Marketing and Management Thoughts

Michael Bierut is one of the partners at Pentagram (one of the most well known agencies in the design/advertising world). He spoke at the 99% conference and gave an insightful talk on how he has designed over the years. Not bad for a guy who says that he isn’t creative, but just loves solving problems.

“Remember who you’re doing it for, and why you’re doing it and you will not go wrong.” – Michael Bierut

The 5 Tips

1. Listen first, then design
2. Don’t Avoid the Obvious
3. The Problem Contains the Solution
4. Indulge your Obsession
5. Love is the Answer

(via 99%)

I have several friends who work in the advertising/design industry. Several work a few blocks form us at a firm called Space150. They redesign their entire brand every 150 days (a bit excessive for the church, but a really cool concept) and my friend Dan Jenstad documented much of the design process in this 4 minute video for a previous version. Check it out for sure. This video is from their v22 launch (they are now on v23). Check out the rest of the finished work.

If you have ever wondered all the work that goes into good design check out this video. There is so much attention to detail that really comes through when designers screen cast their creative process. While the ability to design well is a gift, it is also a long process that require hard work.

Asking someone to do work on Spec means that they put all the time and energy into the work without any guarantee that they would ever receive any compensation for the work. We are nineteen05 are whole hearted against SPEC work. So why is it wrong?

The reason it has been an issue for designers in particular is that after a designer has finished their work, the client would reject it not liking something and the designer is then out of their time/effort/money. While the concept of spec work does exist on large scale (competitions for major building designs). Unless you are holding a competition for your new church building, don’t do spec work. Even with volunteers.

The newly appointed president of AIGA (the international designers association), Debbie Millman, on Spec Work.

I am personally vigorously, passionately and fundamentally AGAINST designers being asked to do work on spec and neither I nor my firm will ever participate in speculative work. I have said it before and I will say it again: Speculative work denigrates both the agencies and the designers that participate. If we give away our work for free, if we give away our talent and our expertise, we give away more than the work. We give away our souls.

Read the full interview over at NO!SPEC.

For more information on the NO!SPEC movement.

In another article about the Debbie Millman, the author referenced these great articles. The top three are particularly helpful for how the church is most likely to cross the SPEC boundary line.

• Spec Work Is Evil / Why I Hate CrowdSpring, by Andrew Hyde
• More logo design contest nonsense, on The Logo Factor
• Spec Watch on design contests, on Logo Design Love
• Don’t design on spec, by Jeffrey Zeldman
• Spec Work Arithmetic, from the Speak Up Archive
• An interview with SpecWatch, on Web Designer Depot
• Pay the Designer, on 8164
• The Personal Cost of Designing on Spec, by Mark Boulton

Hat Nod: swissmiss

While many churches never think twice about Intellectual property when it comes to what they use. Even fewer look at protecting their own intellectual property. For many they might see it being to expensive or not worth the time.

The reality is that it can be quite cheap, and will be worth it if problems arise later down the road.

Common Fallacies:

1. it’s not worth the time or effort to secure intellectual property rights.
2. Once I get a trademark, my brand is safe.
3. Having a patent gives me the right to produce something.
4. If I have a patent or trademark in the United States, I don’t need to worry about the rest of the world.

The first 2 points

It is these first two points I want to touch on quickly, since the last two aren’t particularly relevant for the church.

If your organization does any sort of mass mailing it is smart to at least get a trademark of your logo. This can be as cheap as a couple hundred dollars, but it will allow you recourse if someone modifies your mark to defame you. Having trade marks can help give you the necessary leverage to protect your brand and identity.

This protection is all the more important for the church since culture so closely identifies our ‘brand’ (for lack of a better word) with that of Christ.

Read the full New York Times article here.

Back in February we wrote about the failure Pepsi company ran into while re-branding their orange juice line, Tropicana. Today there was an unveiling of an updated redesign that is much more faithful to the original design that consumers rebelled so strongly to have back for their Trop50 product.

One of the interesting points that wasn’t mentioned in our previous post was the effect that the current economic situation might have had on this re-branding effort. It was referenced to during a CNN interview back in February and felt its premise relevant to share here.

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We are in the process of polishing everything up to high gloss so we can put our best foot forward this next week at the MORE conference. While it isn’t the largest conference or even one all that focused on what we are doing it will be a great opportunity for us to get our feet in the water, and for the first time announce publicly that we’re open for business.

It is really exciting for us. We are still working on getting our toll-free number set up (and will post reviews of our service provider in time), getting the 10′x8′ backdrop in, and setting up our demo computers this coming Monday with one of our freelance designers (Ben Moren).

More photos to come, if you aren’t already make sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Communicating the meaning and value of an idea (and the Gospel) has been a goal for as long as civilization has existed. This video takes a look at some of the physiological factors that cause our brains to create meaning. Understanding this can help us create more impacting messages and better forms of communication.

Watch the 6 minute video for all the details

Keys to help the brain understand meaning are:

1. Use Images to Clarify Ideas
2. Interact with images to create engagement
3. Augment Memory with Persistent & Evolving Views

If you have been reading here for a while you’ll know that I love the TED conference (Technology Education and Design). I love even more that I don’t have to shell out thousands of dollars to attend plus the cost of room+board and can instead watch video of the talks online or through iTunes.

One of the hardest parts of communication revolves around things that are so much bigger than we are. How do you communicate realities that are out of our grasp. This often has to do with large numbers (number of stars/people/bottles used etc), or with abstract concepts.

This video will inspire you as it does a brilliant job conveying a number of statistics in a visually complimentary way to the imagery already exists in the voice over/script. You’d be missing out not to watch it.

Little of us know the extent to which the work of men like Saul Bass (a personal hero of mine) have had on the visual language the world around us speaks. Saul was the first to use moving title sequences in film. Today these sequences have come light years from the early roots.

Title sequences can be great for video announcements or promotions, and for creating clean, simple, and easy to understand flash animations for a church website.

The top five title sequences of the year according to the NY Times are: (more…)

Hope - Obama by Steve Rhodes

Just about two weeks ago we wrote about the legal case around the image the iconic Obama hope poster was created from. It is an issue of what constitutes fair use, and what is copyright infringement.

This issue alone could cost a church millions of dollars if ignored. Thankfully fellow bloggers over at Church Marketing Sucks came out with a three part series on fair use, from a Copyright Lawyer Richard Byrd.

Check out each of the three parts:

• Part 1 – Defining Fair Use
• Part 2 – Understanding Intent
• Part 3 – Use of the material