Welcome to The Very Daily Weblog of Joshua Blankenship

(In case you missed it, you can read Part 1: The Logo)

Towards the end of the logo design process, I began seriously looking at typefaces to determine what kind of supporting typography would work well for NewSpring Church. I like to think of typefaces in corporate identity as a type of handwriting unique to an individual. One of the constraints this identity package needed to work within was budget. Quality typefaces are often not cheap (and rightly so if they’re well-made), but from a stewardship perspective our budget simply can’t/won’t support more than a handful of font licenses. I wanted a complimentary combo of a solid, modern sans-serif and a functional, ubiquitous serif but knew there had to be some tradeoff involved to get something appropriate and affordable/sustainable.

I researched a number of san-serif typefaces, particularly Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Whitney which much of the final wordmark was based on. Ultimately, Whitney was a tad too playful and didn’t work as well on-screen for some of our video applications. But when I began using Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk Extended for the “Church” tagline in my logo iterations, something clicked.

It’s still fascinating to me that a typeface released in 1896 can somehow feel fresh today. Crazy Germans and their great typographic legacy. AG has much in common with other realist san-serif typefaces like Helvetica and Univers (both of which were based on it), but a few of the characters, particularly the capital R, led me towards AG when I began the first comps of wayfinding/environment signage for our facilities. In the end, a combination of AG Extended (for all-caps signage applications and AG Super for mixed-case applications started feeling cohesive and appropriate. We bought two 5-CPU licenses for Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk Collection, which includes all weights of the standard, condensed (occasionally used for web graphics) and extended versions. The Communications and Creative Arts teams create most public-facing graphics and visuals for NewSpring Church, so those teams are the only ones who have/use this typeface. That keeps things tidy and within our licensing budget.

Having settled on AG for “the designers” to use, we still needed something ubiquitous/affordable for the rest of our ministry staff to use in common applications like sign-up forms, internal documents, etc. As much as I wish the Communications team controlled everything, I also don’t — we’d never get it all done. The reality of life in a large organization is that this identity needs to make room for non-designers to create visuals in keeping with the visual identity that is being established. Narrowing the type choice down to something free and widely available obviously dramatically decreased the number of options. This is where my web design background actually helped solve a typography issue for once — the font family Lucida can be found on most modern computer systems. As I understand, it’s on all Apple computers with OS X and on most PCs that have Microsoft Word installed, so there’s no purchasing/licensing to deal with.

The Lucida family includes a rarely (at least from my experience) used version called Lucida Fax, a slab serif originally designed for fax sheets. The geometric nature of slab serifs appeals to my general design sensibilities, and worked well in partnership with Akzidenz Grotesk in some of my first typography experiments (which littered my workspace for weeks). Other members of the Communications team undertook the fairly large project of resetting all the internal documents and forms and such in Lucida Fax and making sure it was installed on all the computers at the office. We’ve been coaching our other staff and volunteers to think of Lucida Fax as “the NewSpring font” when creating documents.

The combination of a licensed sans-serif for the designers and a free serif for everyone else saves our church a great deal of money in font licensing, enables us to present a united typographic front in all applications, allows for enough interplay between the two faces to not feel limited and puts certain “design tools” (in the form of templates and a single font) into the hands of untrained ministry-level people so that they can produce visuals that are still in keeping with the NewSpring visual identity.

If I had an unlimited budget, I might have chosen a more-refined serif face (like H&FJ’s cut of Didot they did for Harper’s Bazaar), but that would’ve cost thousands of dollars that we can spend in better ways elsewhere. I think the AG/Lucida Fax combo gets us mostly there, and works within our constraints without cramping our style too much.

Still to come: signage, standards guides, copywriting and the relaunch of www.NewSpring.cc.

This post is the first of a few detailing the 7-month process we went through at NewSpring Church to rework our identity for modernization, scaling at multiple locations and, most importantly, play visual catch-up with who we actually are. I was on staff at NewSpring from ‘02-05ish and the “before” logo was designed and implemented just after my departure. That logo served the church well in the season of transition into permanent facilities and represented the 4-part vision statement of Engage, Enlarge, Endure and Enable, but it was no longer representative of the vibe, culture and personality of NewSpring. This process was an effort to find out who we are and then best represent that visually.

The set-up: I always start out branding work by asking the client for a list of words they think describes them (and then I try to get them to get the same list from their customers, but they hate that because they never see themselves the way others do. See my article on logo/brand perceptions for more on that topic.) Since I was technically both the client and the designer on this project, the key words I started out with were fresh, open, growing, friendly, modern, tight and bold. My direct supervisor Tony Morgan is on our senior management team and handled all the presenting of logo concepts to that team.

As a first phase of exploration (in January I think), I wanted to see if there was something to the 4-E logo that we could simply take and modernize. I started on the icon, with the strategy to move on to typographic updates later if the mark had traction. It didn’t. Fairly early in the process, the senior management began hinting that the 4-E vision statement may change eventually and I didn’t want to go through this process all over again when it did. 4-E icons? Killed. Next?

During my first tenure at NewSpring I tried to establish solid branding based on an “N” icon. In retrospect, it was both too corporate-feeling and not well carried out in all applications. I didn’t know enough about branding to think through what would and wouldn’t work in applications like signage, wayfinding systems, collateral, etc. With a little more experience under my belt, I gave the “N” another go before I tried moving on to completely new concepts. I like both directions shown here, but ultimately, a key desire of the senior management came out after presenting these options: “we don’t want an icon at all.” So, we were going with a wordmark only. The typophile in me rejoiced.

Options 1 and 2 were concepts I felt like could be fully-realized in a large-scale branding effort. The simplicity and repetitive device of the slanted box/line could have uses in print and on screen, especially in regards to cropping photographic and video imagery in the confines of the rigidly-defined box slant. Option 3 was one of a multitude of “clever type” variations of the wordmark that, ultimately, didn’t serve any purpose other than cleverness (and decreased legibility.) Options 4 and 5 just… died. Option 6 was an effort to create a custom typeface, but our relatively short timeline for brand launch (the opening of our second campus in July) didn’t provide enough tweak time and honestly, there are so many fantastically talented typographers far more skilled than me, why even bother trying to create from scratch?

After a presentation of these concepts (and a few others), the other key desire of the decision-makers came to the surface: “we don’t want an icon, but we want something more than just text.” Maddening, right? Less than an icon/wordmark lockup, more than just a wordmark. Somewhere right in the middle was the logo that would stick.

These two logos rose to the top after a number of other presentations of “in-between” concepts. Both had traction with the decision-makers and both had typographic choices I felt like we could work with on a corporate identity/standards level (Whitney for Option 1 and Neutraface for Option 2).

The problem was they were both completely dependent on gradients in order to “read” right. One of the issues with our previous mark was that it turned every print job into a 5-color piece (4-color plus a metallic silver) and increased costs; a gradient logo would do the same, with the added headache of infinite press checks to see if the gradient was getting printed correctly. And even when tightly-managed, gradients can work well for web, on-screen applications and 4-color print jobs but they completely fall apart for branding applications on the outskirts of an organization. What happens to fax cover sheets? Internal documents printed b&w? Nametags printed by our check-in system that only allow for small bitmap images? That didn’t seem tenable or scalable for a church whose budget for graphics isn’t bottomless. I set to work to find another solution and our deadline with signage vendors for outdoors signs was closing in for the Greenville campus. Constraints are inspiring. Mostly.

I was starting to (rightly) fear and loathe the gradient. I hated that I hadn’t found a simple, more timeless, less-trendy solution in keeping with the logomakers I admire. I tried a two-color version of Option 1, with a clear break between the lowercase “g” and the tail, but it made the logo feel harsh and, in all honestly, looked like crap. I loved the typography feel of Option 1 (a heavily-tweaked version of the aforementioned Whitney), so I cut off the tail and started fresh with that wordmark as a base. I quickly landed on the 7 circles that dot the “i.” Utilizing the lowercase “i” dot to make a logo of some variety is clearly an oft-used device and I’m under no allusion that it is in any way original. This new option also ditched the “Church” tagline set in Whitney in favor of Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk Extended — a decision that would eventually set the tone for all our typography and signage.

An early version of this logo was presented at some point, and promptly rejected. Sad.

With deadlines encroaching and the knowledge that “if we were going to rebrand, we had to do it now” or waste thousands of dollars in signage and print collateral at new campuses, a final meeting was set to determine the logo. Options 1 and 2 were presented, in color for the first time (orange-y red, bright blue and light green options.) Also presented was the previously shot-down dotted “i” option. Tony and I decided to include the third option and press hard to sell it, feeling strongly it was the best solution (and that eventually the rest of the senior management would see that as well in the context of the rest of the identity.) That’s what I call back-up and employee cover, managers.

Option 2 was (rightly) deemed too corporate and cold (not too mention too “Welcome to the ancient pyramids of the 4th dynasty, tourists.” I got caught up in exploring the complementary angles of the “w” and the “n” and somehow made a monster.) Option 1 was the front-runner, but a hard sell landed us where we are today. In retrospect, I would have hated life if Option 1 would have won out. The identity options I’ve had with the final logo in terms of wayfinding, typography, a simple color palette for print/screen have been numerous and cohesive. Gradients wouldn’t have allowed that.

Posts will follow on the fallout of that logo decision, including typography, signage, standards guides, copywriting and the relaunch of www.NewSpring.cc. Thanks for playing along.

I’m going to write a few longer posts later this week related to the rebranding process we just went through at NewSpring. Are there any specific questions you have (details or broader strategy)? I’ll try to incorporate some of them.

The good: after a solid 9-day push of all-nighters, we rolled out the initial version www.NewSpring.cc a few minutes ago. I don’t know what day it is, but i’m fairly certain i’m hungry and my lower back is killing me.

The bad(?): There are a metric ton of Internet Explorer woes to tackle, as well as a big list of design tweaks and type changes mainly pertaining to giving the blog(s) some much needed loving care. There’s more content to add. There’s a Resources section to finish. There’s a slick new video player to rollout (more on that later). There are 3+ years of audio and video to port over to the new site/servers. Lots of IM pats on the back to Mr. Noah Stokes, who handled all the development heavy lifting. There are bloggers to train on a new content management system and strategy meetings to be had about what features should be added where. There are hallway conversations and emails to field. There’s second-guessing to be done and typos to be fixed…

All that to say, there’s always something. Perfection in design is illusory, especially in regards to the web. You strive for it, and walk in the tension between it and productivity, but at some point, you just have to launch the thing and then hit the ground running in the fallout, dodging shrapnel and enjoying the weather.

This is a foundation. An experiment. A process. A series of little victories yet to be had. I’m excited.

P.S. if anyone ever suggests launching a full corporate rebranding and a new website on the same weekend on a roughly 6 month timeline, punch them in the nose and call them silly names, because they are idiots. I’d hit myself in the face for suggesting it to myself (and others!), but I’m too tired to fight.

You can try to outspend the competition. Or you can try to outculture them. Create a place that makes employees feel special. A place that makes them feel like they’re part of a bigger whole. A place where they continually get to learn and evolve. A place where everyone actually likes each other.

If you create a culture like that, who would want to leave? Plus, you’ll get the best minds out there knocking on your door to get in.
— Matt Linderman, excerpted from Pixar’s tightknit culture is its edge

I think Matt hits on something important here. I know for us at NewSpring, it’s essentially impossible to outspend the competition, especially when it comes to skilled professional jobs like designers. We joke about “negotiating your paycut” when you come on staff here. For better or worse, it is what it is — a constraint we work within. We’re a church, and we simply don’t have the resources to “compete” with a company that sells products and makes profits.

But we can outculture them every day of the week. We can offer creative staff permission to fail (big) and have freedom, we can ditch as much bureaucracy as possible and we can push boundaries. Plenty of people work in “dream jobs” that don’t have any of these values.

Besides, after the initial courting process, I don’t worry too much about salary. I mainly think “do I want to go to my job today?” I answer “yes” 99% of the time these days, and I assure you that has nothing to do with my paycheck and everything to do with the culture I walk into everyday.

In about 20 minutes, we’re having our first meeting to discuss the new visual identity and communications standards with some key staff leaders at NewSpring. Should be fun times.

At some point soon, I’ll make these available as PDF downloads.

Have you ever worked on a longterm project? As in putting months of days of (long) hours and thought into making something? It’s a surreal process, and it makes things very difficult to look at objectively.

I started working on new identity concepts for NewSpring Church before I even officially accepted the job, so in reality, I’ve been working on this rebranding for close to nine months. Acts of God and/or appeasement of Godzilla aside, we’re launching the rebrand this coming Sunday, July 13th. We’re also launching a new campus in Greenville, a new message series answering some pointed topical questions and, fingers crossed, the foundation for our new website (with some major 2nd, 3rd and 4th phases after the launch.)

All that to say, posting might be sparse this week, along with sleep, sanity, coherence, the ability to process information and form complete sentences, etc. Of course post-July 13th I’ll actually have some work to show off. A lot of work.

Decent trade-off?

NewSpring Church sponsors a benefit concert (and fireworks display) every year called LiveFreeLiveLoud. All the donations and proceeds from vendors go directly to a few local non-profits: Anderson Interfaith Ministries, Haven of Rest and the Anderson Care Pregnancy Clinic.

This year, we raised $20,900 and NewSpring matched that dollar-for-dollar for a total donation of $41,800 to support these ministries that are on the ground-level of helping marginalized, poor, underprivileged and in-need people in our community. We also rocked out, had a lot of fun, watched some pretty fireworks and ate a snowcone and a hotdog (or two.) I’ve got a few concert and fireworks photos on Flickr for your perusal.

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.

Job postings are tricky things. You want to be succinct. You want to be engaging. You want to rise above the noise and reach out in the right way to find the just-right candidate. Being truthful helps. So does being funny. You want to let potential applicants know what kind of culture your organization has. You want to communicate exactly what you want, and, perhaps more importantly, what you don’t want. There is a job to be done and you want the role filled, preferably with a minimal amount of false leads and wasted time in between posting and hiring.

I probably did a decent job of the above in the Art Director/Designer job posting. Most people chuckled a bit. And in the context of this blog, I think most of you know my general demeanor and writing tone, so it read funny. When it was posted outside the context of this blog, I wonder if it just read smug.

You see, a friend called me out on it. I think she actually used the phrase “totally harsh” when we talked about it. I also think she was probably right.

“Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious…”
— Colossians 4:5-6a

All of the things I listed in that original job posting are true. I intensely mean them. This role is for a highly-skilled professional designer that knows their stuff and has a portfolio of client work to prove it. I don’t want to come across as compromising on that. But in my attempt to filter the applicants on the front-end of the process, I used a tone and attitude that stands in stark opposition to the fact that above all, I’m a follower of the way of Jesus Christ and I am responsible for acting, thinking, and speaking in a way that best represents who I am in light of who I believe Jesus to be. This isn’t so much about it being a job posting for a church — that’s secondary to it being a job posting written by me.

“Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity, and sound speech that cannot be condemned, so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say about us.”
— Titus 2:7-8

Elitism, the pride it stems from, and the smug swagger it takes on in action have no place in the Kingdom of God. They ruffle my proverbial feathers, so I’m a hypocrite for hating them, and then engaging in a bit of my own oratory elitism for the sake of a good read and a laugh. So for that, I apologize. I want the right person for this role to join our team, but I don’t want to compromise the attitude I should walk in and speak from in order to take some short cuts in filtering applicants. The easy way is rarely the best way.

In light of all those thoughts, I’ve edited the job description on this site. Before anyone thinks this was in any way motivated by someone from NewSpring Church, I assure you this is something that I’ve been wrestling with by myself tonight and felt a personal need to talk openly about and to change. For those of you that read my blog who don’t really “get” the whole Jesus thing, I’m sure all this is difficult to understand, but it’s a part of the refining process I’m in and the journey I’m on, trying to walk with some semblance of integrity and goodness.

Thanks for bearing with me and my myriad of faults. You’re good readers.

The short: Are you a Photoshop-wielding, bezier-curve-drawing, typography-knowing, web-culture-loving, detail-sweating, direction-taking Art Director/Designer?

The long: You do jaw-dropping, killer print work. You have more than one good comp in you for any given idea/assignment. You work fast, handling everything from idea to implementation. You work well in the lead owning a project. You work well on a highly-collaborative team. You take creative direction with a smile, and then you make it better because you’re that good. You have an extraordinary mastery of typography, layout, and minimizing clutter. You know when to use Photoshop, when to use Illustrator, and when to use InDesign. You read. A lot.

Bonus point gold star cookies if you know some CSS/XHTML/PHP, can write more than your grocery list, and you throw down a mighty iTunes Library gauntlet.

Let’s see that portfolio URL via email. If you don’t have an online portfolio, this job is most likely not a good fit for you. No phone calls please.

P.S. We’re a church, so that obviously presents the proviso that you have to be a Christian. This is also an on-site job at our Anderson Campus; so no remote workers. We want you to be a part of the culture everyday.

I just launched a minisite for NewSpring Church’s Unleash Conference featuring the video content of the two main sessions from this year (and last year), some photography (from myself and anyone tagging their conference photos with unleash08), and a few other goodies.

In leu of a typical blog, I thought we’d try using Twitter as a way to relay information for Unleash 09 and updates. We’ll see how that works out. Obviously, everyone doesn’t have a Twitter account, but I’d wager enough do (or will) to make it a viable experiment.

I’m constantly running into roadblocks, both small and large, while we’re hosted/CMSed by our current provider. Their templates are fairly worthless, so I’m just building pages from scratch, but their core technologies are all Microsoft-based (no PHP, no .htaccess, no anything fun) and they have control of our DNS right now, which makes it absurdly difficult to get anything done quickly or easily. They will go away soon. I will rejoice. All that to say, sorry about the lack of clean URLs; I know nothing about ASP other than I don’t want to use it.

For the typography lovers, I’m using Mike Cina’s quirky tall Jute for most of the display text. I’ve been wanting to use it on a project for (literally) years, but nothing really clicked until this site.

Oh, let’s see… we’ve been threatened with lawsuit over a print piece (that was direct mailed to a few thousand folks and had the dirty word “sex” on it), I’m halfway through the brand standards guide for our new corporate identity, picking out complementary typefaces for a complete identity rework is fun and consuming, we’re about to make our screenprinter tremble in fear because they’ve never done a four-color shirt with (almost) complete front coverage, typical local newspaper anonymous commenter awesomeness, I’m still listening to copious amounts of Justice, and there are a few other things that I’m sure I’m forgetting.*

Hi, internet! I miss you! Hugs!

*You’re right, it’s totally not a complete sentence.

Welcome to the middle of nowhere. Something like 2,000 of you are descending on smalltown South Carolina for NewSpring Church’s Unleash Conference today. We hope you have a blast and get a healthy dose of southern hospitality.

I’m the scary-looking one taking pictures,
Joshua

P.S. Sorry our website is down right now. Apparently it’s a flaky router everything at our service provider. We’re They’re working on it.

This is the first message series I’ve worked on since coming back on staff at NewSpring. I think our team pulled together a stellar communications package for print and screen. All five bulletins were in circulation at once in the auditorium, which was fun to watch (and hopefully added to the magazine publication feel I was envisioning.)

I handled art direction, copywriting, and design/layout. The photography is courtesy of one of our production designers Will Rodes. Ken Wilson put together the video opener to set it all up nicely (utilizing the haunting Gary Jules cover of Mad World by Tears For Fears). And of course our models were all perfectly morose. Ben Coleman recorded some behind-the-scenes footage during the photoshoot, if you’re into that sort of thing.

For the typography nerds out there, the articles titles are mixed weights of ITC Officina Sans and ITC Officina Serif, highly usable font families for display and body text. All the numbers are set in Stefan’s wonderfully quirky Armchair Modern.