Maybe it’s just me, but the only way a post ever makes it on this site is if I sit down and write a post the moment I have an idea. Otherwise, I end up with a paragraph or two and it’s left to rot in my drafts forever. Stuff that I’ve had sitting in my drafts folder for up to a year that you may or may not see sometime in the future:

• Bungaku Shoujo
• End of the Golden Witch
• Hidamari Proof Sketch
• The Reappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya
• Heaven’s Feel
• f(Angel Beats)

Oh well.

Let’s talk about Canada. My macroeconomics prof said that the defining trait of Canadians is that they’re boring. This is what separates us from the Americans. This is what kept us relatively safe during the global economic crisis. This is why we’re so nice.

So you may have noticed that there are a bunch of people in Vancouver who’ll be playing in the snow for the next two weeks. We just had a fancy ceremony to open the next two weeks and of course, the knee-jerk reaction is ‘herp derp China was better’. Which, I guess, is true. This ignores another fact that should be blatantly obvious.

Canada is not China.

I mean, it’s pretty clear. One of those countries has 1.2 billion Chinese people in it and the other has 33 million random immigrants. One stems from an ancient civilization going back thousands of years and the other is a relatively young constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. One is a burgeoning superpower and the other is a modest middle power. The opening ceremonies of an Olympics should reflect the culture of the host nation, so why are we expecting Canada’s to look like China’s?

China used their opening ceremonies to go through how awesome their history and culture is and to show to the world that it’s back. Canada is looking to present its culture, but not necessarily grandstand in it. And well, there is the fact that China has a much larger pool of cool things to draw from. This is why China had 2008 drummers in absolutely perfect coordination and Canada had punk tapdancers with shoes on fire.

Then there’s the cynical side of things. China is an authoritarian state and Canada is a parliamentary democracy. China has the authority and the will to trample over peoples’ rights and sink ridiculous amounts of money into showing the world how great they’ve become. Canada is beholden to the public and its actions are under constant scrutiny and there are always people displeased with what’s going on who have the right to make a fuss about it.

The intent of China’s show was much more clear as it was a show of force designed to awe the world. As a result, they did whatever it took, at any cost, to pull it off. And for the most part, they succeeded in making an amazing spectacle. Canada’s show is completely different in intent, which was more of a ‘hey guys, we’ve got some pretty neat stuff to show you’ sort of thing. This worked out because it meant that the scale and cost and execution didn’t need to be as grand. It was interesting and fun and pretty neat and that was all I was really asking for.

Now let’s see some frigging medals, Canada.

After much procrastination, the promised next post in the series about worship slide design is here! The first thing we’re going to look into can be one of the more noticeable things about your slides. While a lot of decisions you’ll have to make are more subtle, such as the relationship between type sizes or where you decide to break of screens of text, colours and backgrounds are things that most people see immediately.

Colour

Colour choices dictate two things: readability and visual appeal. The chief concern should be for readability. That is the purpose for worship slides: to display lyrics for the congregation to read. Anything that diminishes that for any reason is bad. If your slides are hard to read because they suck, then learn and get better so you can offer your best for worship. If your slides are hard to read because you think that they’re prettier the way you have them right now, then you need to reevaluate why you’re doing this and what purpose your work is supposed to serve.

Some basic colour theory is nice to know. I’m not going to go through it here, since Wikipedia and Google can provide pretty much what you need to know. At the very least, you should be able to tell if a colour is too dark or light to be seen against your background. The most basic slide setup you can come up with is white on black.

The other obvious choice is black on white. However, this isn’t such a good setup. The main difference between black on white and white on black is the readability. First, we should remember the setting that we’ve placed ourselves in. We’re displaying lyrics on a giant screen. Generally, each slide should not have an enormous amount of text. Thus, we should have plenty of space to work with and so a light on dark scheme will work better than a dark on light. With the amount of space that isn’t taken up by text, using a light background will create a sort of overwhelming brightness whenever someone tries to read it.

Now that we’ve established a basic starting point, we can take it and make it snazzier. Something I’ve tried and done a few times is add a slight gradient, which adds some depth to the background.

You can also try some other colours in the background.

Or have a shot at having colours and gradients.

Of course, it is possible to make things that don’t look good using this approach.

The key to keeping things looking good is simple and quite noticeable. Try and keep gradients reduced to changing to colours in the same neighbourhood.

Remember that colour is one of the ways that you can set a general mood. Keep this in mind when you’re making slides for a set. Knowing this, you use suitable colours for various themes that the worship leader might be trying to convey through the set. Something that I just thought of that would be cool is if there was a slow, slight change of colour throughout the set, like a gradient, except the colour variation would be through time as opposed to a physical dimension.

Anyhow, never forget to make sure that the contrast remains high. Readability should never be sacrificed. Reading always comes first, as that’s the purpose of the slides. Cool things that add to the mood are secondary. If you are making the slides, you should be able to do both.

So, with a few simple steps, we can ensure that the slides that we make aren’t huge pains to read. We also know how to make things a bit more bright and different and do it, again, without making things impossible to read. So the obvious next step is backgrounds that involve pictures. These open up a series of new challenges that I’ll be talking about in my next post in the series.

So I’ve gotten bored and ended up looking into subscribing to some of these podcast things. It’s been fairly good so far, I’ve subscribed to two. The first is Downloadable Content: The Penny Arcade Podcast. This is done by Gabe and Tycho who are as hilarious in the podcast as they are in the talks that they’ve given or interviews that they’ve done or the news posts. Very quality conversations as they hammer out comics. Sadly, it’s released fairly irregularly.

The other podcast I’ve subscribed to is The Rissington Podcast, done by Jon Hicks of hicksdesign and John Oxton. The two are fairly recognized (on the Internet at least) British web designers who work at a former air base RAF Rissington. The page has a snazzy design and they are also quite entertaining. They also have some spots that they do like a typeface of the week.

And with that, I’ve run out of things to listen to. While I’m on the subject, I may as well ask for more sites to track on my RSS reader. I’m a fairly picky reader; I don’t read a lot of the large blogs like Kotaku or Joystiq. I prefer small blogs, like 4 color rebellion or The Escapist, since they have this charm to them or reputable sites, like Ars Technica, since they’re usually not full of exaggerated opinion as bloggers are want to do. Also, I’m looking for gaming, technology, or design types of sites.

Unlike that stupid “find x, here it is” picture, this math joke is actually hilarious. xkcd is awesome.