Welcome to The Very Daily Weblog of Joshua Blankenship

Happy to see the Wordpress crew finally paying attention to the Dashboard. It’s always been a bit useless to me. Yay for usability and customization.

Chances are, there’s at least one step in your process that users shouldn’t have to do themselves. Why?

Quote, “I hate automatic paper towel dispensers. Waving may hand back and forth in front of that thing is only slightly less annoying than turning a crank…Since most public faucets are automatic, why not tie the dispenser sensor in with the faucet sensor? If I put my hands under the faucet, I’m going to need a towel, right? The dispenser could anticipate that and feed out a towel when the water turns on.” — Matt Donovan, excerpted from his post Automate This!

I love this kind of solutions-oriented thinking that doesn’t start with what currently exists and work from there, but seriously takes things to their most basic level and asks, “wait, why is THAT there?” with the goal to make the path from initial touchpoint to end result that much quicker. This works for design, environments, signage, check-in processes and so much more.

Find the step that doesn’t need to be a step and make it automatic.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Viewzi bills itself as “a new and highly visual way
to search that brings all your favorite stuff together in one place.” It essentially gives users multiple visual and contextual ways to search the web and hopefully cuts down on the clutter and boringness so often associated with search engines. They have a 101 video to learn more.

When I was still in Dallas, I signed my first (and thus far only) NDA in the early days of Viewzi (only to choose another v-named opportunity at the time), so it’s awesome to see it come to fruition because it’s a great idea and it’s well-implemented. Huge props to Aaron Martin for a lot of the design details throughout, and to the rest of the team that’s pulled it all together.

Gorgeous homepage design and direction from Virginia-based Viget Labs.

I’m a sucker for watercolors. The overall vibe and colors are quite refreshing, and their blog has some solid web design-related content.

That being said, the site overall design falls apart on any non-blog (e.g. long-scrolling) pages because that sidebar is like 8 million pixels tall. It’s only a sidebar in name and placement now, because it becomes more than just secondary information; it becomes the bulk of a page’s content. Sad to see a beautiful site not paying attention to details.