Yes, I read fashion blogs. As I have become more passionate about communication and design it has become clear that communication design is a full package, head to toe. To be honest this doesn’t mean you should look to me for my fashion sense. I’m a work in progress.

My fashion reading is more in the area of street fashion as apposed to fine fashion…not that I’m not in to fine fashion it just doesn’t fit into the real world very well.

Sartorialist

Probably as high fashion as I get. The Sartorialist is a photographer who captures people he sees every day on the street. Rather than the runway he hits the city looking for real people in real places to find fashion inspiration.

Hypebeast

Hypebeast is an all around fashion blog that also focuses a bit on the culture and industry that produces it. With a strong influence from skate culture, Hypebeast has a good pulse on what fashion is hitting the streets.

Nice Kicks

Nice Kicks is a local shop here in Austin but they have a world wide following due to the fact that they get access to rare and limited release kicks from various companies.

Hit me with your favorite fashion blogs, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 go!

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I dwell in an organization that inherently has complex vision and ideas that can be difficult to communicate. Last week I wrote about communication design and I want to start fleshing out those ideas a little further.

On our team I have started to introduce a few of the players to my new favorite phrase; Whack Bat. We are in the middle of rolling out a strategy that is very complex yet needs to be communicated simply.

Whack Bat

The issue that arises in such a large collaboration is that different people are passionate about different pieces of the puzzle and can start to feel threatened when the communication effort doesn’t appear to show what they think the value of the component is.

What strategies does your team use to take a complex idea and whittle it down to something simple?

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This week’s three blogs are news blogs. In my world of social media and internet, things move super fast and I need to stay on top of all of it. Sure there are the news sites, but I want more thoughtful and focused stuff. Here are three blogs I keep an eye on to stay on top of the game.

Fast Company

Fast Company sits in a niche right in the middle of business, technology and pop culture which I’m finding is my sweet spot. Writing that out makes Fast Company sound boring but when you really break it down it is a great blog on sociology since the things that drive western culture are pop-culture, technology and business.

// Keywords: sociology, business, technology, pop-culture

TreeHugger

Really? TreeHugger? I grew up with a passion and love for all things nature and outdoors and TreeHugger is a great source for news in that space. The green movement or what ever you choose to call it is a true driving force in our culture right now. A word of warning; TreeHugger does drop like 20 posts per day.

// Keywords: green, organic, nature, politics

Mashable

Half of my work falls in social media and the news feed at Mashable is focused on exactly that. If social media has a piece of the story it is on Mashable. I can keep an eye on emerging social networks and trends which is vital for gauging the next moves to make in web space.

// Keywords: social media, twitter, facebook, meme

Hit me with your favorite news blogs, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 go!

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Ed Stetzer Referred the folks at USA Today to me a couple days ago and I told them what Gateway Church Austin has been up to online when it comes to our prayer team. Head on over and read the article.

Also head over to Ed’s blog for a more in depth look at the data that is referenced on church and technology.

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If left unchecked, your Twitter space can get overwhelming and the result is that you become a lame Tweep. I have a few things I do regularly to keep things tidy and happy.

Prolegomena: Twitter is a mostly open public forum if you are not interested in connecting with people you don’t already know then you should stick to Facebook because you are missing the point of Twitter and breaking the internet. I wrote a post about the Facebook and Twitter relationship.

Following

Following someone does not mean you are listening. Following is an acknowledgment that you see that they are a real person with something legitimate to bring to the table and not a spammer/gamer. If you follow me and are a real person with an avatar, bio and a link, then I will follow you back. This doesn’t mean that I am listening to you however.

LISTening

This is how I organize who I am actually listening to. Twitter lists are subsets of twitter users that allow you to pay attention to a smaller group of people. This works best when you use a Twitter client (I use Tweetdeck) that has columns or tabs to display different feeds. A couple of my favorite lists are one of my colleagues in my field and another list, which is private, called; ‘don’t miss’. That one is a list of close friends and other people that I don’t want to miss. Making it private makes it so that they don’t know they are on the list but more importantly other people can’t see that they are not on it.

I do keep a column of everyone I follow and look at it a lot, but the shelf life of a tweet in a stream of thousands is pretty short.

Unfollowing

The most rocking tool ever for pruning your Twitter account; Manage Flitter. Manage Flitter looks at my account and allows me to drop people in bulk. About once a month I go there and drop everyone who isn’t following me back. I’m on Twitter for the conversations and relationships not to simply consume your content. That’s the main function that I use it for, but it will also let you sort out people who Tweet too much, don’t tweet enough, don’t have a profile pic, have certain keywords in their bio or tweet certain things.

You may have seen me follow you more than once because you didn’t follow back and your name came up somewhere and I followed you again, I’m pretty sure this has happened more than a few times for some people I follow. This is because when I do clean up my Twitter once a month I unfollow everyone who isn’t following back.

That’s how I live in the twitternets. It’s not perfect but it works for me.

How are you keeping things organized?

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Communication has seen a rapid change in the last couple years. Most of that shift coming from the demand side as people have changed their content consumption habits and content creators  have had to play catch up. People are going to less movies, reading less newspapers, watching less cable and network television.

When I was taking my public speaking and homiletics classes in college the entire focus was on delivery. How to talk. How to stand. How to look around the room. How to not be boring. There was very little focus on understanding what the consumers of my talking were thinking our how to cater to their needs in any given environment.

This is where design comes in.

No longer is it good enough to simply make something that works. Or to simply write out an idea. Gone are the days where you can walk on stage with your notes and do the talking head thing for 40 minutes.

Communication needs design just as much as anything…and maybe more.

Enter the film Objectified.

It’s a film about design but as a watched it I understood that design wasn’t just about tools, furniture and living spaces.

Design is the vehicle that communicates the idea of what an object is and how to use it.

The film takes you on a journey of stories from different people at different places in the world of design and as I watched it I couldn’t help but draw the parallels to communications.

If you teach, write or in anyway communicate, you must watch this film.

If you watch it and don’t get it, take an inventory of how relevant you…because things are changing have changed.

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For 2011 I’m going to be focusing very heavily on content creation and delivery. An important part of content creation is for me to consume a lot of content. On Mondays I’m going to share three blogs that I read regularly and I would love for you to share blogs that you’re reading in the comments.

This week, some design focused blogs:

Public School

I started subscribing to Public School a few months ago because it was making some noise here in Austin. Public School is a design studio here in Austin and the content of their feed reflects that. It’s less of a source of a original content as it is a aggregate of what the designers at Public School come across in their internet travels.

// Keywords: design, culture, communication

Mike Industries

Mike Davidson is a seasoned web developer with some really big sites under his belt. He doesn’t post a lot so this one won’t bog you down. If you are into user experience (not just the web kind) you might want to add Mike to your reader.

// Keywords: user experience, industry news, web design

Promise Tangeman

Promise Tangeman is a good source for design inspiration. She promised (hehe) to post more often this year….didn’t we all? Anyway, a little of this a little of that and some good links to.

// Keywords: graphic design, photography, fashion

Hit me with your favorite design blogs, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 go!

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We have spent most of the last year looking for a way to improve community communications around Gateway Church Austin and we have settled on SoChurch to fill in the gaps between our ChMS, website and social media outposts.

Becky Laswell, who is the project lead, started a blog series to outline the details on how we’re using SoChurch.

Go check it out.

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