So I decided to do a very quick change-up of the site. I haven’t been able to have the time to properly do this ever since I came to Waterloo. I had something a lot more ambitious planned, but I couldn’t do it given what I knew how to do at the moment and the amount of time that I had. Oh well. This will have to do for now. I’m fairly satisfied I got rid of a bunch of colours and made everything more clean, but I really wanted to get my new-ish logo up, which I really, really prefer to the old one.

I guess the old site wasn’t as minimal I’d hoped or as it should have been. I mean, the blog’s title is less blkmage, but the site design didn’t convey that too well. I had too much of everything. I had too much colour, too many things cluttering up the sidebar, too many things in my CSS file. I spent much of my time just getting rid of things. In the end, I ended up with a simple colour scheme: black, white, and hat red.

I particularly like the new logo because the new typeface, FF Kievit, is much friendlier than the Trade Gothic I’d used before. Also, for some reason, I thought that mixing weights and colours in it would be pretty cool, but the more I looked at it, the more awkward it became. The nice thing about Kievit is that it comes with a small caps variant. I love setting things in small caps.

To me, small caps and text figures feel very elegant to me. It could be that I’m being an elitist jerk and the fact that very few fonts come with proper small caps and text figures makes me gravitate towards them. But, really, they look so damn nice. It’s the same way when you look at text set with proper ligatures. It feels correct and not cheap, like most printed material today.

In conclusion, I wish I had all the time in the world and small caps and text figures are cool. Use them more.

I’m not a designer. I know that. During the past two years, I’ve followed the weblogs of some of the top web designers in the world. What started out as wanting to learn this fancy new XHTML stuff turned into web standards advocacy and a look at the world of graphic design. With regards to graphic design, I’ve picked up a few tricks to make my work look less like crap. That is the extent of my graphics design prowess.

I decided it’d be interesting to go through how I come up with stuff. I hope that this’ll help those of you who just play around with Photoshop filters and don’t know anything about design to create something that looks passably decent. This post will go through the birth of the Trail Mix happy face logo.

There were some interesting specifications for the logo. Since the church wanted to make this look nice, I was allowed to use colour in the posters, and thus, the logo as well. However, since the poster would also be used as a flyer for the church, it would also need to look decent in grayscale, photocopied. Finally, the logo was to be used on shirts as well, so the logo had to both scale well and look decent in colour and black and white.

The first thing I do before anything else is choosing a font. Those who know me know about my dealings with type. For a logo that consists of mostly words, choosing a font is important because it sets the character of the text. There are tons of examples of how poor type can ruin anything with a substantial amount of text, from posters and cards to books and academic papers.

Since Trail Mix is a kids’ day camp, the font had to be friendly. The usual choice for something like this would be some kiddy and overly nauseating, awful typeface like Comic Sans. Obviously, I refused to go down this path. Kid’s fonts are not the automatic solution to designing for kids. It might be a bit harder, but it’s not impossible to design something decent for kids using normal typefaces. Even though they may appeal to kids, those kinds of fonts betray a lack of professionalism and good taste that may affect the kids’ parents.

I chose to go with Avenir. Avenir is a humanist sans serif typeface. Obviously, serif faces look way too formal for something for children, although I did use it for a flyer advertising something for children’s ministry helpers, but that was offset by a pile of Lego bricks, and everyone knows that kids love Lego. Also, humanist faces are more natural and less plain and cold than the other types of sans serif faces.

Avenir is used for everything that has to do with Trail Mix (or at least, everything that I had to do with Trail Mix). The rest of the poster is also set in Avenir. And to my great satisfaction, the back of the shirts, denoting STAFF or 1/2 STAFF were set in a heavier Avenir, which remained unstretched, as an inexplicable number of people are want to do.

The next challenge after setting the right type was figuring out how to change the logo from “trail mix” set in Avenir to a logo. Since the logo was to be printed in both colour and black and white, the logo’s shape was much more important. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the i’s are actually upside down! Yes, the dots of the eyes form the happy face. This was inspired by the “mix” in Trail Mix. In addition to that, I decided that reversing the letters in “mix” would help. Unfortunately, only the m got reversed, as x and i are both symmetrical.

The first challenging part was choosing colours. I hadn’t really had any chances to design with colour seriously, since everything I’d done was in grayscale for photocopying. I knew that I wanted to restrict myself to two colours; the problem was which ones to take. My thinking lead to something to do with real trail mix, the stuff with nuts and raisins. I tried using my eyedropper on a few photos of it, but the brown was fairly unappealing.

The raisins were easier. While raisins may be black in real life, everyone knows that deep down inside, they’re purple. I set the happy face to be purple, because I knew that I wanted it to stand out compared to the rest of the piece. The purple gave me the next idea as well. As we all learned from primary school, yellow is the opposite of purple. This is nice, because yellow is sort of how the brown nuts look in contrast to the purple raisins, as well as being a generally happy and sunny colour, like summer! Symbolism! It also helps make the purple stand out even more.

That basically covers the logo portion. However, there is one last bit of interestingness on the poster itself. You’ll notice that there are puzzle pieces and one of them has a face. Well the face was drawn from the idea of the happy face. Summer is boring. But Trail Mix is happy! Good old ASCII face representations! And the puzzle pieces are symbolic of the puzzle pieces that are used in our church’s children’s ministry. Colourful foam puzzle pieces are put together as a safe area to sit on and run around in on the floor.

I am really pleased with how the poster came out. I am also pleased with how the logo has endured, unlike so many other projects. It captures the fun that is had at Trail Mix quite well.

For pretty much the entire time I was serving at Jaffray, one of the things I did was worship slides. It was the first thing I did in terms of serving and I did it all the way until I went off to university. Over that period of time, I was picking up on some design knowledge and that eventually made its way into how I designed slides.

For quite some time now, I’ve been observing how different churches and events do their worship slides. For the most part, slides are not very well designed. There are reasons for this. And this is why I decided to finally get cracking and write up a guide to designing slides.

Why are they bad?

For the most part, slides are designed by one of two groups of people: members of the A/V crew or the worship leaders themselves. There are reasons as to why both these groups tend to produce poor worship slides.

For worship leaders, it may be because slides aren’t really a priority. For the majority of them, it’ll be because playing around with PowerPoint isn’t their thing. Similarly, for A/V guys, design probably isn’t their thing, they’re more concerned about the equipment and the sound. While they may be more computer-y, they’re not necessarily artsy enough.

Why do they need to be better?

I anticipate that a lot of people are satisfied with their worship slides and will be wondering why I’m not content with the state of worship slides in general. The first reason is simple, that God doesn’t deserve any less than our very best. I’d be skeptical if you were sure that your slides were the best if you had no formal training in graphic design. Reading tons of Photoshop tutorials is no substitute for that. But as much as that reason is true, I really dislike pulling those types of answers. There are definitely more concrete reasons.

It’s true that as the A/V guy, your role is to be invisible. But the work that you do has just as much presence as the worship team up on stage. Just like the worship team, the job of A/V is to help create an environment where the congregation can worship without any distractions. When the congregation can’t read lyrics, that is distracting. When the congregation starts snickering at an ugly background, that is distracting. When the congregation is confused by lyrics that are split up illogically, that is distracting. Poorly designed worship slides will work against that goal.

What do you bloody know?

One of the interests I’ve developed during high school is design. Much of how I served at my church was through design, whether through web, print, or onscreen. So, no, I don’t have a degree or anything, but I have picked up a few books, so I’d imagine I’m a few steps ahead most. As for this area specifically, I’ve done it fairly constantly while I was serving at my church (about four years, to be exact), and I managed to get the opportunity to go wild and come up with the slides for TC 2006.

What’s on the menu?

I intend to make a series of posts, each addressing a different area of design for worship slides. These are things I think about when I whip them up, regardless of whether I’m at home with a week to go or in the sanctuary half an hour before service. These are:

1. Background and colour
2. Typography
3. Positioning

I’ve gotta say, the International Olympic Committee has a habit of taking perfectly fine bid logos and replacing them with ugly official games logos. This one’s up there with Stereotypical Generic Asian Country 2008 and Arctic 2010.

I was beginning to forget why I hated Internet Explorer. Then I decided to test the Project TDOT 2 site in IE. In short, it took my mind-numbingly simple design and managed to take a crap on it. I really sped the development of it, so I used incredibly simple techniques in positioning and stuff. It’s less than a hundred lines. I could probably draw the design out on paper. And IE still managed to fail hard. It’s a good thing Christ’s grace covers all because if not, those IE devs would certainly be burning in a special spot in hell reserved just for them for that travesty they brought to life called Internet Explorer.