The value of Aesthetics

Thanks to Wayne Connor and Bryson Smith for this insightful article on why aesthetics matter...
"We’ve all seen arguments in the design community that dismiss the role of beauty in visual interfaces, insisting that good designers base their choices strictly on matters of branding or basic design principles. Lost in these discussions is an understanding of the powerful role aesthetics play in shaping how we come to know, feel, and respond..." Read more at http://www.alistapart.com/articles/indefenseofeyecandy/

Some great new free fonts...

Smashing Magazine has again featured a bunch of fresh free fonts.  Titillium is my fave so far... multiple weights, and oh-so 2009ish.

The Village Church

MPC is launching a new church plant on the edge of Kelvin Grove Urban Village. We're calling it "The Village Church" and aiming for students and young urban professionals. We threw around a few ideas for logos, and settled on the second, grungy version. I still kinda like option 1 though...

MPC Style Guide

Steve Cree from Southern Cross Presbyterian suggested that we post the MPC Corporate Style Guide here on design4church. While there's maybe a bit of 'yuk factor' in juxtaposing the words "church" and "style", the guide is simply an attempt to standardise the use of fonts and logos across our church organisation. Otherwise, left unbridled, everyone will have a 'word from the Lord', and they'll all be in the most ostentatious fonts they can find. Now we've got a style guide, the challenge will be to get people to stick to it!

Click here to download the pdf.

Font makeover

Here at design4church we're often pushing the importance of font consistency in your church publications. Finding a consistent and coherent set of fonts with nicely contrasting weights and sticking with them relentlessly is the challenge. Every few years, though, it's time for a total refresh. At mpc, we've moved from the Eras font family (with lots of useful weights from ultra light to ultra black) to a slimmer Bell Gothic phase, which we're now - after about 5 years - retiring in favour of a new font family based on Bitstream's Humanist 777 Condensed. I was looking for something slim, sans-serif, modern and clean. Apart from the unlikely name, the only problem with the Humanist777 family was that it looked a bit 'sterile' on the page. Clean, but too clinical. So with the help of the excellent Type2.2 font editor (and its freeware partner TypeLight), I set about making some mods. Putting it simply, I slightly bent the stems on abdgmnpqr and u. The results? A little bit of swing, and a subtle warmth on the page. Here's a sample...



After working the same minor surgery on the light and extrablack fonts and renaming them to a more corporate-friendly MPC Black and MPC Light, it was time to start work on a matching serif font. Painstaking - but no worse than knitting. All my TV watching time in the past week or two has been spent adding carefully styled serifs, and the result is a very tidy body text that fits perfectly with the sans serif fonts... MPC Serif.

Finally, our favourite handscript face - Desert Dog - got a makeover to raise the x-height to match the rest of the MPC font family as MPC Hand. Here's the final result...

Pantone Colour of the Year - Mimosa

Actually, white's not so 'in' after all. In fact, Pantone recently announced that wattle-yellow 'Mimosa' is their colour of the year for 2009. Look around and you'll see it in all the style-leading places... the Rove Live credits on Australia's Network 10, Brisbane's La Boite Theatre, and many more. It's officially PANTONE® 14-0848 Mimosa, which according to the press releases is "a warm, engaging yellow." Need more persuasion? "In a time of economic uncertainty and political change, optimism is paramount and no other color expresses hope and reassurance more than yellow." Or so they say.

Rechurch09 Video Promo

Our second promo video comes from Mitchelton Presbyterian Church, from the launch of their rechurch09 theme earlier this year. White is so 'in'.

Design4church goes video...

About time too, I hear you say. The whole world has gone video-crazy, so it's time D4C jumped on the me-too bandwagon with links to your best church-promo vids. We'll start the ball rolling with this nice "Got Questions" advert from Southern Cross Presbyterian.

More Black than Black

Just learned something I never knew over at fuelyourcreativity.com. Check out their 3 Deadly Sins of Print design to find out how to make your blacks print really black. Simple really - just add a dash of the other CMYK colours to punch your blacks right out of the page. Simply specifying K100 (100 percent black) gives a slightly grey look when the ink runs thin on the paper. That gets my tip of the month award!

Font resources

On a roll here - ready to share some more good font resources. This list points to a load of free font websites. One it doesn't mention though is the excellent Font Squirrel site, which seems way more selective than most. They're all good... though none better than Vegur from DotColon.net.

Free Stuff at ThinkDesign

Get free fonts, vectors, textures, tutorials, and loads of inspiration at thinkdesign. Another design blog worth a link. Best feature? A great list of 20 free pro-quality serif fonts if you want to stand out from the pack. In a subtle way. 

Thinking about Logo Design

PositiveSpaceBlog runs this useful primer for thinking through Logo Design. Wordmarks, letterform marks, pictorial marks, abstract marks and emblems are all explained and exampled. Seems Positive Space   may well be worth some positive space in your favourites, or your feedreader.