor Hugo
This week’s installment of Oh Great Yet Another Portfolio That’s Better Than Mine is brought to you by Angus Macpherson, a third year graphic design student at Leeds College of Art. Top-notch typographic and print layout work, as well as photos—and not just “for a student.” The sky’s the limit for talent like this.
Why not go out on a limb? That’s where the fruit is.
—Will Rogers
Mrs. Blankenship and I are happy to announce that Kingdom Boutique is open for business with our Summer Collection of modern American craft, including illustrated and sewn goods.
The extent to which you have a design style, is the extent to which you have not solved the design problem.
—Charles Eames
