I guess bottom line why complicate things when the best option is right in front of you. Setting this slide show up and customizing it to my needs and colors was a breeze.

Check out Easy Slider here: http://cssglobe.com/post/5780/easy-slider-17-numeric-navigation-jquery-slider

I built the mock up in Photoshop and am using 960grid as the framework for the site (though the header has a custom code), finally I will place it into Expressions Engine as it’s CMS. It has been a while since I have done a large scale website, enjoying this project as it goes along. I will keep posting as I go along.

It was a great trip and I thank my church for putting me up and flying me out there to be apart of the experience and learn from the conference. It was awesome to meet people that I had only meet via the Church Marketing Lab, and to also meet some new people.

Anyway the design that won is…

I really do want to thank my family, Micheal Buckingham, and ‘the family’ at the CML lab.

This design is a series that our pastor is preaching. Originally it came to me as “Hey Russ, Ken is preaching on ‘How to respond to the economic crisis’, but we are thinking through the title at the moment”. A week later they just stuck with “How to Respond to the Economic Crisis”. I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t thrilled, but then again I had nothing better. So that in mind I started my brain storming and started playing around with ideas. Three or four ideas later I started building this typographic map.

Anything built with type is funny, cause people have a hard time seeing it early on. Anyway it got good reviews with the peers, which always make me happy. Hope you all like it as well.

I knew on the front end that some issues would arise, I knew only the design specs about the book and nothing about the book itself. I didn’t know Rick Warren’s heart on the book and why he wrote what he wrote. Very quickly this became an impersonal project. Next is I realized very quickly this wasn’t a few people submitting, but ended up over 3000 designs were submitted with some people submitting more than 10. A lot spent no time at all on theirs and it was very clear by their submitted piece, others spent a lot of time on their piece again as evidence by their submission.

Bottom line… its a lose lose for everyone. Rick Warren gets a half rate design based on partial information on his book, 2000 some odd people walk away hurt and 1 person based on Rick Warren or his staffs opinion on what art is walks away with $5,000 and a nice piece to add to his portfolio.  Regardless of  the outcome, I am proud of my design, very pleased with how it came out, hope you enjoy it.

Found it Sermon Promo from Russell Brown on Vimeo.

Post was done by giving the video a acid wash curves effect and then adjusting another set of curves to make the contrast “pop”. A black vignette, a soft desaturated layer, and the grunge effect (via istock) which was actually doubled and off set to bring it out a little more.