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)

I’m not saying that we should abandon our current styles and designs to adhere to this list, but I always find it inspiring to see examples of other good work.

Smashing Magazine did a top ten list that is worth a look. Its full of great examples and descriptions.

1. Embossing
2. Rich user interfaces
3. PNG transparency
4. Big typography
5. Font replacement (sIFR, etc.)
6. Modal boxes
7. Media blocks
8. The magazine look
9. Carousels (slideshows)
10. Introduction blocks

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.

30 Essential PDF Documents ever designer should download

You can never have enough references, resources, and samples to look to for help or inspiration.

This raises the question, How do we, as the church, stay relevant in the info age?

I understand some people have strong theological opposition to the Internet and the progression of technology. If that’s you, the rest of this post will just upset you. If not, keep reading.

First we have to embrace technology, and quickly. The church has gotten into the habit of letting technological things blow past us until its obvious we need to get on board with them.

So what does this embracing look like?

• Dynamic Organization websites (with databases and interactivity)
• Fully utilization of digital delivery whenever possible (Content Re-purposing!)
• Creating digital, gospel based, content people under 30 want to experience
• Digital Transparency of leadership (through personal websites/blogs/etc.)

The list could keep going but for the sake of brevity these are the big three ways the Church is extremely lacking overall in the info age.

Lets re-cap on `the Church` for a second. The Church is the largest organization in the world (though with many fractions within its structure). The Christian faith is the most widely accepted faith in the world. OK, got that?

Now why does the Church with these incredible numbers have such a pathetic presence in the Information

Age? Priorities…

Shifting our priorities

As Christians, and even more-so as Church leaders, we have an obligation to steward our resources. So lets be smart about how we use our money and people.

The goal set for for us at the end of the gospels is to proclaim the good news to everyone. With technology this can be easier than ever with the Internet. The world is funding programs like OLPC which has delivered 725,000 laptops to children the world over (list in next paragraph). Intel also is in the market with their classmate PC and just sold 500,000 laptops to Portugal yesterday.

If we want to reach out to countries like Uruguay, Peru,  Haiti, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Mexico what better way then to capture the imagination and hearts of the youth these Million+ laptops will reach. They will all have Internet access, and the laptops hope to close the technological divide.

To do this we have to invest in technologies and content (Content is King!) to reach the world.

Why can’t we do virtual discipleship with children in countries and cities we can seldom reach with physical people?

To do this

We have to do it well, this means investing some serious money, efforts in doing this. I believe that there needs to be another movement like the Wesleyan bible translators for the Information age. Their goal will be to make the Gospel accessible and appealing to Internet viewers.

Ironic thing here is that to pull this off, we’ll need those ‘weird’ creative people the Church has been so good at pushing away.

What role do you think the internet should play with the Church? Or Church with the internet?

Photo: Can’t Touch this by Foxtongue