This is the second in an ongoing series of posts about bbbbrands.com, a new project I’m working on with my good friend and fellow brand loyalist Noah Stokes. If you missed it or just need a recap, here’s part 1.

As Noah and I began to talk through the initial gist of bbbbrands and I started some sketches and typography explorations for an identity, I also began the task of thinking through taglines. Not every brand needs a tagline, but in this case it made sense to craft a line of copy that described the site’s core functionality to the user and helped us have a clear mission as we design and build it. A statement of purpose helps the user know exactly what value we’re providing to them and it gives us a main identifier for decision-making (e.g. does X or Y feature fall into what the tagline describes us as? If not, kill it.)

Here’s the first round of tagline attempts:

All of these more or less describe what the site will be full of, but there are problems with them, too. There’s way too much “brand” in there. The site name already has it, so repeating it in the tagline, especially twice, is overkill. These choices are passive. They’re a description of something, not an action or a call to participate. Some of the language of each individual tagline doesn’t hold up. What’s a label recommendation (#2)? What if they aren’t actually new recommendations (#4)? Are they really the best (#5)? All of these fall short.

As Noah and I bantered back and forth on IM (this is a bicoastal operation we’re running here) we settled on the concepts of sharing and discovering as the main verbs we want our users to engage in. Are you looking for recommendations for a new messenger bag? We want you to discover trusted brands on bbbbrands. Do you absolutely love your new American Apparel Tri-Blend Track Shirt? We want you to share that on bbbbrands.

The passivity is gone, but #6 still suffers from word overkill, #7 feels awkward, and #8 is just too long. #9 is close, but stops just short of what we want for users—sharing and discovering the brands themselves, not just the reviews of the brands. And then there was #10. Short, sweet, active, bold, truthful. If we do our job to build a site that attracts like-minded brand loyalists, then they’ll naturally share the best brands with one another. And over time our catalog of brand recommendations will become a playground for discovery.

On a design note, I initially fought myself on #10. Then I realized I was doing it for the wrong reason; I simply liked the typographic lock-up of the lowercase serif “from” in there. I liked how it looked. But this isn’t solely about letters and aesthetics, it has to act as a rudder and identifier. Ultimately, the content has to be more important than the form, even if it hurts.

We want our users to share and discover the best brands, so that’s our working tagline. But is it the best? Are we missing a better opportunity? We’d love your feedback.

…And in our time, when a man dies—if he has had wealth and influence and power and all the vestments that arouse envy, and after the living take stock of the dead man’s property and his eminence and works and monuments—the question is still there: Was his life good or was it evil?…Envies are gone, and the measuring stick is: “Was he loved or was he hated? Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come from it?”

I remember clearly the deaths of three men. One was the richest man of the century, who, having clawed his way to wealth through the souls and bodies of men, spent many years trying to buy back the love he had forfeited and by that process performed great service to the world and, perhaps, had much more than balanced the evils of his rise. I was on a ship when he died. The news was posted on the bulletin board, and nearly everyone received the news with pleasure. Several said, “Thank God that son of a bitch is dead.”

There was a man, smart as Satan, who, lacking some perception of human dignity and knowing all too well every aspect of human weakness and wickedness, used his special knowledge to warp men, to buy men, to bribe and threaten and seduce until he found himself in a position of great power. He clothed his motives in the name of virtue, and I have wondered whether he knew that no gift will ever buy back a man’s love when you have removed his self-love. A bribed man can only hate his briber. When this man died the nation rang with praise and, just beneath, with gladness that he was dead.

There was a third man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize those fears. This man was hated by the few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, “What can we do now? How can we go on without him?”

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Somewhere around 9:00pm today, I turned 30.

I’m strange; I adore getting older. I love that I am better at life now than I was a year ago. I hope I am more wise and less rash. But most of all I want for those changes (and others) to be felt in the lives of those closest to me. I want to be a man, “whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good.”

Onward and upward (albeit with a little more gray hair and a slightly slower gait).

1. Taking the long way
2. Sleeping in
3. Super sizing it
4. Not moving
5. Taking off my shirt

We bought a cow. Or more specifically, four families split a cow. So technically we bought 1/4 of a cow. In this video, however, you see the full beefy.

Dotcomrade Kory Westerhold has an updated portfolio full of fantastic graphic design, art direction and photography for clients like Complex Magazine, Adidas, and The North Face. He’s also responsible for the seemingly everywhere To Write Love on Her Arms branding. You should hire him to do something for you. He’s aces.

You are not playing Contra. You don’t get 30 extra men.

That fact established, do you really want to die on that hill today? Is the outworking of whatever it is a dealbreaker? A vortex of inexorable woe? The end of all you hold dear? If not, let it go.

Fight for something that matters. Don’t die on stupid hills.

Coke is apparently talking up a new strategy for interacting with ad agencies based on the marketplace performance of each campaign. If said campaign meets consumer response criteria, the agency pockets costs plus profit. If it doesn’t, Coke covers costs but the agency gets no bonus. It’s so logical it’s practically revolutionary.

I’m glad someone is starting to take ad agencies to task and demand measurable results. As Mark Stevens notes in Your Marketing Sucks, “If every dollar you spend in marketing doesn’t bring back a dollar in revenue, your marketing sucks.”

From my perspective, too many agencies build creative for clients that eventually wins the AGENCY new business (or awards), but doesn’t effectively impact the CLIENT’s bottomline. And often this happens in the name of “brand recognition” or “you’re the talk of the town.”

But talk doesn’t cook rice.

I’m completely enamored with these bird paintings by Frank Gonzales. It’s like JPG artifacts or satellite TV glitches. I’d love to see that style applied to editorial illustration portraits.

Faithful readers, this summer I’m relaunching this site with some cosmetic makeover and a complete reworking of everything under the hood (including porting it all from Wordpress to ExpressionEngine). It has existed, in similar form, for the better part of two or three years, it’s badly coded and very piecemeal from a content management standpoint. It needs to grow up to catch up with what I’ve learned over the past few years.

I’d love to get some feedback from you about how you use/view/read/share the content here, and what could be better. So, a very general question: what would you like to see change from a design/UI/presentation standpoint to make this site more usable/enjoyable/awesomable? We’re not talking about actual content or delivery, but more so the framework it lives in.

1, 2, 3, go.

Big failure (the kind that levels companies, complex systems, longstanding relationships) has its origins in a contradiction: it happens gradually, then suddenly.

Big failure happens over time, all at once. Unless you catch it now.

Here’s the problem with copying: Copying skips understanding. Understanding is how you grow. You have to understand why something works or why something is how it is. When you copy it, you miss that. You just repurpose the last layer instead of understanding all the layers underneath.
— Jason Fried, Why you shouldn’t copy us or anyone else

What if your homebuilder constructed houses based merely on the outward appearance, with no attempts to understand the foundation, infrastructure or load bearing walls? They would have no idea why that one window was off-center, or that specific material was used in the kitchen, or why the porch trim is blue. The exterior may look fine, but the bones are rotten.

Ultimately, copying doesn’t affect the person being ripped nearly as much as the one doing the copying. After all, rarely is the faux as compelling as the original. But when you copy, you do yourself a disservice. You cease to do work. You cease to be inspired. You stop trying.

When you copy, you never learn how to learn.

My name is Joshua Blankenship, and I am a brand loyalist. A connoisseur of highly functional, beautiful things. Bags, jeans, toothbrushes, water bottles, pens, whiskey, guitar strings, and so on and so forth. If a thing is worth having, it’s worth having the best of it (that you can wisely afford.) And if there is a category of thing, I likely have an opinion on where to find the best of it.

So when my left coast friend Noah Stokes asked if I would be interested in collaborating on a site for like-minded brand loyalists, I jumped at the chance to handle design and branding. And when he started throwing out ideas about sharing our process for the project with our respective readers while we were still in the process, I got even more excited.

And so we begin humbly with the easy part: a name, a URL, a logo and a loose tagline to help serve as a mission while we start putting our money where our (collective) mouth is.

Noah has a great write-up on the beginnings of this idea here. If you don’t already, subscribe to Noah’s RSS Feed and my RSS feed to stay up to date on bbbbrands, and be sure to follow @bbbbrands on Twitter for other updates.

I shouldn’t be surprised that a product/service I’m brand loyal to is born and maintained out of a company culture that runs counter to typical corporate structure, but I am. It’s fascinating any time I see stuff like this articulated so well:

Instead of adding rules as we grow, our solution is to increase talent density faster than we increase business complexity. Great people make great judgment calls and few errors, despite ambiguity…We have found that by avoiding rules we can better attract the creative mavericks that drive innovation…We are mitigating the big risk technology companies face (obsolescence), by taking on small risks (running without rules).
— Netflix, excerpted from 7 Great Reasons to Work at Netflix (emphasis mine)

The whole thing reads like a manifesto for Doing Amazing Things, but the specific ability for a company to grow in size and complexity without an avalanche of bureaucratic muck is rare.

If you, as a leader, create and nurture a culture where employees must continually fall on their swords to prove their loyalty to the mission, the cause, the vision, the organization, your leadership, etc., eventually you won’t have anyone left. Your people will either burnout or simply leave. And when they fail or exit, the delusional self-fulfilling prophet in you will quietly say, “See, I told you they weren’t loyal.”

And maybe they weren’t. Or maybe all employees are not longterm relationship material. Or maybe your mission and direction sucks and they got tired of it. Or maybe they were so bloodied from all the sword hugging that they didn’t have anything left to give.

Don’t let a misplaced need for leadership affirmation confuse the loyal people with the folks just passing through. In the trenches, we all want to know our people have our back. But if the way we expect them to prove their loyalty kills them in the process, don’t blame the dead. You’re the one calling the shots.

1. The aforementioned 30th birthday
2. The Spooners move to The SC
3. My nephew Bear turns 5
4. The Armstrong Family Circus stops by our casa for a few days
5. Anywhere from 0—5 site designs I’ve been working on for clients go live

In less than a month, I turn 30.

Western culture loves assigning weighted meaning to a good round number, a gravitas beyond the simple recorded passing of time. And however right or wrong or in-between that is, I feel the weight of soon-to-be 30.

There are a lot of things I’ve said I wanted to accomplish before that birthday. Some of them have happened, some of them haven’t, a lot of them I’ve probably forgotten. But the impending milestone has me thinking about dreams, ideas, execution, legacy and body of work. And wishing I’d done more. And wanting to do more.

So I have 30 days until I’m 30 years old. And I want to do something.

Happy anniversary, my love! (Worthy of exclamation.)

It’s been an amazing two years. The best two years of my life thus far. You are the best woman/wife/friend/artist/person I know. Please never stop being so dang awesome.

Humbled and happy,
Joshua

P.S. We met on the internet. Isn’t that crazy?

To say that this take on Sherlock Holmes looks enjoyable is to undersell it.

I know, I know. You’re probably thinking we already covered this, you weirdo. But no, again I go with the job titles thing. Call it a pet project; I thirst for complete knowledge of the topic. It is my white whale, and I am its Ahab.

Let me throw a situation out at you. A few years ago I was in one type of work environment, mainly agency-type places with a very set structure and clear hierarchy. Everyone knew the top, the bottom, and all the clearly labeled rungs in between. Then I transitioned into a different work environment, one more wide than tall, more collaborative than creatively authoritative. There aren’t many rungs, and a proclivity for climbing isn’t part of the DNA (or mine for that matter).

On paper, I’m the Creative Director at NewSpring Church. But here’s the rub: NewSpring doesn’t really have a Creative Director. And the more I think about it, I don’t think we ever have, despite the fact that I’ve held that title for half of our existence. Let me explain…

In agency world, a Creative Director usually has a design or writing background and interacts with the client to create ideas, approaches and treatments that are typically implemented by designers and copywriters on their team. They’re the filter, and often the initiator of the idea. It’s fairly clear, and intensely hierarchical. But at NewSpring, no one person does that. Or to put it better, a lot of people do that. There’s tension. There are often (much to my dismay) minor lacks of cohesion. But ultimately we share the process and burden of creative direction across a lot of roles on our team. Which is cool, especially considering we’re the “client,” too.

That brings me squarely back to the job title thing (“from hell’s heart I stab at thee!”) and my situation. At NewSpring I handle overall design, branding, some copywriting, and web design/strategy. But I’m admitting the traditional Creative Director role doesn’t exist in our environment, so what* am I?

*I have an idea of what I am, but I want to hear your feedback.

Back in October I wrote a post about building a team that’s better than you and said, “For [my team at NewSpring Church] to accomplish great things, I have to make an intentional, concerted effort to not be the smartest guy in the room.”

I’m happy to share with you a major step in that direction. Detail-oriented, good-taste-having, wicked smart Web Developer Adam Spooner will be leaving the grand isle of Manhattan to join our team at NewSpring this summer. You can get to know Adam via his blog Lead Neophyte or by following him on Twitter. I trust you will benefit from doing so.

NewSpring launched a rebrand and a new site 10 months ago to coincide with the opening of our second campus. Since then, we’ve opened two more campuses (one completely web-based) and seen our overall web traffic double, downloadable media bandwidth triple, and video streaming bandwidth almost quadruple. And let me assure you, internet, we have been over my head and talent capacity in regards to web development and all that it entails for every bit of that time.

But that season is coming to a swift end. We’re about to do some damage.

1. My iPhone is not in any way connected with AT&T
2. My iPhone projects movies on the wall and connects to speakers via Airport
3. My iPhone remotely unlocks my house
4. My iPhone is a flying car
5. My iPhone pays off my student loans