My post-Dordt journey started in 2000 after graduating with a graphic design degree. I moved to Sioux Falls, South Dakota and worked for two dot-com startups right out of the gate. Two years and two failed ventures later, I had learned some valuable lessons about life, business ethics, and how to unsuccessfully run a small business.
I took a job with an interactive development shop called Electric Pulp as a project manager and absolutely loved it. It was here that I decided the online space was my ideal fit. I ended up getting my MBA realizing that I was moving away from design and more into the “business” of marketing. It was also during that time I moved into the healthcare marketing field, anxious for the opportunity to combine online/offline strategy into a cohesive effort.
After spending three years at Sanford Health managing their online efforts, I realized there was a significant lack of knowledge in the marketplace on how businesses could effectively utilize the web. A gaping void existed in our marketplace for an online strategy firm. After much prayer and consideration, I started Click Rain, Inc. — an online marketing firm – and have never looked back.
Click Rain helps organizations understand digital strategies and how to properly apply them to their core business. We like to say we help businesses market smarter. Traditional media is dying a slow death. That’s not a biased statement from an online marketing guy… it’s fact. Unfortunately, many businesses are slow to respond to this technographic shift. Our services – things like web development, search engine marketing, social media strategies, email, and mobile technologies – provide tangible ROI that demonstrate the value of a polished online game. That sounds really “salesy”, I suppose. But that’s what makes online marketing so great – the trackable, traceable nature of it.
Click Rain does a lot of work in the political arena and is currently entrenched in several heated races for 2010, including a U.S. Senate race in Kentucky that is getting national attention. We’re also doing work in financial services, healthcare, and hospitality, to name a few. You can view some of our client work here.
While my graphic design chops are pretty rusty, I do break them out on occasion when duty calls. I designed the Click Rain identity, but have since relied on the much more talented design skills of my team for our interactive design work. My day is spent more on the operations of a small business, business development functions, and managing the online strategies for our larger client accounts.
While I wasn’t sure where my graphic design degree would take me in 2000, I am thankful to have a design background when dealing with my staff and clients. I am also appreciative of the moral base instilled during my time at Dordt, which has helped me through some difficult business choices and created the foundation for my decision-making framework today.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Dordt Alumni in Design: Paul Ten Haken
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The time I asked Jay Doblin a question.
Permit me tell you about the time I had the privilege to speak briefly with renowned industrial designer Jay Doblin (1920-1989). In 1983, the Society of Typographic Arts (STA) sponsored a conference, in Chicago, for design educators at the Illinois Institute of Technology and held in S.R. Crown Hall. On a superb October Saturday the conference was like a garden party with an impressive guest list of Who’s Who in design education. Sectional facilitators included Katherine McCoy, Gordon Salchow, Victor Margolin, Patrick Whitney, Dale Fahnstrom, and Michael McCoy. Conference attendance was not large and it was a small gathering for each breakout session. Jay Doblin, a dean of design educators, was the keynote speaker.
Doblin encouraged the audience to think of design education as fostering cultural transformation. He supported his thesis with a case history and discussion of the work of architect Ben Thompson. As he spoke he seemed to assume that we all knew who Ben Thompson was. Later, I was able to meet Doblin and I asked the question, “Who is Ben Thompson?” Doblin seemed embarrassed that I asked the question and went on to describe Thompson as a friend.
Thompson passed away in 2002 at the age of 84. And as stated in his obituary:
Benjamin C. Thompson, an architect whose exuberant re-creation of Faneuil Hall in Boston inspired festival marketplaces around the country and whose Design Research International stores have influenced home furnishings to this day. Conventional boundaries were not part of Mr. Thompson’s practice, for he was just as much an advocate as an architect of vital cities, human commerce, lively design and good eating.In 1966 Thompson’s essay, “Visual Squalor and Social Disorder,” advocated for an urban architecture that would promote joy and social life.
‘For art to be part of our life we must live with it, not just go to museums,’ Mr. Thompson said in a 1963 interview in The New Yorker. ‘In a way, things like museums and Lincoln Center kill art and music. Art is not for particular people but should be in everything you do—in cooking and, God knows, in the bread on the table, in the way everything is done.’
‘It was food, it was the culture of food, it was the design of objects that surround us in our daily lives and the buildings that sold them,’ the architect Moshe Safdie said about Mr. Thompson’s career. ‘It was an extraordinary celebration of design, life, urbanism and all the things we tend to take for granted now. He was one of the forces that changed America in that respect.’ From racematters.org.
Thompson’s essay made me think about urban architecture from a Christian perspective of common grace. That is to say, creative designers can be the miracle workers, finding holy-spirited solutions to societal problems. Christian graphic design students and design practitioners need to ask this question: “How does my work help grow the kingdom of God?” In response, we can begin this work by cultivating a creative attitude in the community of Jesus Christ. As philosopher, Nicholas Wolterstroff eloquently puts it:
The task in history of the people of God, the church, the followers of Jesus Christ, is, in the first place, to witness to God’s work of renewal to the coming of His Kingdom. Its task is, secondly, to work to bring about renewal by serving all people everywhere in all dimensions of their existence, working for the abolition of evil and joylessness and for the incursion into human life of righteousness and shalom. Thirdly, it is called to give evidence in its own existence of the new life, the true, authentic life—to give evidence in its own existence of what a political structure without oppression would look like, to give evidence in its own existence of what scholarship devoid of jealous competition would look like, to give evidence of what a human community that transcends while yet incorporating national diversity would be like, to give evidence in its own existence of what an art that unites rather than divides and of what surroundings of aesthetic joy rather than aesthetic squalor would be like, to give evidence in its own existence of how God is rightly worshipped. And then lastly it is called to urge all men [people] everywhere to repent and believe and join this people of God in the world.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas P. Art in Action. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1980. 197.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Cathie Bleck: artist | illustrator
A couple of weeks ago artist Cathie Bleck, kindly, posted a comment on our piece about Carl Regehr. Her comment referenced Milton Glaser while she reminisced fondly about Regehr as an exceptional teacher. Her blog is titled, The Artwork and inspirations of Artist Cathie Bleck. And in May 2009, she posted her interview with Milton Glaser for Communication Arts Magazine. The interview is very interesting and insightful.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Tonya Harpenau: a follow-up
Still photography sequence is courtesy of Paul Hanaoka.
Graphic design entrepreneur Tonya Harpenau of Dezign Lines, which is based in Le Mars, Iowa, was the Dordt College AIGA student group’s first guest presenter of 2010. On Thursday evening, January 21, fifteen people came to Tonya’s presentation where her energy and enthusiasm for graphic design was very apparent.
Ms. Harpenau began by first "breaking the ice" with the group by handing out mini candy bars. And from there showed and passed around to the audience actual printed examples from her portfolio. It was absolutely delightful to see an early work sample of hand drawn “comps” and multi-layered mechanical boards with cut amberlith film for color separations. Tonya then proceeded to discuss transition into digital graphic design, art direction, and her personal vocational path. She was insightful when she conveyed what it's like to work for a variety of clients and being self-employed in Northwest Iowa.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Did “Booster” foreshadow airport security scanners?
The U.S. Transportation Security Agency’s (TSA) has started using whole-body imaging technology. Did artist Rauschenberg’s life-size lithographic print, Booster, foreshadow the new airport security scanners? Did he have a prophetic eye?
One of the most successful of Rauschenberg’s collaborations has been with the Gemini GEL print workshop – a printmaking partnership that permanently changed the terrain of American printmaking. The artist’s highly experimental approach to print processes comes to the fore in the colour lithograph and screenprint Booster, created in 1967. For Booster, Rauschenberg decided to use a life-sized X-ray portrait of himself combined with an astrological chart, magazine images of athletes, the image of a chair and the images of two power drills. Printer Kenneth Tyler was a masterful facilitator for Rauschenberg’s ambitious project and the collaboration radically altered the aesthetic possibilities of planographic printmaking. Rauschenberg and Tyler pushed beyond what had previously been done by combining lithography and screenprinting in a new type of ‘hybrid’ print. The rules governing the size of lithographic printmaking were also ignored, and at the time of its creation Booster stood as the largest and most technically sophisticated print ever produced. Today, Booster remains one of the most significant prints of the twentieth century, a watershed that catapulted printmaking into a new era of experimentation.
Text taken from the National Gallery of Australia website.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Tonya Harpenau: guest designer
Tonya Harpenau, graphic designer, will be presenting her work this Thursday, 21 January at 7 pm. in room CL 1223. Tonya is owner of DeZign Lines in Le Mars, Iowa. Her clients include: AG Partners, Burgess Health Center, Plymouth Ice Cream Company, and others. All are invited to attend. 
Burgess Health Center
Friday, January 15, 2010
The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within
For some time, I've appreciated the work and insights of Edward R. Tufte and one of his books is in my library entitled, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Dordt’s library has a copy… check it out. The book was required reading for one of my OEM clients in the 1990s.
Last semester, when we were implementing the Iowa e-Health Identity Project the design principals discussed whether or not to present to the IDPH panel with PowerPoint or with art mounted to large presentation boards. In the ensuing discussion about the pro and con of PowerPoint the decision was made to use the traditional black boards for the presentation (Madman style), which was a decision that turned out to be very beneficial. Anyway, I thought about Tufte’s, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.
Someone wrote this about the book:
“In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now “slideware” computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.
Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?”
For more about PowerPoint, here’s a sample from the essay:
PowerPoint Does Rocket Science—and Better Techniques for Technical Reports
