It’s been a photo-tastic week here at the Heerema House

• Camping 2004
• Building my parent’s deck

Enjoy!

I added some new albums to the gallery. Check them out.

• New Archie Pics
• Destination ISU gig photos
• The new Rock Info Booth
• The Dorms – 2004

(Well, this was going to start out as a post about why I love designing things, but turned into a rant… perhaps I shall post a follow-up)

This Summer I have was given responsibility of promotions for The Rock. This meant that I was in charge of overseeing the creation of all of our literature (propaganda) that would go into people¹s hands at the beginning of the year. This excited me to no end.

You see, I have a huge passion for the presentation of Christianity (in general) to the world. I feel that in general, over the last thirty years, the church has given itself the reputation of being passé, outdated, and generally out-of-touch.

For the most part, our literature is generated with Microsoft word, using clip art and Comic Sans font. Our Web sites have animated .gif¹s and obnoxious repetitive background patterns that make everything impossible to read, (some even have cheesy midi music playing in the background). I didn¹t link to any of these sites, but it would take me about 30 seconds to find a good example. Food at our social gatherings consist of cookies, and punch served in little Dixie cups. Our music is nicey-nice and contrived at best, nails-on-chalkboard atrocious at worst. In short, we haven¹t done ourselves any favors from a presentation point of view.

Now, I realize fully that the only thing that really matters is the message, right? We don¹t need to be flashy, or worldly, or cool to communicate the Good News of Christ. In fact, I¹m pretty sure it is impossible to ³out-cool² the devil (from the World¹s definition of sex-drugs-and-rock n roll cool). But let me set the record straight.

Presentation is a large part of your message!

The message we have been sending the world for the last two decades is that we have no clue what is going on with them, and that we don¹t care enough about ourselves to present our message with anything less than excellence. Photocopied all-black-text-with-some-clip-art-graphics flyers send a message to the people you give them to: Lame. Unprofessional. Half-hearted. Music played (or mixed) by people with no sense of rhythm, little musical ability, and no creativity will simply be mocked.

I am proud of my brothers and sisters that we are realizing this and trying to change towards a higher standard of quality in our presentation. But now we are faced with a new problem: Lack of creativity. This is something that I personally am plagued with a lot of the time.

We have simply tried to copy what the world is doing with design, with music, with our language and literature and we get a new name: copycats. We have moved from being 10 years behind the times to something almost worse, being two years behind the times. So now, instead of being quaint, nostalgic, or cute; we are simply poor, slow mimics.

I know for a fact that there are creative people out there. I can even have a flash of creativity from time to time. When are we going to be bold and take back our rightful place as innovators of art, literature, and music? When are we going to stop holding onto our dear traditionalism, or our fear of not being cool, and try something new with music, rather than trying to copy current trends (because if you are copying a current trend, you are already most likely a year behind.)

I have to believe that God has given his body creative people, and I know we follow the ultimate graphic designer (have you SEEN a sunset or mountain-scape lately? And how about those Hubble pictures?).

Maybe we need to start innovating.

If you had to make a list of every user account you had somewhere on the internet (from yahoo, to banking, to newsgroups, to news services, to bulletien boards) could you do it? Do you remember your username and password?

Another cool (if slightly disturbing) flash game to waste time on. :)

Scarecrows

Have fuN!