Its not a Grammy or a Webby but the statue comes to us from the same folks who carve the gold for the Oscar and the Emmy. I must admit I hadn’t known much about the Telly until I was told a few weeks ago that we won the award due to the awesome work of our PR director at It Is Written who submitted the My Place With Jesus website to the judging panel last fall (I wrote a little about the hard work we put into My Place With Jesus and the role I had the opportunity to play in making it, here - http://yostevo.com/blog/?p=159).
The official Telly website says that the award was established to “honor the very best local, regional, and cable television commercials and programs, as well as the finest video and film productions, and work created for the web”. The Telly offers two tiers of prizes - bronze and silver, silver being the highest honor. Apparently the Telly is somewhat different from other awards in that the applicants aren’t pitted against each other, but rather each winner receives an award based on its own merit. According to stats from Wikipedia the Telly receives approximately 13,000 applicants each year, 7-10% of applicants are awarded the Silver statue and 18-25% or applicants receive the bronze statue. Some of the Telly’s past applicants and winners include Universal Studios, Microsoft, Walt Disney Studios, Sony BMG, PBS, ESPN, and Harpo Studios to name a pretty few.
My Place With Jesus was awarded two Silver Tellys in the categories of “Children” and “Religion/ Spirituality”. Receiving two of these awards for the same project is a first for us at It Is Written. We’ve collected quite a few bronze statues over the years for our exceptional TV programming (browse some of that programming here in our newly designed media browser - http://itiswritten.com/television). In 2006 we won the silver Telly for the first and only time till now, receiving two of them for two of our programs - “Fingerprints of God” and “All These Things”. Check out our listing on the Telly Award website and some of the pics of the awards below.
Over the past decade Apple has emerged as perhaps the undisputed champion of delicious technology engineering. More than this it seems to hold true that once you go “App” you won’t want to go back, because Apple products tend to maintain a high level of user satisfaction in comparison with the competition.
I love Apple’s stuff. I wrote this blog post on an Apple laptop, which I’ve had for the past 2 years and I’m almost just as satisfied now with it as when I first got it. I also own an iPhone which I also acquired 2 years ago, and for the most part I am still very happy with the technology, it has been a great source of blessing to me. Apple’s computers are the bomb, and if you regularly do your computing on something other than a Mac then you mostly likely need to switch.
Notwithstanding I haven’t bought into Apples marketing campaign strategy which seems to say, “If you don’t buy our latest product then you are an uncool miserable wretch who wears a goofy brown suit.” Here are 5 reasons why this is especially the case with me concerning Apple’s newest technology - the iPad.
1. Cheese
Shortly after the keynote speech introducing the iPad was over, I was instant messaging with a friend about Apple’s new latest and greatest. My buddy’s first response to the contagious yawn I shared with him over the release was that the name was kinda cheesy. I immediately dittoed the sentiment. I feel like Apple is getting carried away; sticking a lowercase “i” in front of any random name to make sound cool, just feels so 2005. I truly believe this is a convention Apple needs to reevaluate heading into the new decade, especially now that they’ve given to one of their most impressive pieces of hardware technology a name that could easily suit a random 3rd party freeware application that wouldn’t even be worthy of sitting on my OSX dashboard. Continue reading ‘5 Reasons Why the iPad is Not For Me’
Its been almost a year and a half now since the launch of the biggest web project that I’ve ever worked on in my infant career of digital design. In 2007 It Is Written (IIW - the Bible teaching, philanthropic, television ministry that employs me full time) set out to create an interactive website intended to teach children (ages 5-12) the basic tenets of Christian faith from the Bible in a few lessons — like a year of virtual Sunday school condensed into a few hours. I was fortunate to be given the task of designing and providing the creative direction for the project. Almost a year and a half later we’ve been fairly happy with the results. My Place With Jesus has accrued nearly 166,500 visits from 77,600 unique visitors in 187 countries/territories who spent an average of 19 and a half minutes on the site. We’ve also acquired a not so shabby bounce rate of 24.17%.
Upon first visiting MyPlaceWithJesus.com kids are taken through an account creation process which allows them to later login and continue from the last lesson they completed during their previous visit. After creating an account they are welcomed and given an introduction to the website by the My Place With Jesus host / instructor Jean Boonstra, the Children’s Ministry Coordinator for It Is Written. You can watch that introduction here - Continue reading ‘Making My Place With Jesus’
I figured the Christmas season might be the perfect time to put an end to my long blog posting drought this year. For my resurrection post I’ve decided to share a novel idea for Christmas that a coworker shared with me a couple of years ago and would perhaps be particularly handy during a holiday season mired in a tough global recession. This idea is from the folks at Adventist Conspiracy, and what they’re suggesting is this: instead of participating in another round of the bankrupt/break-your-bank-account consumerism X-mas tradition, why not start celebrating CHRISTmas by participating in the tradition that Christ has left for us, i.e. giving to those in need?
“Then Jesus said to His host, ‘When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.’ ” (Luke 14:12-14)
Although this passage is referring to “banquets” I’m sure you, like I, can see how easily the principle Jesus is teaching here translates into the modern day Christmas gift giving ritual. Here are 3 videos from Advent Conspiracy, the first one is the video I saw for the first time 2 years ago, the second is the 2009 update, and the third provides a snapshot of how rewarding the practice of this idea can be. I’d also consider it a shame for me not to tip my hat to the clever typographic animation and design used in the promo videos; so yah here…
So why not be proactive this Christmas in participating in a cause worthy of our money, especially during a time when we don’t have a lot of it to waste?
The Adventist brigade is on the move again with yet another effort to counter the skeptical claims of the today’s postmodern society concerning the existence of God, and to be honest I can’t begin to tell you how well-pleased and excited I am about what I’ve seen and read so far concerning this particular production. From what I gather from the producer’s website, this trailer is promoting the first in “a series of powerful shorts called [Re:], or The Reply, breaking down the God debate”. The host in this production is David Asscherick, one of my favorite speakers among Adventists and Evangelicals alike partly because of his gift of animation and articulation, but also because of his dedication to addressing secular and postmodern minds in a few of his evangelistic efforts.
Another thing I noticed from the trailer and the website is that product features great cinematography and design. This plays a huge role in my satisfaction because I am really big on seeing Christian productions packaged in the best aesthetic form possible, and from what I see they seem to be on the right track.
My copy of the first installment of this DVD series is already on order.
As my recent unprecedented busy streak was drawing to a close, I’ve took a few moments to do something creative that was outside of my employment responsibilities. My brother, Philip, who has done some contract work for my ministry as an illustrator, has spent some time with me this summer furthering the capacity to express his talent by learning how to digitize and color his illustration, a job that I had done for him in the past. He picked up very quickly and produced an illustration of himself and colored it in the industry standard software Adobe Illustrator. I was well pleased with the work he had done, and wanting to get in on the beauty of it some how I confiscated a copy of the Illustrator file and threw into Adobe Photoshop to produce the grungy image above. I kinda liked the way it turned out, although I must admit I do enjoy better just looking at the illustrated image by itself with out all the grunge and digital dirt around it. Clicking on the pictures will take you to a larger version of the images. Clicking on the processes image takes you to an images that describes the process in more detail.
Another thing you might find interesting — I’m not the only one, apparently, who thinks Philip’s work is pretty cool. Recently he submitted a colored illustration of one of his homeboys to a notable sneaker shop in Chicago. The character in the drawing was wearing a shirt with the company’s name on it. Shortly thereafter they posted it on their website. You can check it out here: http://leaders1354.com/v2/?p=473
The battle concerning our origins rages on. Skeptics and promulgators of evolution are ever lifting their forceful and uncompromising voices against intelligent design with increasing intensity. Yet with all the hoopla, many still remain unconvinced that the beauty and genius that we see all around is the result of chance. They see in nature the handy work of a designer of titanic intellect. Many of us (a few billion) who share this world view have found in the Bible a sensible and reliable account of the origins of the human race and the races’ interaction with this great Designer. But few who share this world view have any idea of what the chronological and historical landscape since Adam (the first human to live) actually looks like according to the Bible.
My buddy from college, Dustin, has created an elegantly designed Flash application that visually depicts the life spans of Old Testament characters on a virtual timeline that begins at the year zero with Adam, and ends with Jesus.
One of my favorite features of this app is the ability to copy a snippet of the timeline and embed into your website or blog like a Youtube video (as I have done above). When selecting an area that you want embed from the timeline the app lets you choose and in and out point, and when the timeline loads into your website it will animate from that start point to the out point that you have set. Another cool aspect of this application is that it is tied to a blog where select users have entered their thoughts and observations relevant to the timeline and the characters therein. When you click on name in the timeline a window appears that lets you see all of the posts relevant to that person.
This a project that I worked on with three other buddies of mine during my senior year in college. It took us two weeks of college scrap time to complete it (sleepless night included). The part I played in its development was concept design, storyboarding, and script writing (the least amount of time attributed to the latter). As with other projects I worked on in my college years, I felt this one would have been better if we had more time to devote to it (check out my college music video project here: http://yostevo.com/blog/?p=17). Nevertheless I thought some of you might find it interesting to watch.
You can check out what some of the other guys who worked on this project are up to here:
This video was the final project for my introductory video editing class that I took during my second to last semester in college. I shot most of the footage last minute in the cold Michigan December. Ironically the song speaks of the weather being 46 degrees outside, but on the day we shot the video it was precisely 20 degrees colder than that (26 degrees)! Though the project was edited and burned onto a DVD just minutes before I had to present it in class, the teacher said for an intro class that he had no negative critique of the project save the fact that I forgot to clean off some dirt on the lens of the camera on a few shots. The project also earned a 3rd place award in my departments end of the year gallery which was supposedly judged by local professional videographers. Yet there is no doubt that the final out come of this project was a bit crude and unpolished and could have been much better if we had more time and if we weren’t all as busy as we were.
Ezra and Geoffrey (Flow Track Star), the artist featured in this video, are both good friends of mine that go way back. Geoffrey and I go back to our scrappy high school years, and Ezra and I go back to before our conception (Our mothers’ were roommates in college).
I could say a lot of other good things about these characters but you can find out more for yourselves by visiting their music pages on Myspace:
A couple of months ago It Is Written launched a new web initiative called A Better Way to Live. This microsite provides a new video devotional by Shawn Boonstra each of the 5 work days every week (that equals approximately 240 morning devotionals every year). These devotions are on average only 3 minutes long, and are designed to give busy people an added “spiritual boost”.What makes this website extra special to me is that I given the task of designing and developing the custom player on the website (The overall site design and css was developed by my co-worker, while most of the back-end functionality was handled by our programmer using the Drupal content management system). While building a custom Flash video player wasn’t something new for me coming into this project, like my previous Flash project for It Is Written, the vision for A Better Way to Live demanded me to cover some uncharted territory.
The new custom player features the ability to provide users with code to embed a particular devotion into their website (as I have done above), the ability to email a devotion to a friend, and (my personal favorite) the ability to watch the devotion fullscreen (this feature is only available at the home website: www.itiswritten.com/betterway). All these features are made available within the Flash video player via the option button on the bottom left. While these features are old news in today’s web, I thought this undertaking was special since not too many Christian ministries have yet taken advantage of some these new and powerful Flash-based features.
All the same, my hope is that you (the reader of this post) do find an opportunity to take advantage of this devotional site. I myself have already found some these simple devotions to be enriching and encouraging. In the “midst of a crooked and perverse” world we can use all the help we can get to turn our minds heavenward. “You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You” Isaiah 6:3 nkjv.
Last week was truly a Fisher Price moment for me as we put few final touches on the first all Flash website that I’ve ever built. The website, found at www.thinairevent.com, is a micro-site created for It Is Written’s “ground breaking” series entitled Out of Thin Air presented by IIW’s speaker/director Shawn Boonstra. The series will be tackling and addressing the Creation/ Evolution debate from a scientific and Biblical standpoint, which made me excited about the project from the get-go. Continue reading ‘My First Flash (site)’
Search
About
You are currently browsing the Stephen Adetumbi's Blog weblog archives for the Design category.
