Collide Magazine

Christian tees can be cheesy or just lame at times, but we are here to challenge the status quo. Here’s an intense print job done for the new Echo tees that will be sold at the conference next week. A normal tee shirt print job generally consist of 3 colors or less. However, for this design by Barton Damer, it required an oversized print as well as 10 spot colors! Exactly what does that mean? In order to get the colors to pop off of the tee shirt the way the original artwork was created, the t-shirt was separated into 10 solid ink colors and printed on a mammoth 12 color machine (below). (more…)

As opposed to the design thievery I mentioned yesterday, fresh/creative/orginal/quality design is a good thing. Not only does good design help you clearly and effectively communicate your message to audience, but others take notice as well. With that in mind, I’d like to congratulate Edgepoint Church in Tennessee. Their site features a clean design and well organized content. That helps their members and prospective visitors find out what they need to know. (As a side note, church members like it when they aren’t embarrassed of their church’s website.)

Beyond that, Edgepoint’s site is so well designed that Smashing Magazine recently featured it in a post on creative grid-based web design. Smashing Magazine, by the way, boasts 70,000 subscribers to its RSS feed, so they know what they’re talking about when it comes to design.

I’d like to congratulate Edgepoint Church for their commitment to good web design. I’d also like to congratulate FortySeven Media for designing Edgepoint’s site and having their work featured by Smashing. On FortySeven Media’s site, they have a section titled “Don’t Hire Us.” Here’s a quote from that page:

If you don’t value your work enough to have it professionally presented, well, it was nice speaking with you. Because if it goes out with our name, it is going to be our best. We expect the same from our clients.

Personally, I think that’s a great perspective. If your message (a sermon, an announcement, the gospel) is important, it’s worthy of quality presentation (a graphic, a video, a song, a drama).

We talked before about the fine line between stealing and creativity (here and here), but I wanted to share this egregious violation of intellectual property law and common decency. You can find the long version of the story here in a blog post titled “Christian Thieves,” but I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version. Basically, a designer/blogger named Jimi designed a really cool T-shirt graphic he named “Revelations.” While one T-shirt company paid him for the right to print and sell shirts featuring his design, a Christian T-shirt company just grabbed the design (either off a shirt or the web) and began selling it.

Sigh.

After the Christian T-shirt company was bombarded by hate mail from Jimi’s fans and friends, the company took down the shirt and apologized (in other words, they stopped when they got caught). While apologies are all well and good, the way I see it, the damage has been done, the company’s reputation is forever  ruined, and we have to add another incident to the Christians Behaving Badly list.

So why do people who worship the Creator of the universe shy away from creating? Why do people who argue for the Ten Commandments to appear in public buildings (and on network TV) ignore “Thou Shalt Not Steal” when it suits them? I’m not sure. You could suggest the “fallen people/fallen world” idea, but that doesn’t quite work for me this time. Instead, I propose that we as broken people work toward building a Church where it isn’t acceptable to associate theft and Christianity. As church leaders who regularly employ technology and the arts, let that work begin with us.