Sioux Falls’ New Event Center

On Friday Sioux Falls celebrated the completion of its new event center with a ribbon cutting ceremony, complete with a large ribbon and giant pair of scissors. The Denny Sanford Premier Center opened its doors after a series of remarks about the history of the building project itself. I have had the opportunity over the last several months to develop a large timeline display to tell that story, and I’m very happy with the way it came together. These images from the event on Friday show how the community came out to celebrate the opening, as well as the timeline display itself.

The display walks the viewer through the history of the project, from its initial concept (on the far left), to the controversy surrounding the project’s locations and the subsequent vote, on through the planning, construction, and completion of the building. Portions of the full story are told in three rows of images, from left to right.

Community, Design, Photography

I recently borrowed a wide-angle lens from a friend to take some exterior photos of a building and I was reminded of two things about photography, and work in general:

1. Having good equipment makes all the difference.
2. The best equipment in the world can’t take good pictures for you. You still have to be intentional as you create your images.

Whatever your field it’s always easy to get caught up in the gear or the tools, but there’s no substitute for learning the craft. Having the right lens, equipment or software will help create compelling designs, but it also takes work. Talented artists can use any tool to create great art, even a tool as unlikely as Microsoft Excel or a basic camera phone. (Until recently, one photographer made most of his stunning images with a simple iPhone.)

Just for fun, here are some of the test photos around our house.

Creativity, Design, Photography

Possibility usually comes disguised as hard work. Don’t expect your next project to be easy.

Things fall apart

Anyone who tries to make something or do something finds that there is resistance. It’s an accepted fact of life that things tend toward disorder–cars break down, paint peels, joints begin to ache as we age. We expect that things left to themselves will fall into disorder. But it is also the nature of things to resist being brought into order in the first place. The world around us not only tends toward chaos, it also drags its feet when we try to make something out of that chaos.

Go looking for trouble

The problems only reveal themselves as you dig into the work.

The reality is that most projects have inherent obstacles, stubborn sticking points, intractable awkward aspects that only reveal themselves as you dig into the work. If you begin your project expecting to not run into obstacles, you’re setting yourself up for unnecessary discouragement. If on the other hand, you start the work with the expectation that some things will probably go awry, you’ll be pleasantly surprised when they immediately do. You’ll be able to tell your friends how clever you were to see it coming.

Include extra grit in your budget

It’s normal to build in extra time and money in your estimates on a given project to cover unexpected problems. The trick is to also mentally set aside a store of patience and perseverance so that when problems do arise, you’ll be resilient enough to follow the work through whatever obstacles come up. Because there will always be problems–something will break, or blow up, or you’ll have to scrap the whole thing and start over. That can sound pessimistic but it’s really not. We’re not looking for problems so that we can be defeated. Without knowing what they will be, we can anticipate that there will be problems and mentally prepare ourselves for the task of figuring out how to solve them.

Community, Creativity, Ideas

Making fur hats out of kittens

When people in college told me they were studying marketing, they might as well have told me they studying to make fur hats out of kittens. I thought it was universally acknowledged that marketers were in the same camp as payday loan peddlers, Ponzi schemers and email spammers. I remember wondering if you had to sell your soul in the second or third year, or if that was more of a capstone, a Faustian final project in exchange for your diploma.

Marketing as a zero-sum game

Do you have to sell your soul to work in marketing?

“Marketing” doesn’t have to be dirty business where one side manipulates the other into acting a certain way. What I was reacting against at the time, and I what I still reject, is the kind of marketing that appeals to the lowest desires in a person and causes them to act in a way that is not actually in their best interest. Marketing that flatters, belittles or bullies its audience into a response that only serves the organization’s interest is mere manipulation and a waste of creative energy.

Marketing, and marketers, should not:

1. Create a false “need”
2. Appeal to the worst in people (our vanity, our pride, our hatred)
3. Prey on people’s vulnerabilities (our insecurities, our fear, our ignorance)

I’m not interested in spending my time to do any of those things. Marketing or advertising that pits itself against the audience creates an adversarial sort of relationship–a zero-sum game. (In games like basketball there is no limit to how many times each side can score, and one side’s points don’t alter the number of points their opponent has. In zero-sum games like poker, the winner gains only as much as the other players lose.) But there is a way to “market” that is collaborative–one where both sides win.

So what should marketing do?

Marketing that is honest and real should tell the truth about the product, and it should also keep people from believing things that are not true about themselves. Companies have products to sell, and organizations have messages to promote. At the same time, if those products or messages are legitimate, valid and useful, their customers or audiences have a real need to buy those products or hear those messages. In this case, both sides benefit from marketing done well.

Marketing that is legitimate:

1. Communicates what a brand is clearly and accurately
2. Connects people with products and messages that help them live their lives
3. Helps companies or organizations meet their goals

Tell your story well

A few years ago we developed some materials for a cabinet maker and carpenter to help him showcase his work. He’s a craftsman, and his work is beautiful, and in some ways his work speaks for itself. But the fact was that his work couldn’t speak for itself unless his audience and potential customers saw it. We took photographs that showed off his work. We developed a logo and a visual style for his printed material that matched the style of his work and his personality. We helped him create a web presence that was easy to find and to navigate. We “marketed” him and his work, but I think a more accurate way to describe it is that we told his story well. We didn’t try to show him as something he was not, or create false need for his products. We represented him well and people that were looking for products like his began to find him. Everybody wins.

Branding, Ideas, Identity

When you study something intently, you sometimes lose sight of what made you want to study it.

When readers begin paying attention to a book’s design, it is usually because the design is getting in the way.

For better or worse, the words of the Bible have been studied and parsed and dissected to an extraordinary degree. The pages of most Bibles are littered with notes, numbers and other study aids. But the power of the text can get overshadowed by the clutter of the “helpful” material that has been added. For the most part, Bible designers have been primarily concerned about arming the reader with all of the information he or she might need to interpret the text, and less concerned about the reading experience. While presenting the text along with the scholarly apparatus might help readers to study the text, all that information hovering in the margins and gutter makes it more difficult to read the text.  (For more on readability and “the physical form of the Good Book” see J. Mark Bertrand’s Bible Design Blog.)

The Good Book, Designed

Bibliotheca, a project being funded through Kickstarter, is aimed at presenting a book (in four volumes) that is meant to be read. The goal of the Bibliotheca project is to present the text of the Bible simply and beautifully, with a focus on clean design and “classic and elegant typography” uncluttered by notes and numbers.

I’m looking forward to seeing the finished volumes later this year, for spiritual and professional reasons. The first “book design” project I undertook was motivated by exactly the same reason, with myself as the client. I found myself distracted by the notes and especially the verse and chapter numbers in my reading of the Bible. (To be fair, it doesn’t take much to distract me.) I decided to take the book I was studying and redesign it as simply as I could, with ample space for marginal notes, a narrow measure, and a careful treatment of the poetry sections.

Good book design gets out of the way

When reading a book, what is the reader most interested in: the content, or the form in which the content is presented? Most likely, the reader has picked up a book because she is interested in the information, or the story, or the ideas presented. Unless the book is a design portfolio, where the goal is to display the work of its designer, or a textbook intended to inform about and present examples of design, the reader has only passing interest in how the material is presented visually.

When readers begin paying attention to the features of a book’s design, it is usually because those features are getting in the way–margins too narrow for the reader to hold the book without covering up the text, page numbers that are hard to find, text that is too cramped to follow comfortably, and so on. You could almost say that as soon as the reader becomes aware of the design of the book, the designer has failed in his first goal: present the text to the reader.

Book Design, Books, Design