Email newsletters confuse me. More specifically, the blind allegiance that many organizations show towards email newsletters as a primary means of communication is confounding.
Don't get me wrong, email newsletters can be an effective tool, but they have their place (strengths and weaknesses) and it's important to recognize that.
Today I read this article. It's truly worth your time to give it a read as it is six quick paragraphs that will have an important impact on your thinking around electronic marketing and communications.
The one quote in that article that really caught my attention was: “Email...is based on hope. Hope that the message gets through, hope that the recipient is there, hope that they open it and hope that they return the message.”
I love that quote. Email is a challenging medium. One with few guarantees, lots of competing 'noise' and little control over. So why would you opt to put all your eggs in that basket when other means are available that provide more immediate and more measurable feedback?
The last two lines in this article say it best:
“These findings also have significant implications for those businesses that rely on email marketing for some or all of their business. These companies should be evaluating to see if social media platforms are an effective method for distributing their message.”
I am thrilled to have received so much feedback from the readers last week for two reasons. It is nice to know that so many people were reading the MMM posts and enjoying them. At one point I was wondering if it was at all useful or falling to the wayside. Secondly, it is nice to know that so much of the Xpiritmental community is invested into the blog leveraging it as a valuable resource. So based on the comments I received last week court is now in recess. That's right, recess, not adjourned.
For the time being I am going to take a break from MMM and move onto more of a "How-To" style of post. I think MMM will resume some day and maybe I will break from the "How-To's" from time-to-time, but for now the majority have spoken and said that the “How-To's” would be very helpful.
Thank you to those that posted comments. This was a decision I wanted to make based on the readers needs. Throughout this new series I will take requests for posts if you want to know how something is done from a design standpoint. Next Monday tune in for AM Design 101.
As usual, all AM 3.0 templates are fully customizable including the ability to change the number of columns, colors, fonts, etc. If you would like to use a simplified version of your home page, edit your template, click the Layout Tab and choose "Hide All Columns (Simplified Home Page)". Resource files for the new template can be found in the "Download Materials" menu under "Template Resource Files".
To change your template at any time, login to your AdvancedMinistry account and select "Choose My Template".
This week I am looking for some reader feedback. I would like to know if any of you out there have been finding the Monday Morning Misdemeanors useful or interesting. I have been writing these for over four months now and want to know if it is time to bang the gavel and move on.
So far I have written about a number of issues ranging across almost all facets of design. I am by no means out of ideas, but this blog is for you, the readers.
I have been thinking if MMM has run its course for the time being, I could change gears and start writing some "how to's" for custom template design in the AdvancedMinistry ("AM") 3.0 backend. There are a lot of creative ideas that can be leveraged to make interesting and different template designs that will make your site standout.
Oftentimes, when we design a template we are sort of restricted in what we can do because our sites need to work for anyone that might want to use it. These ideas don't just go away and I have been thinking that I could use Xpiritmental as a means of getting the word out. Our AM product is really flexible and when you put your mind to it there is quite a lot you can do with it from a design perspective.
So the question for the week is; does MMM keep going or do I step out of the court room and into the class room and start teaching design for the AM product? Let me know. I want your say. After all, I am writing for you.
For those of you who use our Twitter integration component on AdvancedMinistry or Electricurrent, you may have noticed a message that comes up every once in awhile that says "Twitter service unavailable" The reason for this is because the Twitter services are overloaded. They are working to fix the problem as fast as possible. Here's what Mashable.com (a social media news site) has to say:
"Twitter's been having a rough month keeping the service stable, and the micro-blogging service is willing to admit it.
For the last few weeks, Twitter has been experiencing constant errors, fail whales and downtime, culminating in yesterday's extended downtime and today's high error rate.
In a short blog post, Twitter's Sean Garrett didn't mince words: 'From a site stability and service outage perspective, it's been Twitter's worst month since last October.'"
To read the full article on Mashable.com, click here. We will continue to monitor the situation closely.
This week I am going to revolutionize the way you look at making selections in Adobe Photoshop. For a long time early on in my career the only way I ever selected objects in Photoshop ("PS") was by using the pen tool and close cropping the subject matter that I wanted to isolate. That was partly due to the options that PS offered way back when, but it was also due to the fact that I didn't try to learn anything new. As I grew as a designer I picked up on some things that made my life a lot easier. Today I am going to pass them onto you.
Pen Tool/Paths - The paths panel is usually found as a tab on the layers palette. If its not there you can go under the window menu and click "Paths" to open the menu. You will then have to use the menu button in the top-right corner of the path palette to make a new path. Once this is done you can take the pen tool and begin tracing what you want to isolate from your image.
Once your path is complete you go back to the same menu that you used to create your path and select "Make Selection". Then you can do whatever you need from there with the selected area.
Lasso - This tool is found on the main tool bar. With the lasso there are three versions available that all have their own benefit. There is the regular lasso tool that is a free-flowing selection tool. There is the polygon lasso tool which is a point and click tool meaning you can click and move to another point then click again to set your next point. Lastly there is the magnet lasso tool which reads the pixels of an image and sets a path along a line of pixels that have similar color values.
This tool works a lot like the pen tool but it isn't saving your progress as you go. What is painful about the lasso tool is that if you make a mistake it is not easy to go back and make changes. A lot of the time you are stuck with staring over. I recommend this tool for making small or quick and uncomplicated selections.
Wand - The wand is found on the main tool bar in Photoshop and is a quick and handy way of selecting a chunk of pixels with similar colours. The magic wand offers the ability to set the tolerance of how sensitive or picky it will be while making selections. In a bar under the menu across the top of the screen there is a box which you can enter a number to set the tolerance. You enter a value between 0 and 255. In this range 0 = very picky and 255 = select everything.
Color Range - For me color range is my favorite and most preferred method for selections. It operates with the same principles of the wand but is more sophisticated. This tool is located under the "Select" option on the main menu bar.
What is great about this tool is that it offers a preview of what your results are going to be before you commit to a selection. You can also refine your selection on the fly by holding shift on Mac or PC, then clicking on the image with the eye dropper to add to the selection, or by pressing the option key on Mac or alt on a PC then clicking on the image with the eye dropper to subtract from a selection. When you are finished you click "OK" on the color range box and your selection is made.
Background Eraser - This is a quick and handy tool to use if you have an object that needs to be selected off of a background that is mainly made up of a solid color. It can be found under the eraser tool on the main tool bar. You simply set your brush size and start erasing the unwanted portion of your image. If the tolerance is set right, you should get a result of the background being erased and the desired pixels remaining unaffected.
Extraction - This is a great tool and rather sophisticated and would require me to write a whole lot more than I believe you are willing to read. So if you want to know more about this click here. This method is great to use for subject matter that have intricate parts, particularly hair. The extract tool is a plugin that needs to be downloaded from Adobe. If you are on a PC click here and if you are on a Mac click here.
While all of these methods are great, they take practice and experience to gain a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. Once these are learned you can make better judgements of when and where to use them and how they can work together to make good selections. One of the biggest realizations I ever made with selections is that sometimes its easier to select the opposite of what your actually wanting to select. Meaning if you are trying to select a tree on a sky background instead of painstakingly selecting the tree it is easier using the above tools to select the sky. Then delete the sky and you are left with the tree you wanted. All these tools will help you avoid having ragged cutout shapes or being left with ghosting around objects. A lot of these will also save you loads of time.
As always if you have any questions, post a comment.
I was reading through Marketing Magazine and came across an article entitled: "Peer Trust Plunges". The subtitle read: "Consumers trust friends less, CEO's more, according to latest Edelman study."
The article goes on to outline that: "the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company dropped by almost half, from 45% to 25%, since 2008..."
This is a bit of validation for me because although I'm a fan of social media and hold high the banner of authenticity and accessibility, I've always struggled with passionate people who say that social networking and social media are in fact, the future of all organizations and those that don't get on board, will fail.
I think that's an extreme position and it's a wonderful play on the human tendency to allow the pendulum to swing too far one way or the other. Lots of people have made loads of cash preaching the death of old marketing and the extreme perspective that social media is THE future. I'm not convinced it is. It's definitely a part of our future, arguably a big part, and it will evolve as this study shows it already has, but it's not the silver bullet for marketing.
So for me, this is a lesson in being careful to not allow the pendulum to swing too far to the left or the right. At times, there's definitely opportunities to foray into the extreme edges of our reach and explore what's out there, but let's be passionate about maintaining an unbiased and evaluative perspective, instead of just doing what the next guy is or what the big marketing guru is saying to do.
To my mind, that's more of a silver bullet than social media will ever be.
The title of this blog post is actually a quote from a presentation by Steve Uzzell.
Steve is a professional photographer and has shot for many big name corporations, including having done editorial for National Geographic, Time and Newsweek...so here's a guy that knows what he's doing with a camera and specializes in capturing moments of magic in an image.
Have you ever looked through a National Geographic and thought to yourself: How are these photographers always in the right place at the right time to get shots like this?
Let me tell you that it isn't luck...it's preparation. Or better yet, let Steve himself be the example.
Take Steve's shot above of a Maryland bridge. He scouted this location for a few days searching for the right spot to get a good angle on the bridge. Then he went home and in the subsequent days, called the national weather service and other resources to learn about and determine the exact moment in the coming weeks/months that he would need to be in his location of choice in order to capture the shot he had envisioned...as seen above.
And then the magic happened. In all of his research and planning, Steve could have never planned and known that at that moment, two trucks would lumber across the bridge and find themselves both back-dropped by the burning sunset in the background.
Steve's preparation led to magic.
It strikes me that so many people today tend to believe that magic just 'happens'. You know what I mean...that moment of brilliance where someone comes up with an amazing idea, a worship service goes incredibly well or a video goes viral. And while some of those things do just somehow happen, more often than not, those magic moments we encounter come as a result of a lot of groundwork laid prior to the event.
And since we can't count on the magic to happen, it just makes sense to do the preparation. The happy side-effect is that you'll find yourself encountering the magic more often when you do.
I am going to make this post rather simple because the philosophies of design are hard to express verbally and nearly impossible to do in writing. In my more than ten years of designing I have also found that tastes are many and varied. Some people see what they see as good and others see as bad and no one can convince them otherwise. As stated earlier I have been doing this for a long time so I think that gives me some authority to hand out two cents and tell you they can be taken to the bank. So for your consideration, here is a list of things that should never be done when creating a logo.
Never design your logo in Adobe Photoshop. You will be tempted to add too much detail or special effects that don't belong on a logo.
Never design a logo in Microsoft Word.
Drop shadows, bevels, glows and other special effects should not be used. They make your logo too complicated. This hinders reproduction, reducibility and usability.
Never distort typography. (as per last weeks post)
Don't use more than two different typefaces in a logo.
Avoid swooshes and other design items that are trendy.
Never use a stock logo or clip art.
Never steal.
Never commit to a logo before getting feedback from others.
Take care when making symbols into letters.
Now these are ten rules that you could follow but I feel like there is so much more that could be covered. I could follow these ten rules and still make something that looks terrible. So consider these as a place to start designing a logo. Look around for yourself and get a feel for the differences between good logos and bad logos.
A place that I frequent for inspiration or just to get my head into the right space for logo design is LogoPond. There is nothing on that site in the main showcase that is bad, so feel free to get so more education there.
Lastly, I have shared this before but it is so good I am going to share it again. A famous designer by the name of Paul Rand wrote a good piece on logo design. It changed my mind and philosophy on logo design forever.
Feel free to question me on any of the above rules, I'd love to discuss them more with you. If you have a logo you would like me to comment on, I would be happy to help out.
As usual, all AM 3.0 templates are fully customizable including the ability to change the number of columns, colors, fonts, etc. If you would like to use a simplified version of your home page, edit your template, click the Layout Tab and choose "Hide All Columns (Simplified Home Page)". Resource files for the new template can be found in the "Download Materials" menu under "Template Resource Files".
To change your template at any time, login to your AdvancedMinistry account and select "Choose My Template".
If you're on Facebook, we invite you to become a fan of the new AdvancedMinistry Facebook page. The new page replaces the old (rarely advertised) "AdvancedMinistry 2.0" Facebook site which has now been removed.
By becoming a fan of AdvancedMinistry on Facebook, you'll have access to all of our blog feeds, sample sites, and new feature announcements. Additionally, from time to time AdvancedMinistry will be giving Facebook fans special previews on the latest features coming down the pipe.
To become a fan of the new AdvancedMinistry Facebook page, go here and then click on the Like button.
Monday Morning Misdemeanors is a series of weekly posts written by Graphic Designer, Derek Gyssels. In this series, Derek hones in on a number of common problems that crop up in graphic designs and then gives you the tools to avoid them which will give your designs a professional polish. This week's feature is actually "TAM" because we are posting it on a Tuesday Afternoon (as yesterday this feature got trumped in favor of announcing our corporate 10-year anniversary).
This week's post is going to act as a bridge between last week's and next week's.
On one side of the bridge we have the topic of typography (Do's & Don'ts) and on the other side we have logo design. I consider this post to be a bridge because last week I wrote about bad practices in typography but only brushed on topic of font distorting and next week's post is going to be about bad practices in logo design. Using a distorted font in a logo is about the worst thing a designer can do. It is so bad that you could almost say that any person willing to commit such a heinous act is not a professional designer at all.
Before I can make a solid case for why font distorting is a graphic crime, I need to build a foundation of understanding, so consider the following. Typography is both alphabet and font. Or to say it another way, it is both science and art.
On the science side of things we have 26 letter forms that make up the English alphabet. They are all unique and identifiable from each other but also work together in groups to form words and sentences that translate into communication. Of course this has been a process over the course of history but here we are today with a solid group of letter forms that have been engineered to be easily recognizable and readable, that is to anyone who has grown up learning English as a language.
On the art side of things these 26 letter forms are carefully crafted into fonts to be aesthetically pleasing to the eye and enhance readability. Throughout history, many designers have attempted to design the alphabet into different font styles to convey different feelings and moods with varying degrees of success.
With both of those philosophies combined we can assert that typography is and should be well engineered letter forms that are easily recognizable, both easy to read and aesthetically pleasing to the viewer.
With this understanding when you distort a font for whatever reason you are taking easily recognizable letter forms that are easy to read and pleasing to the eye and making them less recognizable, less easy to read and unpleasing to the eye. This in turn makes a piece of visual design repulsive to the eye and therefore unattractive to the audience you're working very hard to appeal to. Does that sound like something you want to do? I don't think so.
While font distorting is undesirable everywhere, it is especially problematic in logo design. Your logo is the representative of your company. Your logo is often everywhere that you aren't. In many cases your logo leaves the first impression and many impressions after that. There is never a reason to distort a font because distorting a font basically equates to being careless and negligent. There are literally thousands upon thousands of fonts to be chosen from. Many of these fonts are parts of families that offer every possible variation you could want whether bold, thin, condensed, expanded, italics, all caps, the list goes on. Choose one that meets your needs and doesn't need to be altered by either adding an outline to make it bold, or skewing to make it italics or stretching and squishing to fit.
It can be time consuming looking for the right type face and costly to purchase the right font but it is worth it in the end. Do you think Nike spends millions on its identity just because they like to spend the money? No, they recognize the value because people gravitate to well-designed and purposeful communication. Now I am not saying you need to spend millions, but maybe $200-$500 dollars on some good typography is a wise long-term investment. I'll close by showing some examples.
All these examples feature the Helvetica font family. Here we see the difference between a condensed version and one that was squished.
Extended versus stretched.
Bold versus outlined.
Italics versus skewed.
Does this car look as sporty squished?
Is Mona still compelling stretched out?
The last two images are to make the point that we don't really consider distorting other visuals because it makes them look wrong. The same applies to type. So stop distorting fonts. You don't stretch, squish and distort anything else in design. It is an unnecessary, bad and unprofessional practice. There are always other options.
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.
Email newsletters confuse me. More specifically, the blind allegiance that many organizations show towards email newsletters as a primary means of communication is confounding.
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For those of you who use our Twitter integration component on AdvancedMinistry or Electricurrent, you may have noticed a message that comes up every once in awhile that says "Twitter service unavailable" The reason for this is because the Twitter services are overloaded. They are working to fix the problem as fast as possible. Here's what 
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