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“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%)

For many people the idea of social media seems to be a fad or something that is inconsequential in today’s society. For much of the last decade it was seen as the place for teens and unproductive young adults. Today it has become a force to recon with. This video pulls together some amazing statistics on just how social media is transforming our culture and our world.

This reality is on of the driving forces behind many NGO projects like the One Laptop Per Child program designed to decrease the digital divide between the haves and the have not’s. It is this same reality that makes the online presence of your church so important.

So, what is your church doing to be a part of the Social Media Revolution?

Let us know in the comments below.

Video by Socialnomics – Sources

Kuroshio Sea – 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world

Click here to view the embedded video.

Niagara Falls in Motion

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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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Recently I came across the twitter feed of Erwin McManus, pastor of Mosaic Church in LA. He was lucky enough to attend the annual TED conference (Technology, Education, and Design) which I follow closely through their videos (Highly Recommended). TED is a conference of the best and brightest sharing the latest and greatest from their fields. This leads to many inspiring and challenging talks.

Erwin captures that excitement in the first of these two tweets. Which were given in succession to one another.

Sitting at TED So inspiring. So I thought I would invite you into my TED experience. Today has wonderfully reaffirmed my passion to awaken humanity. February 5

Then the following day this he posted this.

Phrase “evangelical pessimism” stood out at TED. Everyone understood what speaker meant. This is why we need to change our narrative… February 6

I’m not making any comment about Erwin, simply reaffirming his statement about ‘Evangelical Pessimism’. In an earlier post we touched on this subject. Again I want to ask what brings about this pessimism that is understood beyond the walls of the church, and maybe not recognized within its own walls (or even worse, promoted from within the walls).

Why does this observation matter?

It matters because if we hope to influence the culture around us, and be a tool for God to use to draw people into the church we need to understand those who live around us. So it does go beyond just understanding that  evangelical pessimism exists (and likely extends to christian groups beyond just evangelicalism since many Americans couldn’t tell you the difference).

Then, how do we go about addressing the idea of this pessimism. Should it exist? Erwin is quite explicit that we need to change our message. So if the message needs adjustment, what needs adjusting and into what? I’ll share my thoughts in the weeks to come.

Image: A view from above by whiteafrican

I have been spending far to many nights lately working that I missed Louis CK (personal – wiki) on Conan O’Brien last week. I want to hear your thoughts.

Louis hit right on the head the entitlement mentality of the majority of Americans under the age of 30. Not only have we never faced any major struggles (as a society), our parents grew up in a similar circumstance except that they had their parents harping on them about the war (WWII). Yes Vietnam was a tragedy for our nation, but it is drastically different than Iraq/Afghanistan in terms of social/cultural impact.

Not only are some of his lines great (“You’re sitting in a chair, in the SKY!”) and potential illustration material, he has address what I believe to be one of the underlying things the current recession has touched on. That we believe we should never have to cut back, or to choose between several ‘good’ things, and that paired with a lack of appreciation spells a recipe for hard times ahead.

This video has been making its rounds on the web, and I’m interested to hear what you feel Louis is touching on during his interview.

(hat nod - swissmiss & DEtF )

We wrote about the re-design failure of Tropicana last week and this week the older style packaging should be showing back up on the store shelves. This video is from CNN showing a discussion over the new brand image. There is a fruitful interview with Linda Kaplan Thaler of the Kaplan Thaler Group Ltd.

While your church doesn’t have the market penetration and exposure that a brand like Tropicana does (or the $35 Million to dump into a re branding strategy) it does raise one last question I believe could prove beneficial for the church.

At what point does the church (any church) change their approach of ministry or marketing due to the response of those around them? Would it take five complaints? fifty? hundreds?

(hat nod Visual Culture)

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:

1. “WALL-E,” Susan Bradley and Jim Capobianco/Pixar. These poignant end titles, which show humans and robots flourishing on a revived Earth, offer a quick history of art, from cave paintings to van Gogh. They then proceed to retell the entire movie, this time in the pixelated style of old video games.
2. “Tropic Thunder,” Kyle Cooper/Prologue. These titles feature Tom Cruise’s best performance in years as he dances to “Get Back” by Ludacris. They’re intercut with graphic freeze-frames of the rest of the cast.
3. “Slumdog Millionaire,” Matt Curtis. Another dance sequence, this one in grand Bollywood style. After a film full of difficult and sad struggles, this joyous, cathartic sequence, set to “Jai Ho” by A. R. Rahman, gives us hope that the main characters will actually live happily ever after.
4. “Iron Man,” Danny Yount/Prologue. Amazing in a comic-book way, these take us inside the blueprints for Tony Stark’s armor. The soundtrack, appropriately, unavoidably, is “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath.
5. “Mamma Mia!,” Matt Curtis. The end titles toss off the pretense of winding a story around the songs and give us a straight-up, super-’70s tribute, complete with glitzy rainbow prism effects and Meryl Streep singing her heart out.

(via NY Times and Visual Culture)

With the current financial crisis on the news and minds of everyone day in and day out. This ten minute video does a very good job at explaining the macro-economic cause/effect of the crisis and how we got to where we are today, without all the technical jargon.

If you are a minister and don’t understand the crisis. This is worth your time. The people you minister too will be thankful you took time to understand how things got where they are.

Note: While this makes brief mention of the dot com bust and September 11th, the deferment of those slow-downs can’t be over estimated. Be careful not to extend blame to any single administration (bush, clinton, etc) or government policy as this can easily be tracked back decades to the root cause (if there even is one aside from greed). Issues of regulation, oversight and so on are constantly/hotly debated in congress.