Atl. 50-55.
This week was an intense amount of design output. Monday, I finished up two massive, retractable vinyl banner designs for the Sojourners’ Justice Revival event and Gisele picked them up from Sign-A-Rama and mailed them straight to Dallas. Justice Revival’s Twitter feed said that they received them and they looked great, so that was nice. I also started dialoguing with Scrappy Apparel to begin the ordering process for Green My Hood’s new shirts; now that the logo design is approved, I guess we’ll start putting it on everything. How sweet is that! I also made Keynote templates for the Sojourners’ crew to present stuff on for Justice Revival.
Tuesday I started on a massive project that is actually going to spill into this next school year, probably. Jeff’s new brand initiative, Plywood, is going to start manifesting itself soon in a format called Plywood People, a conjunction of a blog and a digital magazine with some pretty big-deal contributing authors on the blog, and the coupled digital magazine will be a monthly publication that features an unsung hero who is bringing justice into their communities, highlighting some of the people in the world who may not ever make the mainstream media but who are doing great things. I am going to be the designer for the magazine. So I spent the morning Tuesday researching formats and layouts for a lot of other magazines, taking notes, and then the rest of the day and night crafting a few concepts for the magazine. Here is a tidbit that I have learned about design:
Design is failing. Often. Until eventually you get something you like.
The majority of your first ideas, any time you are crafting a new identity for someone, are going to be garbage. Why? The first ideas are the ones that are predictable. The more you force yourself to develop new ideas, the more creative and conceptual your ideas get. Want originality? Try making fifty different designs for a project. By the end of the process, people will wonder, “Wow, how did you ever even come up with that?” And, of course, it’s because you didn’t settle for what everyone else would have come up with.
So by 2:00am Wednesday morning, I had a lot of different cover design ideas, and a pretty solid structure for some internal spreads. But the process was far from over. I spent the rest of the morning Wednesday at MetroMerge gathering a lot of visual inspiration pieces that had elements of design that I thought I could pull from for cover designs, and then I printed them out, laid them all along the tables, and then drew a bunch of new designs on the tables that brought the things that I liked out of the printed inspirations. So, by the lunchtime on Wednesday, I had well over twenty cover concepts for the magazine, and picked a few to craft further. Now, I think I’ve got some pretty solid stuff. A good process!
I spent the rest of the day (and night) on Wednesday designing and coding an English and Spanish splash page for Sojourners’ event, simple sites where users can submit their info to sign up for updates on the event until the full sites are ready for launch. Check the splashes out here: www.justicerevival.org and www.avivamientodejusticia.org. I definitely loved translating the latter into Spanish! :) That night I also went to the Braves game with Jeff, Andre, Keri and a bunch of the Catalyst crew.
Thursday morning I went to a breakfast meeting with Jeff to talk with Dwayne, one of the guys over the CanZion Institute, a hispanic institute that teaches music in 70 countries across the globe to better train the students, especially for worship ministries. A very good conversation to get to sit in on. I also got to craft some ideas for t-shirts for the Justice Revival. Some sweet ideas coming for that, I think. Thursday night I went to Freedom Park with a bunch of people to have gelado and throw frisbee and just hang out in honor of Andre’s birthday.
Friday morning I went and got Chick-Fil-A to have a bit of downtime for personal spiritual study with a good chicken biscuit and coffee. Much needed time. And then I shot some photography downtown and around the city just as a recreational break to recharge a bit of creativity and energy. Afterwards, I went with Jeff and the Blacksons (Josh, operations pastor at Elevation in Charlotte, NC, his wife, Angie, and their three kids) to Centennial Park downtown so that the kids could play in the fountain. We went for lunch at Little Ozio’s, and then I spent a good chunk of the day designing a lot of Web advertisements for the Justice Revival (we even are distributing our own iPhone backgrounds!). Friday night, Jeff grilled kebabs, we watched So You Think You Can Dance (yes, I do watch that show now; sorry), and then played Settlers of Catan. Busy day!
Now it’s Saturday, and I just got done presenting all of my work on Gift Card Giver for the summer to the non-profit’s board. I think it went well! They definitely enjoyed the bit about Cow Appreciation Day, and Andre got me a gift bag with my intern shirt in it (it simply reads, “IGSD” which… I won’t tell you what means, but is applicable because of all of the all-nighters I have pulled to finish projects; haha…) and a gift card to Chick-Fil-A (they know me too well!). I’m about to head to Gadsden, AL now to hang with one of my roommates for the rest of the weekend and then Monday I head to Memphis to start the CRAZY week of the GCG tour: 5 cities in a week!
