XPIRITMENTAL is a resource that is designed to inspire creativity and conversation among Christ-followers. It's a place to share thoughts on marketing, design, service, technology and culture.

Welcome to the first edition of Show & Tell, a new weekly feature that focuses on the work of ministries within the Electricurrent and AdvancedMinistry clientele.

This week's feature is SEND International, a missions organization that serves in over 20 countries throughout the world.

We have had the privilege of working with SEND for the last couple of years on branding and web initiatives.

You can read more about their ministry by visiting www.send.org.

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Monday Morning Misdemeanors is a series of weekly posts written by Graphic Designer, Derek Gyssels. In this series, Derek is going to hone in on a number of common problems that crop up in graphic designs and then give you the tools to avoid them which will give your designs a professional polish.

This case is a little obscure, but I know there are a handful of you out there that are going to appreciate me covering this. This topic is a bit of a nitty-gritty detail but it is also one that can cause quite a bit of grief if it is overlooked. It is a bit of a head scratcher, but the color black needs to be treated with some care in your design projects, especially print projects. Let's start by looking at a few fundamentals.

All design projects can reside in a number of color modes but the one we are concerned with is CMYK which stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and black. What you need to understand is that all printed materials, unless specified by pantone colors, are made by those four colors in various halftones and line screens. All four of those colors can have a value between 0 and 100 which is a range of intensity of application from least to greatest.

Now through no fault of your own, if you were working in photoshop and wanted to fill the background of your design with black your natural compulsion would be to set the black value to 100 and all the other color values to zero, however this would be wrong. That result would give you a very dark grey. If your looking for a black as dark as the night sky it requires a color formula involving all four colors (as seen in the image provided).

There was a time that this was a huge problem in the printing world because the software would display black the same way regardless of the color formula involved. Then Adobe made an improvement in their software to account for this making sure that a black with a value of only K100 would appear grey in nature (again see the image provided). This leads me into the first of two points I want to leave you with.

It doesn't matter what the black looks like on your screen, the numbers making up the black are king. If you're not sure about the values involved in a color, use the 'eye dropper' tool in Photoshop to find out what the formula is. The numbers are going to be fed into a computer or printer and those numbers will be translated into ink coverage so always keep that in mind.

The last point is only use K100 for type. If your have a print piece and there is a lot of black text at 10 or 12 point you should never us a black made up of more than one color. On a press the four colors are printed separately and the registration will be to hard to line up accurately and you will end up with some ghosting around your copy. The only time you can use a true black formula on type is for a large headlines of more than 24 points or so.

At the end of the day if you have any questions talk to your service provider and have them help you out. You shouldn't be on your own with this, especially if you're unsure about what your doing. Just be careful with the color black because if you impersonate it with the wrong values you could be disappointed in your final printed work. As I have learned in my career, once ink is on paper there is no going back. Don't learn it the hard way.

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As reported on CNN, a funeral was held last night for Internet Explorer 6 (better known as IE6). “Attendees were expected to eulogize the Microsoft browser by sharing remembrances, some of which have already been posted on the company's website – see www.ie6funeral.com.

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"The early 2000's will go down as the MC Hammer of decades. It started out all confident and flash, and ended in bankruptcy. Then came the grunge era. The global economic meltdown might give us the distance we need to fully absorb the absurdity of dog jewelry, pimped rides and man-made island resorts in the desert. As a generation of young people cope with the double-digit unemployment, they might embrace a new set of values that are a break from the past. A break from status that can be bought and mortgaged. People may once again start looking for things that are 'real'. Status may once again have to be earned. I'm already seeing a lot of people wearing plaid."

- Barry Quinn, executive creative director, brand design, Juniper Park

I love this quote. In no small part because plaid is in fact, making a comeback.

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For the last couple of days I've been carrying a cold around with me and among the other unpleasantness of a good virus, the one thing most noticable over the last day and a half has been the fact that I lose my voice if I talk for a while.

It gets frustrating too for a guy who's job it is to communicate all day. But my situation pales in comparison to what I just read about film critic, Roger Ebert and the cool new technology in his life. Click here to check it out.

Once you get back from visiting, reading and viewing that link, I'm guessing at least some of you are also immediately thankful for the voice that you take for granted each and every day...and it's true, we all do it. Our voices are an amazing tool for us to communicate with and we take for granted that it will always be there...that we'll always have a chance to use that wonder of communication to clearly convey the thoughts that we want to.

But what if you were to lose it? What if you weren't able to communicate using your voice anymore? Would you regret how you had used it when you had it? Would you wish you'd done more with it?

I think the same attitude needs to be taken with all our communications, personal and organizational. Don't treat what and how you communicate as just something that's a throw away. Value it. Treat it with respect by communicating well. Don't let neglect lead you to regret. We have a plethora of communication options these days - let's use them for all their worth to communicate the greatness of our God and His calling in our lives!

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Last week I wrote about the “Own the Podium” program that the Canadian Olympic Committee, VANOC (Vancouver Organizing Committee) and Canada's sport federations established back in 2005 which involved greater funding for our athletes than they had ever had before and also provided a really aggressive goal for the athletes.

Thing is, it just wasn't us. It isn't a Canadian thing to go around chanting, “We're #1! We're #1!”.

Then, halfway through the Olympics, the “Own the Podium” program was rescinded because it was clear that there was no way that we would actually end up winning the Olympic games which quite frankly, was embarrassing. So, even though after the program was rescinded our athletes went on an unbelievable run to win the most gold medals by a country in the history of the Winter Olympic games, our bold strategy at winning the Olympic games outright left us with a bit of mud on our faces.

Enter the closing ceremonies and at one point, a small, kinda shaky guy in glasses, jeans and a sport coat stood in the middle of the ice and said: “Hi, I'm Mike”.

BC Place erupted with cheers and applause.

“Mike” in this case, was Michael J. Fox, one of Canada's most famous actors having starred in shows like Family Ties, Spin City and Boston Legal and films like the Back to the Future trilogy. But what many know him for today is his courageous battle with Parkinson's and advocacy on behalf of finding a cure for that disease.

So here's a guy with a lot to brag about if he wanted, but instead, he kinda humbly, almost sheepishly gets out on the ice of BC Place and introduces himself to a global audience as if we were all standing in his front foyer and he was welcoming us individually.

And immediately, I was struck with the thought that the reason everyone was cheering was not just because it was Michael J. Fox, but it was also because that in that demure statement, he embodied so much of who Canadians are. We identified as a nation and we cheered at how refreshing it was to just be ourselves along with Mike down on the ice.

But that kind of identity isn't just a Canadian trait. It's a human one.

Wouldn't it be refreshing if we would just drop all the pomp and circumstance around our brands (personal, corporate and organizational) and just approach the people we interact with in our personal lives and at our work by saying our own version of “Hi, I'm Mike”?

It's a long way from “Own the Podium”, but it goes a lot longer of a way to creating trust and a lasting positive brand impression.

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Monday Morning Misdemeanors is a series of weekly posts written by Graphic Designer, Derek Gyssels. In this series, Derek is going to hone in on a number of common problems that crop up in graphic designs and then give you the tools to avoid them which will give your designs a professional polish.

This crime is certainly a petty one but it is one that I want to call attention to nonetheless. For some reason in high school keyboarding classes we were taught that it is correct to put two spaces after a sentence. This was a lesson that I carried with me into my college years in graphic design, where I was taught that this practice is actually incorrect. So what's the deal? After having been taught both and having implemented both practices, I live by what I was taught in design school. Let me give you a couple of reasons why.

From an aesthetic point of view, it looks better to use one space instead of two. When you leave two spaces after a sentence you end up having little holes in your blocks of type. This is especially true if you are laying out a brochure with some large blocks of body copy. The image at right demonstrates this.

Another reason to not use two spaces is space itself. If you happen to be type setting a large report or book, you end up saving pages worth of space. Over the course of a 100 pages of type you can save hundreds of spaces which can end up saving a few pages by the end of the report or book. To be honest with you, most of the copy we receive from our clients comes with double spaces, and we remove them. My coworker type sets books and says its not uncommon to save well over 500 spaces from a book's worth of type.

At the end of the day, its going to be your call as to whether or not you push the space bar once or twice after a period. The graphics police aren't going to write you a ticket, but I suggest that it is more professional to use single spaces. Any knowledgeable designer or agency you provide copy to will remove double spaces. Truthfully, double spacing is more of an old-school, typewriter-era practice.

So stop abusing your space bar and start loving your designs!

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There's nothing casual about the message in the video above other than the fact that it's a lot easier for me to post a video than to dream up and type out a coherent post late on a Friday...so happy casual Friday to me :)

But being the Friday that I get paid, I'm about to walk out of the office and head over to the bank to cash my paycheck. As I do that and by God's grace as I go through every day that He grants me on this earth, I want to be thinking about the challenge in this video.

I want to encourage you to do the same.

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Although I didn't have designs on this, and the inspiration for todays and yesterdays posts came from entirely disparate sources, this post is actually closely tied with the thoughts I shared yesterday.

Back in October of last year, Christian Computing Magazine published an interesting article that contained statistics indicating that the most used portion of church websites is the “I'm New” section - pages related to people attending for the first time, those who are looking for service times or locations, those looking for other information about the church and its beliefs and doctrine, or those who have no knowledge of Jesus Christ.

I think a lot of people would read the statistics supporting that article and even if it's only in the back of their minds, presume that they indicate that churches are doing a great job at outreach on the web. However, just like website hits aren't a measure of a sites success, but rather quality of those hits are, this statistic requires qualification.

The truth of the matter is that “more than 80% of the current growth registered by Protestant churches is biological or transfer growth – very little of the growth comes from penetrating the ranks of the unchurched.” (George Barna, Grow Your Church from the Outside In)

That's a critically important piece of information to consider because it makes you ask the question, 'Are the “I'm New” sections of our sites truly representative of us doing a great job of serving those outside of our church communities, or are they just examples of us serving a modern desire to jump from church community to church community?'

If it's the latter then these stats, although valuable, become more of an argument to change or adjust the strategy than they are a statement of web usability success.

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It's disconcerting that in 2010 we still have to talk about this, but the fact is, we do, so here goes:

The number of clicks that you get on your website is not the measure of success of the website. You have to begin to consider the quality of those hits.

Is the person hanging around on pages, are they coming back again and most importantly, are they 'converting' (a.k.a. taking some measurable action on the site like signing up, donating or filling out a contact form)?

You could have 1,000 hits an hour but if they aren't converting or gaining something valuable from you in the experience, then they aren't a sign of success...in fact, quite the opposite is true.

Google Analytics can help with that so think about using that free tool to help evaluate the state of your site.

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