Atlanta. Day 2.
Today was all over the place.
This morning Jeff took me to BigStuff Offices in Alpharetta, a northern suburb of Atlanta, for a pretty awesome treat: the chance to sit in on the first creative planning meeting for this year’s Catalyst. I can’t say too much about it (because they made me agree not to let out any details before the event), but it was great to be around those kind of creative innovators and thinkers and just be a part of the processes and conversations that were happening in planning for such a massive church leadership event (if you don’t know, Catalyst is one of the largest Christian events in America and it’s specifically for church leaders; it’s typical attendance is around 12,000 people). And beyond just the planning for Catalyst, hearing about some of the other projects that some of them had their hands in was awesome. It was cool to sit in on the brainstorming process, and from an interest in marketing’s standpoint, to hear practical thinking about breaking ideas down to be able to effectively convey the message.
Oh, and Jeff said he could get me and a few friends into Catalyst this year. So, that’s pretty sweet too.
After the meeting, we went and had lunch a few blocks over in Alpharetta, and then Jeff and I left and went back to South Atlanta to Lakewood to work the rest of the day at MetroMerge. I’ll try and break down to you what MetroMerge is as simply as possible. MetroMerge is a community-oriented workspace and facility run by FCS Urban Ministries, which is a big umbrella of inner-city ministry/community development projects. It rents out space for office work and conferencing at a very affordable price so that people within the Lakewood community can come in and use it as a place to develop business ideas and work to better their community. So, it’s a place called “MetroMerge” because it’s a merging of professionals and people living in the community in a work environment. I met Nate Ledbetter there today (he’s a co-director of FCS along with Leroy Barber) and he gave me a tour of the facility, and a little bit around the block just to give me some background to Lakewood. MetroMerge is situated above The Marketplace (run by FCS, a discount store and hang-out place for the community) and Cheer Up (also run by FCS, a sports camp-type place). There’s a pretty sweet mural on the back of the building that I’ll try and get a shot of later. But MetroMerge is where I’ll be spending a lot of time this summer - running it mostly on Mondays and Wednesdays to offer it out to the community, and just using the office space myself for work with Jeff.
So, designing-wise, a lot when on today at MetroMerge. Jeff is having me design a “tag” to be attached to the new shirts that we’ll be selling for GiftCardGiver (a non-profit I’ll talk more about in another post) this summer that details the “story” behind the organization. I worked for a couple of hours in Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign trying to figure out a design that would best convey the message of the organization, be visually appealing, and also stay within the overall, pre-existing design theme of the group (this was the hardest part; it has to look similar enough to the Web-site and literature without looking like a direct copy of the old style). Also, I am the one that has to come up with the “story,” so I’m going to be learning about concisely communicating effective messages as well. Jeff thinks that it’s good for designers to get a chance to make the message their own at times because it lets us take full responsibility for a product’s marketability. He also gave me a marketing book, “Tribes” by Seth Godin, to read this summer to help me better address that. We are going to meet tomorrow morning to look over some of the design ideas that I came up with and talk about their pros and cons.
We got back to the house tonight to greet Megan, Andre’s sister, who is in town and staying with us for the week. Andre cooked spaghetti for supper, and then we played Speed Scrabble, and then Jeff and I went to the Publix to pick up groceries. When we got back, Meghan and Andre had made chocolate cookies and then we all watched a movie. So it was a pretty great, relaxing evening - which was a good way to wind down kind of a busy day.
