Live.Awake

A Pastors Guide to the Web: Part 5

// May 1st, 2009 // Church Life

// The Pastor and The Designer

The final installment of the Pastors Guide to the Web series deals with how you as a pastor can benefit from well-executed graphic design, as well as the pitfalls most pastors fall into when dealing with graphic designers.

VIEW THE ENTIRE SERIES

Joseph Cotten is founder and Principal of Trend Setting Design, a design firm in Greensboro, North Carolina specializing in branding and identity design systems (logos, letterheads, etc.) as well as web design, advertising, video production and photography.  He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts—Design degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and also runs a design blog.

First, I should make a disclaimer at the outset.  I am not a pastor, and I don’t pretend to think like one.  That’s probably one of the reasons why Ben asked me to do this post.  I am a designer.  I live and breathe design all day, every day.  It’s how I feed my family and it’s where I find the greatest joy in my life–after Jesus and my wife, of course.  I will say things in the coming article that will offend most Christians.  Don’t worry–there’s no cursing or questionable imagery.  I have a tremendously fervent desire to see the Church of Christ once again become the guiding force in society, and I’m also crazy enough to believe that it’s going to happen.  ‘‘. . . and of the increase of His government there will be no end.’’  This is our destiny, folks, so it’s high time we started acting like it!  On with the article!

Why is it that so many of the sites listed on Web Pages That Suck are owned and operated by Christians?

What happened to us?  The modern American Church has become known as this strange entity that does sermon series based on cheap imitations of popular television shows and movies, then uses the bait & switch con to trick people into getting saved when they thought they were going to a concert about Desperate Housewives.  Most of the sermon series today are based on popular movies—at least we tell people that they are about popular movies—really, we’re hiding the Gospel inside a transient pop culture reference because we’re often embarrassed of looking religious.  The end result is often that we either trick people into hearing the Gospel, or they are intelligent enough to see through it and are further hardened against the Church.  The hard truth is that if we continue to simply copy what everybody else is doing, we will do damage to God’s fame in our communities. We have the only source of inspiration living inside of us.  Have we forgotten that God came up with the ideas of time, gravity, starlight, the color red, aurora borealis, sunsets and the smell of fresh baked bread.  Think about it–why did God make yeast smell the way it does when it gets into warm water?  Why did He give us taste buds? Because it’s in His nature to be creative!  He is the creator, so He has to be creative all the time in everything He does.  We are made in His image, therefore we—you are creative.  Whether you believe it or not has no bearing upon the truth.  If you are human, you are a creative force on the earth.

We don’t have to settle for just copying Hillsong and Saddleback, and doing a sermon series based on Desperate Housewives.  The original ideas should be coming from the Church.  Steve Jobs should be scrambling to keep up with us because we seek to live each day in the presence of the Creator.

Why is it important for a pastor’s stuff to look good?

We live in a capitalist society, even though conservative talk radio is trying to convince us that we’re socialist.  Being a capitalist society, the motivation for personal change must be an internally-generated one.  We can’t coerce people into anything.  Therefore, an American must come to an internal realization that a product or service will increase their quality of living high enough to outweigh the costs associated with adding said product or service into their lifestyle.  For that to happen, they have to see and learn enough about said product or service–before experiencing it–in such a way that they make the decision to adopt it purely because of what they’ve seen and/or heard about it.  That’s an overly-detailed description of advertising.  Advertising is the heart language of modern America. If you don’t become fluent in the visual language, you will be incapable of communicating to those who speak it.  Here’s the great thing: if you’re a modern American, you know the visual language already.  You make decisions every day based on how others communicate to you using the visual language.

Design is communicating with the visual language.  If you want to reach the Japanese living in Japan, you learn to speak Japanese.  If you want to reach Americans, you learn to speak the visual language.

Why are stoplights, stopsigns and brakelights red?  It wasn’t just something that ‘‘happened’’.  Red is psychologically the warmest color, and therefore causes an immediate, subconscious emotional reaction when viewed by a human.  Any person or animal with the ability to see color cannot ignore the color red.  Why is the ‘go’ light colored green?  Because green is opposite to red on the color wheel, and therefore provides the greatest contrast possible to the ‘stop’ color.  Yellow causes humans to feel caution and/or become more alert.  That’s why it’s used for all caution signs and ‘‘Wet Floor’’ signs.  The signs don’t make the color into what it is; rather the color’s nature has determined it’s usage.  Humans have always reacted this way to colors—long before stop signs and mop buckets came along.  I bring these things up because I want you to see that there’s more going on in the visual realm than most people realize.  I’m fluent in the visual language because I’ve been trained to be, but you can learn to recognize it, and learn to discern when it’s being used well.  Just like if you try hard enough, you can start to understand Spanish or German.

Here’s the bottom line on this issue: if your visual presentation is not expert in it’s conception and execution, you will not communicate yourself to your viewers.  That is a pretty serious roadblock to put in front of the Gospel.

We all know we’re supposed to be counter-cultural, because the culture in which we live is God-less.  We’re reaching out to those who are without God and without hope in this world.  However, when we’re counter-cultural in ways that don’t mirror God’s character, it’s a bad thing.  If you can’t communicate using the culture’s heart language, that’s a bad way to be counter-cultural.

Working With Volunteer Designers

Okay, so you’ve got an artist in your church who wants to serve.  Let’s say he/she designs a new logo for the youth group.  Cool.  Uh-oh.  It’s terrible.  It looks like something out of an elementary school classroom.  Or, maybe it’s just incredibly boring!  Pop quiz, hot shot — what do you do?  What do you do?!

1. Realize that any design, no matter how simplistic it looks, took hours and hours of planning, sketching, creating, erasing, recreating, and so forth.  Everything takes work, and nothing good comes without struggle.  Respect the work, and respect the artist that created it.
2. Realize that art (design is art used to communicate) is an expression of the artist’s soul.  If you trample on a piece of art, you are trampling on the artists soul.  Much like the murder of a human being is an assault on the image of God, so the insulting of a design is an affront to the designer who created it.
3. Don’t put weights and expectations onto a volunteer designer.  Inspiration must remain the guiding force behind art; let your volunteers bring you unexpected blessings rather than past-due assignments.
4. Don’t be afraid of artists.  They are people who need pastoring just like everybody else.  If you don’t like something, say so!  But remember that you’re not the designer, so even though you have the final say on the matter, try to submit your opinions to the designer for their consideration.  The more you trust your designer, the better his/her work will be.

Hiring a Professional Designer

So you’ve decided that you need to let the world know who you are.  What better way than to hire a professional designer to do just that?

1. The goal is to communicate your vision, values, mission and individual characteristics to the world using the visual language, so make sure your designer is fluent in the visual language.  Look at their work, and ask yourself if they were communicating different things for each client, or if their entire portfolio looks the same.  Realize that there are cultural idioms, so all portfolios will have periods of time where things look similar, but if an artist can only produce one thing, then they aren’t a visual linguist.
2. Your designer has to be a good listener, and has to be keenly interested in getting to know you.  This isn’t about them asking you if you like the color mauve, or if you want a glossy business card.  Your designer needs to know who you are because their job is to translate who you are into the visual language.
3. Your designer needs to understand that they aren’t just creating art; they are using art to communicate who you are.
4. Make sure you hire somebody who’s humble.  Your designer has to be able to realize that you are the customer, and even if you’re wrong, you’re right.  Never hire a designer that’s full of himself/herself.  Watch out for too much self-promotion.  They should be able to be interested in what you’re saying, and not try to direct every conversation back to themselves.
5. Know that TONS of work has gone into every comp and sketch you are shown.  The artist’s training, experience and gifting are poured into every design.  Never toss out any idea, no matter how much you don’t like it.  Try to combine ideas and elements from different designs to get a great end result.
6. When you dislike something, find a way to challenge the designer rather than just saying “I don’t like it”.  Look around you at other successful designs and see if you can glean ideas from them.
7. Think outside yourself when going over your designer’s work.  Realize that you carry around a clouded view of reality.  We all do.  You have opinions about things that are wrong.  If you don’t like something your designer has created, be suspicious of yourself and don’t give your opinions the benefit of the doubt. If you’ve done a good job hiring the designer, then you should trust him/her more than you trust yourself.  The more you trust and release a designer, the more pressure that designer will feel to get the design perfect.  If you control the situation, the designer will resign himself/herself to producing crappy work.  It may seem backwards, but if you want a great design, you must release your designer.
8. Pay good money for your designs.  Don’t do the stereotypical Church thing and expect full quality work for half price.  This is a big deal, and I guarantee you that good design will be the hallmark of every church that successfully reaches the postmodern American culture.  It’s a worthy investment if ever there was one.  To prepare yourself for pricing, you can check out my price list, but you should know that all my current prices are drastically lower than the industry average, because of the current economic climate.

Once you’ve got a visual identity in place, don’t give it over to unqualified volunteers afterward.  If you hire a designer to create a branding system for your church [if you haven't done this already, you really should], make sure you get a rule book after the branding system is completed which outlines what typefaces are to be used in correspondence, titles, body text, emails and posters.  You also need the corporate color scheme in RGB, CMYK and Pantone.  You need high resolution (300 dpi) versions of your logo.  Remember that every time you present yourself visually to your audience, whether it’s by sermon series invite cards, outdoor banners, congregational emails, etc—every time you do that, you either reinforce the brand or you destroy it.  It only takes one bad poster to ruin your brand.  It’s better to not advertise than to save money on a stock design from a template website or clipart or a Microsoft Publisher template or just letting an amatuer hack to pieces the brand that you hired a professional to create.  This leads me to a random interjection that I must make:

Never use clipart and never use Comic Sans.

A final parting thought:  recently, a large group of missionaries, pastors and theologians met to ascertain what methods have proven fruitful in reaching the lost over the entire history of missions work.  They have completed a list of 64 practices which can be narrowed down to 7 general factors.  I’ll list them below.  There’s too much in them to talk about in one blog post, so just consider this extra food for thought.

• Using the heart language of the people (and using it well)
• Sharing relevant stories from the Bible whenever appropriate
• Having a godly reputation
• Spreading the Word along lines of existing social networks
• Using Scripture as the main tool of evangelism and discipleship
• Encouraging people to share and house churches to multiply
• Praying for the work

It’s been my pleasure to guest blog for you guys, and I hope you received some inspiration from this!

Resource List

Typophile.  Learn to appreciate good typeface design.

iStock Photo.  When you feel the urge to use clipart, head over to iStock for cheap but good stock imagery.

dafont and MyFonts.  Find fonts–dafont serves up free fonts and MyFonts sells them.

BrandNew.  Get expert design critiques on new logo announcements.  This helps you start thinking outside the box.

Trend Setting Design.  My design blog, where I try to serve the design community.  This will help you get inside the brain of a designer.