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.

An interview with Kyle Blue, Design Director of Dwell Magazine. Despite my once and current misgivings about Dwell’s recent redesign, Kyle and his team have been one of the more consistent design inspirations for me over the last 6 or 7 years.

I couldn’t think of anything to write about yesterday, so I asked the hive mind.

Mike Boutté asked me to write about blogger’s block, so here we are, my friend. Answer: leverage your friends to find content that meets needs.

Michael Harrison asked what I’m doing at this year’s Unleash Conference at NewSpring Church. Answer: I’ll be doing a breakout session with our Communications Director Suzanne Swift talking about communications and web strategy for churches of any size. I might also be speaking one other time, but it’s on the sly. I’ll also be walking around, meeting people, hopefully helping people, and generally being amazed that thousands of talented, passionate folks think we have have something to teach them.

Adam Spooner asked about choosing complementary serif/sans typefaces. Answer: I’m in way over my head, but I typically go for contrast, readability, and faces that have somewhat complimentary general angles/shapes. I also play the very annoying “until it looks right” card. You should probably listen to people who are smarter than me.

Sean Berger asked about Twitter + eCommerce Strategy. Answer: you’re asking the wrong guy. I use Twitter to make people laugh. I don’t know how valuable that’ll be in trying to sell them anything. (But it think that highlights the fact that there is no one way to use Twitter.)

John Flowers asked why I thought creativity was essential. Answer: I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it as an essentiality, I just like to make things and think of things and solve problems.

kjellnygren asked why content management system ExpressionEngine is so awesome and he wanted some tutorials. Answer: EE has a wicked learning curve, but a brilliantly simple payoff. Between it and CodeIgniter, there’s not much you can’t do fairly quickly and elegantly. Since I’m a problem solver, not a developer, you should look into EE Insider, EE Screencasts, these EE video tutorials, and Ryan Irelan’s blog. They’re all awesome.

Ooooh, pretty! Yulia Brodskaya makes gorgeous typographic illustrations. FROM PAPER. Paper!

It’s like 3D swirly awesomeness and craft time all rolled into one.

Quote, “We installed this alphabet into the ceiling of the room in which we studied typography, at Tyler School of Art.”

The project, cheekily referred to as Drop Caps, is a lofty study in large-scale typographic simplicity. I always love seeing type in real settings off the computer. (via Swiss Miss)

Stephen Hallgren asked “[Does] anyone have any good links on how to organize gigantic font libraries (not applications, but methods)?” and then specifically asked me to share my categories for organizing fonts.

I use Linotype’s wonderful free app FontExplorer X as a font manager. It works much like iTunes, in that you can add sets (drop and drag) and “smart sets” (which update automatically based on the given criteria.) These sets keep things organized so I don’t have to scan through the entire massive list every time I need a monospaced font for something or a nice script for a wedding invite. They also help me organize in ways that make sense to me and how I look for the right font for the right use.

I keep a set called “Go To” that’s full of the 50 or 60 typefaces I use most often and then sets for specific clients/projects so I don’t forget what faces I used for what clients. For the most part, this organizational structure works for me and saves me tons of time that I used to spend scrolling through that massive list, one font at a time. I’ll also add that I spent a solid week whittling down my library to around ~1600 fonts total. That helps save time more than anything else because honestly, most of the other fonts I had were complete crap that I never used.

Hope this helps, Stephen (and anyone else who may benefit from nerdy ways to organize font folders and such.) Happy typesetting.

(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.