Marketing and Management Thoughts

This article, “For Good Self-Control, Try Getting Religious About It”, by John Tierney was published two days ago in the New York Times that slipped under my radar until today.

“We simply asked if there was good evidence that people who are more religious have more self-control,” Dr. McCullough. “For a long time it wasn’t cool for social scientists to study religion, but some researchers were quietly chugging along for decades. When you add it all up, it turns out there are remarkably consistent findings that religiosity correlates with higher self-control.”

And another nice quote

Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness. He suggested that nonbelievers try a secular version of that strategy.

The article continues and is chalk full of great quotes and while not explicitly for the Christian faith it shows there is a high correlation between those who are religiously devoted and their self-control. Really interesting.

I came across this amazing letter form project by Cameron Moll of the Temple in Salt Lake City. It is inspiring to see the detail and the level of perfection that he achieved in his poster project. While it used to be for sale at his website, it is now sold out (very short run of 50 or 100).

I hope seeing this work will inspire you to think twice about how you use type in your work for your church. It can have a very dynamic and powerful impact on the final presentation of your project.

via VisualCulture

My heart for media and the web started in Video back in 1999. While I understand this is an expensive area for churches to get into, and the number of churches able to afford live broadcast production tech is even slimmer, it is still awesome to check out.

I came across the NewTek Tricaster (cost is $5000) on the wired blog and its claim to fame is that it can take a whole production truck and compact it down into one box. That’s it. The interface looks super intuitive and easy to use (the wired blog mentioned training in of volunteers in as little as 30 minutes).

Form factor is very small and would easily fit in a rack mount somewhere near the audio equipment for the church. It does real-time chroma keying, lower thirds, and so on. Also with a $1000 attachment you can do slow-mo (the action sports videographer in me just jumped a little bit). Imagine preaching with slow-mo instant replays!

I would have loved to have one of these back in the day when I ran the Midwest Skier Open every year. Probably could have gotten red bull to go in on the jumbo tron then. If only…

Never hurts to dream… Just sometimes keeps me from the work I should be doing.

It is stunning how many brands we interact with on a daily basis. Former ASU under-grad student Tanner Woodford wrote about how he logged all 1,035 brand identities he interacted with during one day the last October.

Incredible how many brands we see, use, experience on a daily basis. The image to the left is from his post where he laid the brands out for a 24 hr clock. Its an intuitive way to display the brands even without the clock arms spinning away on it.

With so many brands being experienced on a daily basis from the commercial segment of society I would contend that as a church as a whole we need to do a better job at:

1. Developing stronger brand identity where needed
2. Exposing that brand broadly in the public arena

Until we make these concerted focal points we should expect people to maintain the priorities that the currently have. The more frequently we as a church interact with the culture (in a positive light) we will only be helping them to make positive decisions on a regular basis.

I have to share one last image of this clock as a more finished product, so beautifully done.

Make sure you check his post out over at fillslashstroke.com

One of the great things about this whole web 2.0 thing is how different websites work together. This is done by them providing access to their system through something called an API. But what it means for us, less work!

So how does it mean less work? As someone in ministry (or even working full time) the prospect of being able to trim time off of our list of to-dos is very exciting. So here is how you can post on your blog, and have that update your twitter account, and Facebook status for free. Follow these 3 simple steps. (more…)

Jeffrey Zeldman comes up with a pretty insightful and funny/painful list of top cues for a designer/developer to walk away from a project before it every starts.

Some favorites are:

#7: Client can’t articulate a single desired user goal. He also can’t articulate a business strategy, an online strategy, a reason for the site’s existence, or a goal or metric for improving the website. In spite of all that, client has designed his own heavily detailed wireframes.

And

#20: Client begins first meeting by making a big show of telling you that you are the expert. You are in charge, he says: he will defer to you in all things, because you understand the web and he does not. (Trust your uncle Jeffrey: this man will micromanage every hair on the project’s head.)

Make sure you check it out if you are a designer for a smile.

If you aren’t a designer/developer check it out to get some insight into that world. Make sure to glance over some of the comments to hear their thoughts.

We at nineteen05 just got back from ringing some bells for the Salvation Army in their annual red kettle drive. Got to wish a bunch of people a Merry Christmas and we were able to make quite a few hardy Minnesotans smile today despite the sub-zero wind chill (6 degrees and -2 with the wind chill). Now back to wrap up Friday and to let my toes thaw out.

Here’s a little shout out to my bell ringing bro’s over at Coed Monkey (blog) and Ministry Monkey. Warm up! And if you need tee-shirts for your church or ministry hit them up. Great guys over there.

http://www.nineteen05.com/media/feed/motion/2008/12/Sequence-01.flv

It’s hard to believe that Christmas is upon us once again. There is snow on the ground here in Minneapolis and it will be a white Christmas this year. In case you have yet to set your tree up this year (there are only 13 days left till Christmas so get on it!!).

From us here at Nineteen05 we wish you the merriest of Christmas’ you’ve ever had, and the peace & joy of Christ in this holiday season.

It’s important in any line of work (professional or hobby) to keep tabs on what others are doing. I follow all these blogs (and then some) to keep my eyes sharp and my mind inspired in the realm of design. If you aren’t currently using a feed aggregator like Google Reader you should really start (lets you keep up with news/blog updates all in one place). Subscribe to our blog, and the blogs listed below.

6 Blogs You’ve Gotta Read

1. Swiss Miss – General Design (http://swissmiss.typepad.com/weblog/)
   Tina Roth Eisenberg keeps this blog packed full of great design work on a daily basis.
2. notcot – General Design (http://www.notcot.com/)
   Kept up by a teamof bloggers who post about all things design. Worth checking out (and they are doing christmas product give aways right now, and it’s free to enter!).
3. Brand New – Brand/Identity (http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/)
   A beautiful blog when it comes to brand identities. They focus mainly on re-branding of large brands (like Pepsi, Delta, banks, ect). The insights shared on the new brands are really helpful to start/continue forming an eye for identify/brand development.
4. Fubiz – Video/Motion Design (http://www.fubiz.net/blog/)
   Most of what they post at Fubiz involves motion art. These videos are really well done and an inspiration to the multi-media designer inside me. I do realize this site is in french, but they post such visually stunning work (much of which is actually in English).
5. TypeNEU – Type Design (http://www.typeneu.com/)
   Type faces are gorgeous. The right type face changes everything. The days of papyrus and comic sans are long gone. This blog will help you realize the current trends in fonts, and gain an appreciation for this, all to often, overlooked art of typeface design.
6. I Love Typography – Type Design (http://ilovetypography.com/)
   Similar to TypeNEU, focuses on typography and has a lot of stunning content for inspiration.

Still not enough designy goodness?

Below are even more blogs to check out.

• http://www.productdose.com/
• http://www.oberholtzer-creative.com/visualculture/
• http://www.designspotter.com/
• http://designnotes.info/
• http://mocoloco.com/

The micro-blogging site twitter could very well be the next generation of blogging (though there are serious limits to such tiny posts and it is a very different experience). We over at nineteen05 just set up our twitter account (@nineteen05).

Our main motivation for doing this is to quickly and breifly communicate product releases, customer service info, new features, user submissions of feature adds, and to keep in better more consistant communication with our customer base.

If you are using twitter, make sure to follow us and we’ll return the favor!
If you haven’t started, get your FREE account and let us be one of your first contacts!