Atlanta. Day 6.
I went home Saturday through Monday for Clay and Rebecca’s wedding in Starkville. Saturday night I, - accompanied by the lovely Katie Sneed as my date - went to the rehearsal dinner, and then back to the Sneed’s house to chat about corporate vs. organic churches and ministries with Tina and Katie for a while. Sunday was the rehearsal all afternoon and the bachelor party that night, and then all day Monday was dedicated to the wedding. It was a great, long weekend: a lot of fun, and just so good to see old friends. Monday evening I drove back to Atlanta.
This morning Jeff and Andre headed out early to go meet with a social worker (they are starting the adoption process!), so I was on my own for work. Jeff gave me permission to sleep in a bit because of how non-stop my weekend was, but I got up and went and had breakfast and chai while I worked on one of the projects Jeff gave me. Jeff and I met back up at the house in the early afternoon and headed to MetroMerge. There, I sat in on a meeting between Jeff and Jonathan Bostik (spelling?), who is a motion graphics designer and video editor for various different productions, including Catalyst, and is launching his own video series for small group studies (similar to Nooma, but related specifically to stories of restoration; it’s called “Garden to the City,” and it sounds awesome). Jeff worked some with him on suggestions/advice for branding the video series, and that was some valuable information to listen in on. Then Jonathan and Jeff starting planning on a promotional video for GiftCardGiver that we can tour with at the end of the summer. The creative process was pretty interesting: Jeff explained a couple of different visual concepts (text-based motion graphics, or stop-motion that tells a story), and then played the music for the video and let Jonathan dream to the music. For all of the different sounds and musical swells, Jonathan was imagining visual concepts that could go along with it. It was pretty great. The project sounds like it’s going to be very creative, so I was glad to glean from their meeting and look forward to seeing that completed in the future.
This evening, Jeff and Andre went to Brad Lomenick’s (the director of Catalyst) birthday party. I went to Publix for some supplies, and cooked up a big dinner (listen to this, my recipe: whole wheat pasta, plum tomatoes, broccoli fleurets, with my own alfredo, provolone and wine sauce over it; Andre tried it later and said she thought it was amazing), and then Max and I watched Arrested Development until the power went out. Then I sat in the dark, rooms lit by candles, and designed until my computer died. And by that time Jeff and Andre were home and we talked about theology and stuff. A great night!
Design stuff: I’m trying to learn how to make an advertisement for a clothing sale without making it look like a typical sale ad that you’d find in a Macy’s catalogue; I don’t want it to look predictable. I learned how to make 3D stars in Illustrator today, and tried to do a “summer sale” themed ad with those, but wound up deciding to keep it simpler instead. So I photographed the product on a surface that I could edit out, and then uploaded the pictures and tweaked them in Lightroom. Then I exported them to Photoshop and cut out the background so that I could have a free-floating t-shirt object. I think that this will be the best design for the ad: simulating the t-shirt sitting on a surface with hand-written information for the ad next to the shirt. I also learned a lot in Jonathan and Jeff’s meeting about branding. They talked for a long time about what different fonts can communicate, and we all discussed the need for a balance in a logo. Jonathan then showed how the logo could be applied to some possible splash pages for the Web site that will launch later. Also, after the clothing sale ad is done, I found out that my main project for the week will be mastering Flash enough to make a custom electronic-invitation for each city that our tour will stopping in to be able to RSVP to. I saw some examples from past projects that Jeff worked with, and started concepting some invitations today. I will detail that more as the work week progresses.
