Recently, our friend Mark Peterson over at the Bridgeway Foundation, highlighted the work and blog of Jason Dick. His blog can be found at http://www.asmallchange.net/. I’ve been reading it for a number of weeks but I wanted to share it with you all as well so you can tune in to hear the great insights that Jason is sharing.
Every once in awhile we have a situation where, because of unforeseen circumstances, we have to reboot a server or install a critical patch; or something merely goes wrong and we have to reboot a web service. Most of the time, we are able to defer these situations to the wee hours of the night when most people won’t even know they took place. If we need to install updates that will result in more than 5-10 minutes of downtime, we let our clients know so that they can be prepared for it. It’s standard hosting practice.
That said, like many other hosting providers, we strive for 99.9% uptime; the actual number that we hit is actually higher.
When we tell our clients that we strive for 99.9% uptime, they are astonished. “Wow, that is amazing”, they say. However, we still have the odd client that lays into us if we go down for 5 minutes due to unforeseen circumstances.
So, in order to clarify, here’s what 99.9% uptime looks like if you do the math:
If we are to hit 99.9% uptime that would mean (based on a 30 day month) that we need to be up for 43,157 minutes out of 43,200 minutes per month, leaving us 43 minutes per month of potential downtime. No hosting company wants 43 minutes per month of downtime; believe it or not, we’ve had months with 0 minutes of downtime. But downtime does happen.
Any company that tells you that they are up 100% of the time is lying to you. Even Amazon.com, with their massive cloud computing structure, goes down.
“Amazon's data storage service was down for several hours on Friday morning, leaving businesses that rely on the service offline.” [PC World News, February 2008]
At the end of the day, hosting companies strive for perfection. However, computers don’t always act the way that we’d like them to, regardless of how many redundancy practices we put into place. I’d like to think that one day there will be a hosting practice that will be perfect – no downtime – but until software and computers stop being built by humans, it probably isn’t going to happen any time soon.
You might remember that recently, we took part in Blog Action Day - Oct 15 to be specific. Well, the results are in and the numbers are impressive. Click here to see the results of this year's campaign and to sign up to be notified for next year's campaign.
Check this video out. It’s a hilarious parody of the challenges facing the U.S. government as they attempt to communicate to the elderly about the why and how of the switchover to digital signals in the States.
I’d like to shake the hand of the lady in this video – she did a great job and no doubt, she has an outstanding sense of humour. Kudos!
This post is to remind AdvancedMinistry users of (what I think is) a great resource that is included with the service.
Users can download PowerPoint backgrounds for their Sunday services. Most churches have moved to a digital overhead projector, and this is a great resource to help add a creative touch to your sermon slides.
Secondly, the “eventually extinct” church bulletin is still being widely used by churches across North America. If you are one of those churches, please view the list of bulletin shells that are available for you to download and use for your Sunday services.
Both of these items can be found by logging into your AdvancedMinistry admin panel, then clicking on “Download Materials” on the right hand side. You will then find the PowerPoint slides and the bulletin shells.
The more time I spend working with and looking at design, the more amazed I become with the amount of visual communication there is in our world. There is virtually a blizzard of advertising and communication happening 24 hours a day, every day, all year, all around the world. So allow me to put on my hat and gloves and try to dig my way through the touchy subject of plagiarism.
I’m sure you’ve heard the term no two snowflakes are identical. While that statement is true, it could also be said no two snowflakes a completely unique. Every snowflake after all is a snowflake. All are principally made of the same materials and are created in primarily the same way. A similar principle holds true in the world of visual communications.
Anything visual is essentially made up of photography or illustrations, colour and type. This is true for websites, brochures, logos, billboards, and packaging, nearly anything visual. Go ahead and try to design something visual and not use anything from the aforementioned list. You’ll find it’s quite impossible. You’re probably thinking by now “Get to the point professor!” Ok, fine, I will. The point is this; design is a finite thing. There are only so many fonts, colours, shapes and pictures in the world and only so many unique combinations to go around. At some point one design is going to bear resemblance to another.
This isn’t a bad thing; it’s just the reality of our industry. Now I want to address the bigger picture here. When two designs bear some resemblance it does not mean plagiarism has occurred. Sometimes similarities are coincidence. Sometimes they are the result of something stored in our subconscious and drawn on later. Sometimes they are purposeful, because it’s good communication. The point is all designs have to coincide in a gigantic and competitive world. Let me be clear, I in no way condone the stealing of someone else’s work. I am solely talking about the instances when two “original works” cross paths and have similarities.
I will conclude with one specific example, our friend, the speech bubble. Where would mobile phones and instant messaging services be without it? As I was writing this, I found this post on another blog with many good examples of how this visual has been used over and over again. Many of them are distinguishable from each other, but make no mistake, it’s the same idea. The objective at the end of the day is to find ways to allow your communication pieces to coincide and stand apart from others it may come into contact with. It’s a tall order, but the best agencies and designers find ways to do it.
Given that the trees have turned colour around here (yes, for all you Americans, we spell colour with a "u" here in Canada); we thought that it would be nice to share a fall-themed desktop background.
Click here or on the thumbnail (on the right) to download the desktop background called “A New Season”.
As a designer, from time-to-time people will send me things regarding the integration of art and faith. Someone sent me a blog post this morning and it really resonated with me so I thought it would be great to share with you all...
Once a year, bloggers from across the world are invited to join in Blog Action Day. Each year there is a specific issue in focus. Last year, the focus was on the Environment and this year it is on Poverty. We at Electricurrent/AdvancedMinistry have registered this year to be a blog that carries a message highlighting the needs of the poverty-stricken in our world. Here are some of the facts from the globalissues.org website:
Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day.
There are 1 billion impoverished people in the world (every second child).
At least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day
Around 27-28 percent of all children in developing countries are estimated to be underweight or stunted. The two regions that account for the bulk of the deficit are South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.
Less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen.
51 percent of the world’s 100 hundred wealthiest bodies are corporations.
Donate to a worthy cause. Commit to sponsor a child. Lobby your government. If you have a blog, register it on the Blog Action Day site and post about this issue. Or just email/tell your friends and contacts.
I just did a quick poll of the team here to generate a list of organizations that we have either worked with or are working with or that someone here donates to or sponsors through personally. They're organizations that are making a real difference in people’s lives:
It takes such a small amount of our time and resources to make a massive impact on the life of a person in poverty. Help us with the 'action' part of Blog Action Day.
“The meaning of a word is the sum of the contexts in which it occurs. When we hear a word, we hear with it an echo of all the situations in which we have heard it before.”
One of the great things about working here is that we have the opportunity to work with so many organizations that are doing really great work and have some really important things to contribute. One such contribution came across our desks last week and we wanted to share it with you all. Thanks to World Relief Canada for the boldness to take a stand like this and for the great work that they do on a day-to-day basis.
Today is Thanksgiving Day here in Canada and although we’re oft referred to as the Great White North, today is a balmy 26 C (79 F) and the fall colors are out in full effect.
But regardless of whether you’re a lucky Canuck with the day off, or an American having to wait a few weeks to cook a bird and toss the old pigskin, I’d encourage you to take a few minutes today to reflect all the reasons we have to be thankful.
On behalf of the whole team here, Happy Thanksgiving!
Craig and I have been joking lately around the office about how people in general, ourselves very much included, like to throw out random percentages to back their arguments. I think the idea is to make ourselves sound more authoritative on the point. But really, the chance that we’re anywhere close to accurate with our random percentages is about 0-10%. What?
Check out what Ben Silverman thinks about percentages – especially those that top the 100 mark.
In yesterday’s post, I introduced the challenge of design subjectivity and spoke to the need for a clear decision-making structure as the first element of giving your organization the best chance at success in a design project, especially as it pertains to the subjectivity of design. Today, I’ll speak to the other element, which has to do with creating a standard by which all design can be evaluated.
Most organizations understand the value of having a mission and vision statement. We value them because we understand that in the absence of those directive statements, the organization can quickly get off-point and get involved in things that are not only counter-productive, but even counter to the organization itself.
Design projects are no different. They need to have directives surrounding them in order to ensure that they meet the goals of the organization as a whole, and not the whims of a spur of the moment decision, subjectivity and preference. There are two levels to the directives that guide a project.
The first directive is the brand of the organization. Whether you’re part of a Fortune 100 Company, a Not-For-Profit or a Church, you have a brand. Sitting down to understand and document your brand and your brand ambitions are critically important elements of successful management. Those documents are tightly tied to how you see yourself as documented in your mission and vision statements, but they also take into consideration how you are viewed by your audience which can be an entirely different thing.
Understanding your brand and applying that understanding to all your design projects will help to ensure that you don’t send confusing messages about who you are and what you aim to do and that filters down to decisions about colors, layout and font of design projects.
The other key tool is to form documentation around each individual project that outlines the reasons for the project, any barriers to success and establishes the goals of the project (including how they will be measured).
The process of developing that document needs to be a collaborative process and all vested parties, or at the very least, the big decision makers that have the power to veto your decisions, need to buy into the directives within and sign-off on it.
Once you’ve developed that document, you now have a non-biased set of statements which can act to guide the process and the design on the basis of objective business/organizational goals for the project and the brand in general.
Which colors do the people in your organization prefer: blue, green or yellow? Thankfully, it doesn’t matter.
Graphic design is an art and like any art, there is a subjective element to it - I like blue while you might like yellow or green.
The challenge that this presents to many organizations is that decision-making is almost always done by a group of individuals and the bigger the group, the more diverse the subjective preferences.
This reality almost always translates into a design that tries to appeal to all groups at the expense of the goals of the piece. At its worst, this problem can bring the process to its knees as the design attempts to appeal to everyone while actually appealing to no one.
So, how do you decide on which color, layout or font to use for your brochure, website or billboard? The answer is two-fold. We’ll deal with the first in this post and the other tomorrow.
The first step in dealing with subjectivity in decision-making is to establish an effective hierarchy of decision-making. I feel for the individual that has to corral the opinions of many people and break it down into meaningful feedback for a designer or design firm.
Most often however, this is exactly the case and we also find that the individual running the project has not truly been given the ability to make a decision. That’s the difference between an effective and a non-effective hierarchy of decision-making.
If the person running the project doesn’t have both a clear structure to receive feedback and the actual ability to make a final decision with the full confidence of the organization, the chance that the project will fail in its goals is significantly higher.
Pick a person to lead the project and then endow that individual with the power to actually run the project – it’s the groundwork of success.
Tomorrow we’ll deal with giving that person the tools to ensure the design meets the goals.
When it comes to the custom side of our business (Electricurrent), we totally understand that creativity is a very personal thing and that most clients want varying degrees of input. That being said, we also understand that we’ve been hired to do a job (provide a service) that the client cannot do themselves for whatever reason. As we seek to serve and help all of our clients, we are sometimes caught between knowing what is the best branding and communications solution, and the personal opinion of an individual or committee.
Collaboration within a strong relationship seems to be the best solution – but not perfect. There are still times when we must bow to the clients “not so perfect” direction. Is that just the way it is, or are we being wimps? I’m interested in hearing what you think (both sides of the equation).
About a year ago, a group of us drove to Toronto to speak at a workshop for the Canadian Council of Christian Charities. Before we went to the hotel to check in, we decided to do a little team building on the golf course. :) Upon completing our game, we walked back to the car to realize that a window had been smashed and all of our belongings were stolen. I’m not just talking about clothes (although they did take my favorite dress shirt); I’m talking laptops, camera equipment, etc.
Now you may say to me, “What the heck were you doing leaving all of that stuff in a car in Toronto?” Well, to be completely honest, I didn’t think that someone would have the audacity to break into my car (which had an alarm system) in broad daylight and steal everything from it. (They did leave my GPS and iPod, which was very nice of them.)
The fact of the matter is – laptops get stolen every day. Consider these stats:
12,000 laptops are lost in U.S. airports each week, and two-thirds are never returned. (Dell & Ponemon Institute, Airport Insecurity: the case of lost laptops, June 30, 2008)
81% of companies reported the loss of one or more laptops containing sensitive information during the past 12 months. (Ponemon Institute, 2006)
Laptop theft accounted for 50% of reported security attacks. (CSI, The 12th Annual Computer Crime and Security Survey, 2007)
In the case of our unfortunate mishap, we had thankfully installed CompuTrace (by Absolute Software) on all of our machines. CompuTrace uses a very sophisticated tracking program that sends us (and the police) the location of a stolen laptop the very second that it accesses the Internet. The thief doesn’t even need to try and connect to the Internet; if CompuTrace detects an open wireless connection, it sends us the location. Even if the perpetrator wipes the hard drive, CompuTrace secretly installs itself again. It’s like our laptops were saying, “I’m right here… save me!” We literally watched a couple of our laptops travel the country… it was hilarious (yet, not funny at all). :)
I would recommend CompuTrace to any organization looking to protect their computers. I would also recommend encrypting your data (with a program like Bcrypt) so that even if you don’t get your computers back, there is a very good chance that no data will be compromised.
And I hope it goes without saying but I’ll say it anyways – back up your data! There’s nothing worse than losing a week/year/lifetime of work. There are plenty of tools out there that can assist you with simple backups. One that I recommend is GoodSync.
At the end of the day, if you are serious about protecting your organization’s assets and sensitive information, then you need to get serious about computer tracking, encryption and data backup. At some point, there is a VERY good chance that you will find yourself without a computer. Be prepared now so that you’re not left scrambling (or out of a job) later.
There are so many things to highlight about this giveaway, but since its Casual Friday, I’m not going to go there. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t spend a few minutes to share some of your comments on the uniqueness of what Squidoo has done here and the value inherent in it.
Oh, and while you’re at it, why not give some well-meaning organization some free money? It’s Casual Friday after all...
The other night, on my way home from work, I stopped in at the gas station that I frequent near my house. It was a particularly busy night at the pumps but I managed to find a free pump and pull right in.
My typical modus operandi at the gas station is to tank up on Regular grade gas, leaving the 89 and 91 octane options for the high-rollers.
As I pulled up, I noticed that a makeshift notice had been taped onto the pump letting us car-driving consumer types know that they were out of Regular grade gas and that the Premium was being sold for what was at that point in time the price of Regular grade. The weird thing is that there was still Mid-Grade gas left in the tanks.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not too worried about the coffers of companies that make up the oil & gas industry and I’m sure that I’ve paid for this little “break” many times over now in my 15-year driving history, but I still have to say that I was still impressed by the decision to not just do what they should do (give the next grade up for the same price). Instead, they went above-and-beyond and gave me the top of the line.
There’s a lesson in that experience and I’m thankful for it – if it’s possible to go above-and-beyond in your service of a customer, and it often is, you might just turn that customer into an advocate that writes a blog post about their experience.
Andrew’s post from yesterday reminds me of my struggle with the fact that, when I donate once (or at regular intervals) to a non-profit, I get bombarded with direct mail appeals for a variety of other programs and/or donation vehicles.
There doesn’t appear to be any cost-benefit analysis on the vast amounts of direct mail to existing donors to determine whether the revenue earned was worth the costs incurred for design, printing, postage, and labor (there might be, but I don’t see it). Not to mention the environmental impact of using all of that paper, transportation, and the brand implications of constantly being in the donor’s face for money.
As a marketer, I know that direct mail averages about a 1% response rate. As a donor, all I see is a campaign that seems to be a giant waste of money, time, resources and the environment. I know you exist, I know you are there. I already believe in what you’re doing. That’s why I gave to you in the first place.
I would love to see a non-profit that discloses such things as a rainy-day fund, process improvements, waste reduction programs, or a contingency plan which shows that it is flexible enough to scale back should any financial crises arise. One that shows me, the donor, that the dollars I am giving are going farther than they previously did.
Xpiritmental is a resource. It's a place to learn and to share thoughts on marketing, ministry, design, service, the Web, culture and more. We'll start the conversation, but we're looking forward to hearing what you've got to say.
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Every once in awhile we have a situation where, because of unforeseen circumstances, we have to reboot a server or install a critical patch; or something merely goes wrong and we have to reboot a web service. Most of the time, we are able to defer these situations to the wee hours of the night when most people won’t even know they took place. If we need to install updates that will result in more than 5-10 minutes of downtime, we let our clients know so that they can be prepared for it. It’s standard hosting practice.
The more time I spend working with and looking at design, the more amazed I become with the amount of visual communication there is in our world. There is virtually a blizzard of advertising and communication happening 24 hours a day, every day, all year, all around the world. So allow me to put on my hat and gloves and try to dig my way through the touchy subject of plagiarism.
Today is Thanksgiving Day here in Canada and although we’re oft referred to as the Great White North, today is a balmy 26 C (79 F) and the fall colors are out in full effect.
Craig
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