Hey, Luke. Hey. I got a question about design and how important do you think good design is for our Adventist institutions? Well, that's something that I'm really passionate about, but I would love to talk to someone who really knows what they're talking about about that.

And I have someone in mind. Hmm. Well, who would that be? Brett Maledi.

Are you familiar with types and symbols? I have heard the name before. They do some really good work. Well, I am really excited because we're going to have him on the show.

So how about we talk to Brett himself and talk to him about this design for the Adventist Church? Fantastic. Let's do that. In each episode, we will sit down with different leaders from the ministry and technology worlds to see their insights, hear inspiring stories and get their hard-earned wisdom for future ministry leaders to use.

Only been talking for a few minutes and there's already so many ideas that I am really excited to chat to you about today. But I'd love to start by giving the audience a little bit of context for who you are. So maybe if you could start by just sharing a little bit about your job, what your role is and who you are. Sure.

I am creative director at Types and Symbols. If you're not familiar with Types and Symbols, we are an Adventist design studio. We work primarily with Adventist clients on Adventist projects for ministries or organizations that are focused on the Adventist mission. And yeah, in my job, I kind of oversee all of the creative aspects of the studio.

Yeah, that's a both design and produce things and Yeah, art direct kind of a little bit of everything oh That's fantastic I'm super excited to talk to you a lot of the stuff that we do at Blue Vineyard has a nice Dovetail into what types and symbols do you guys are heavy on the design? You have a great eye for the work. I've been going through and I encourage anybody to do this go to the Types and Symbols website and just click through the work that you have done. And I want to start us off with, I am super interested in, yeah, you guys did the NAD's booth for the GC conference.

And that looks beautiful. And I'm kind of curious how that came about. Thank you. Yeah.

So NAD contacted us, it was probably about a year or so out from GC session maybe a little bit more than a year, but And they asked us if we'd be interested in working with them on the design side of it obviously there are exhibit houses that produce booth spaces, so we were there to kind of oversee the look and feel of it and the layout and All of that aspect of that kind of goes into the planning of that space so We started out with floor plans. They had about 20 different ministries that had to be involved. I think it was like 14 educational institutions as well, along with a big health care area where the Adventist hospital systems were going to be exhibiting. And the general conference gave them this huge space, and we had to fit it all in.

So we went through a bunch of different iterations of the floor plan. and went back and forth with the different ministries and the NAD folks. We had a committee that was put together to make that happen and we laid it out several different ways. I think we had like 30 different iterations of that floor plan, but eventually we got the floor plan set and then we had to go into, okay, what does this booth space look like? The challenge was that You have all of these different ministries.

They all have their own branding in many different ways. They're very different looking. But we wanted it to feel like their mission, which is their theme for the general conference session, which was together in mission. So they wanted it to feel like they're one united North American division that is putting it all together and working together as a team towards their mission.

So that was the big challenge of the booth space was making it feel united, but still giving each booth their own space and their own way to communicate what their messages were, what their outreach focuses are, and giving them their own space to work in. So yeah, we started out sketching. I did a bunch of pencil sketches, honestly, to begin with, because it's kind of like the type of thing that there's an overwhelming amount of different booth hardware out there. And the exhibit provider that we worked with said, I don't know, just tell us what you want it to look like and we'll make it.

That's creative freedom. There you go. Yeah, so it's like, OK, well, we're starting with a blank page here. Nice.

And the best way is just to start making marks. And yeah, so we sketched out a bunch of different iterations of what the booths could look like and started to kind of get a theme. We had this rounded corners on things. And then we kind of came up with this material palette of wood and the NAD blue. picked a carpet color, and then started working with each ministry to design their own booth.

And so we had similar structure throughout. They had this kind of rounded shape. But each booth, we worked with individually to make sure that it met their needs and used their branding in some way and kind of communicated the things that they really wanted to get across at GC Session. And so ended up, yeah, 30,000 square feet of booth space.

And it was really, we like how it turned out. We were really happy. NAD seemed really happy and all the different ministries. And we did some cool things.

Like we made a podcast booth there where they could record podcasts live on the floor at GC Session. That worked out really well. We worked with professional services on that to get all the technology, but we designed the space and made sure they had what they needed. It was like plexiglass around the outside so that they could, you know, people walking by could see what was going on and kind of added to the hype around it.

And then there are some cool things like a 360 photo booth and the ministerial booth. And, uh, some other interactive type elements, but, um, yeah, there's a case study up on the website. You can see all the pictures and it's, it's super, super fun. It was a fun project.

It was huge though. I'm curious. I'm curious. This might lead into more of your, your design process, but historically a lot of the work that you have done has been, uh, either digital or print and like what is, and recently, yes, you have been doing more physical products.

Um, but this is like on a, on quite a different scale and I'm just curious, how has that transition happened? Was that an intentional process or, and, and was it difficult or was it just naturally that's where the team wanted to go and that's the direction that you're moving? Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't say it was an intentional thing.

This project came along. We had done other exhibits before, um, for clients, but they were much smaller. Um, I had worked on stuff in the past, even before, um, I went to Types and Symbols, and there was some experience there on my part with exhibit space and booths and things. So it kind of came somewhat naturally.

It's definitely a different muscle. You have to think about things a little bit differently, and you think about the space. Involved in in a physical space where you're gonna have this crowd of people moving through and you have to make sure that they Have enough room to get through and and see all the things and the flow of traffic and everything So it's it was it was both it was kind of intentional but The project came along and we we certainly jumped on it at the chance to be able to do it and stretch those muscles. Oh, man.

I imagine with a project like that, you guys have done so many cool ones. There is a lot of, hey, we want this. Oh, and we want this. And we also want this and we really love this and more and more and more and more as design. having to throw your weight around a little bit and say, well, we also need some negative space.

We need some, we need that, that needs to breathe a little bit. How do you work with clients on, and this isn't just obviously for this, but I think probably a lot of projects that you work with, how do you work with, with clients and they have a tendency to say, we want everything in the kitchen sink. And for you to say, well, I understand what you're saying. How do you approach this?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think the thing that we try to focus on is the strategy behind communication, right? So we take a step back and try to think about like, what is, and this is something I would ask every person within the NAD booth space is, What is the one thing that you're trying to communicate with this booth space? If people come to your booth space and walk by, it's kind of like a billboard, right?

You have a few seconds to get their attention in this busy exhibit hall. Sure, you could put everything that you're doing as a ministry on your booth and plaster it with all sorts of information. but no one's gonna walk away knowing all that stuff. It's just not possible for people to comprehend all that stuff within the short amount of time they're in an exhibit hall. So, yeah, that's kind of the one thing that we would focus on with each of the ministries is, you know, what's the main message that you're trying to get across?

What are you wanting people to walk away with? And let's focus on that. Let's do it really well versus trying to, like, just tell them everything at once. There's always space to direct people to a website if they're really interested and give them more information in other places.

Maybe you have a handout that you can put in their hand and they have more information. But yeah, it's really important, especially in the exhibit space, but in a lot of the design work that we do that you just kind of focus on, okay, how are you communicating that one important thing and let's do it really well. Yeah, I want to just add on to that. I was looking at what you did for the Nicodemus Society and how beautifully absent busyness is on that.

It's just peaceful. This feels nice. And there's some elements of motion that you've integrated into that design. Anything interesting that you found about that process of We're going to slow this down.

We're going to simplify this and make this peaceful. I don't know how else you would describe it. Yeah. So I think a lot of it goes back to our branding process.

So for Nicodemus Society in particular, and any branding process that we do with a client, we upfront, we talk about what is the brand tone that you're trying to get across and how do we best communicate that? And so before we do any design, before we put a pencils to paper in terms of the visual brand, we're narrowing down brand tone words and we're saying, this is what we want people to feel when they walk away from either our marketing materials or our logo or any of the communication that comes out of our organization. We want them to feel this way and we want it to feel like this to them. And so it's a matter of like synthesizing that into a brand tone.

And then when we go to design, we can compare everything to that brand tone. So like for Nicodemus Society, I don't remember the exact words that we had for them, but it was very likely something like simple, clean, high-end. maybe calm, I don't remember exactly. But when we're designing, we have that in mind now. And then when the client says something like, hey, I want to include all this stuff in this one little piece of flyer or whatever, we can point back to that and say, hey, but you really wanted this to feel simple and modern and clean.

If you're trying to cram all this stuff into there, it's not necessarily gonna do that way. So let's think about ways that we can simplify ways that we can kind of condense this so that people can really get the feeling of what we're going for in our brand tone and You're not overwhelming them with information Nice Interesting and I'm curious like you mentioned a part of that process and how you work through I imagine a big part, because you do so much work in the Adventist space, I imagine a big part of the reason that that work is available to you is because you are coming at it from like philosophically from the same worldview as them, right? You know, you understand the Adventist worldview and that aspect of it, what do you think, like, how do you think that changes the way you design? How do you think that makes you have the advantage of the edge.

Yeah, so each of us in our studio, we're all lifelong Adventists, right? So we grew up in the church. We've seen Adventist design from the time that we were young, and we've seen the red sometimes, and the bad and the ugly that's out there. Yeah, we were very interested in representing the beauty of the Adventist message beautifully and doing it in a way that is thoughtful and that can open doors instead of closing doors.

And so that's kind of our whole thing is we're looking for ways to do this the best way possible to represent the message. It is a beautiful mission that we stand for in the Adventist Church and we have such a beautiful message and a lot of times it's just not communicated well and it's not visually communicated well either. And so we feel that and that kind of is the background to our whole purpose. And so that certainly gives us, I don't want to say edge because we're not trying to be competitive.

You know, there aren't actually a lot of other advanced studios out there. So we don't feel like the need to, you know, make ourselves better than others. But certainly it gives us the background knowledge and the forethought to understand what we're doing and what our goal is with every project. Wow.

I imagine that you brought in some of that thinking as you were approaching the campus Sobble. project that you were talking to us about. This is a beloved camp. It's been around for many, many years. I've heard about Camp Asobel my whole life.

And yeah, it's not quite ready yet. We can't quite see anything. What was the problem that you were approached with and working to solve? Sure.

Camp Asobel is a unique camp. I think it's similar to a lot of Adventist camps in the sense that they have retreats and they have summer camp. But it's such a beautiful camp and they are expanding, they're building constantly and improving things. David over there, the director, he approached us and was like, we really need to get a better brand because they had this kind of Arrowhead logo.

You can see it on the website now. And it just wasn't really saying anything about the camp. There wasn't really an Indian connection to the camp. There's some, you know, there's some history with the area, but it didn't really say anything about the camp and it doesn't help promote the things that are great about Campus Abel.

And then everything that they were doing was kind of piecemeal. There, you know, there wasn't any cohesive branding that Uh, they were using across different things. So, um, they kind of approached us with this thing, like, Hey, are you interested in working with us? Um, I, it was a cool experience because we were like, yes, this would be amazing.

Cause we're all outdoorsy people and we love camp. I worked at summer camp, actually camp clock for several years, like during summers. And, um, you know, it's just like effort us as designers and people were super excited about being able to brand us a camp like this and Make a difference in the experience of all these people who are visiting every year both on the retreat side, which there's tons of group retreats that go they'll go up there and the summer camp side, which is you know, just hundreds of kids that experience this and as part of their growing up and even Ellen and our team, she went to Campus Aval. Ivan went to Campus Aval and Ivan's wife, Livi.

We're all like, yes, let's do this. It was a fun project. We went up there actually beginning of April of this past year. and during an ice storm, that was fun. We got there and there's sleet and snow coming across and ice.

The four of us met at this Mexican restaurant right there in town and the power went out as soon as we got there and the tree fell down across the street. It's like, we're dedicated designers. We're going to do this. We're making it happen.

So yeah, during that few days that we got to spend there, we spent some time with the staff and we did some brand tone exercises. We got to drive around camp and kind of experience what the buildings look like and what the highlights are in terms of landmarks. We got to meet with with Dr. Gordon Atkins, who's the nature center director there and science director.

And he was super cool, gave us a bunch of information about the flora and the fauna there at camp. And so we got to do like this deep dive with them of what's important about your camp, what's cool about it, what are the things that kids remember. And then we got to work on the logo design after that. Once we had that brand tone established, we put together some logo designs and proposals and met with them throughout the summer, well, late summer after GC session was over.

And then we finalized the logo about a month or so ago, and it's not launched yet, but they should have it out soon. And then we came up with a system of icons for all the different things on camp. So it's like... these icons drawn on a specific grid so that they're all very cohesive and there's like an icon for the mini mech bridge and there's an icon for the nature center and there's icon for the boats and waterfront and high adventure which is like the rock climbing wall and like all the different things there's icons and now we're working on signage and so there's going to be new signs around the camp and stuff that reflect the new branding. Ivan actually drew a custom font based on their signage that's existing at the camp and So we're excited to have them start using that all the branding stuff Came up with some patches patch designs and some things that they can use on the merch and from the camp store and Yeah, it's it's super fun and rewarding to see all this stuff like start getting put into use and I can't wait to go visit again because it's going to be fun to see it all in action.

I feel like it really changes the psychology of any organization. If you've got a cohesive brand that you think differently about it. We're not just a group of people doing a thing. It has a personality of its own and I think that's a real beautiful part of design and that is that You are charged with breathing life into whatever that identity is that people are standing under, right?

That's a really interesting responsibility to have. Yeah. Interesting thing happens with specifically like the brand tone exercises that we do. A lot of times people walk away from that and say, this has helped me understand how to talk about our ministry. because a lot of times the leaders will be so close to the ministry that they'll tell you how they do things and tell you exactly what it is that they're doing, but they don't necessarily know how to communicate the why or how to communicate to their audience in a way that makes the audience realize how they need to feel about this. what do you want people to feel when you look at your organization and look at your marketing materials and your communications?

What do you want people to walk away with? A lot of times, that's unnecessarily clear until they do the brand tone stuff and they walk away with this strategy of, any copywriting we do, let's run it by this litmus test of does it align with our brand tone? That just helps people communicate better. Yeah, you talk about being unclear.

I'm looking at the Camp Asobel website. And when you said that their logo was like a spearhead, I was like, wait, I thought that was a fish. It looks kind of like it was like a small, like, is that a fish? No, no, that's an Indian head.

Like, OK, it says Camp Asobel on there. And no disrespect to whoever the long gone designer that exactly came before us. Speaking of which, is that something that you, like when you're approaching design, do you really try to start with just a like, this is the ministry as of today, we're not going to try to bring a lot of history with us, and we want to start fresh? Or is there an element of the design process where You're trying to tell the story from the past and then the current and then the future.

How do you approach legacy design? Yeah. Well, it depends on the project, but I'll keep using Campo Salvo as an example. For them, we actually, David brought us a bunch of photo albums and just folders of pictures and different materials.

And we just laid it out on a table in their conference room and looked at it all. And it was to an extent inspiration for the branding. Obviously, none of it matches exactly. But there's like a flavor that maybe comes from that because this is a place with so much history and so many people have fond memories of it.

We don't want to like just throw all that away. In a case like this now there are you know, obviously ministries that the design Previously was not very well thought out and they don't have any attachment to it and certainly we can start from scratch based on you know, their brand tone and what they're trying to communicate now, so It goes both ways. I think it depends on kind of the goals of the design and what they're trying to communicate. I'd like to, I just want to explore something a little bit.

You were, you know, you were talking about how people feel like doing the, these, going through the process with you clarifies their own message of what they're trying to communicate. A lot of times, especially, and this is especially true with smaller organizations, they often put design like a bit further away. Like we'll do that later when we have more money or more time or whatever that is. From your perspective, what would you say to that?

When is the right time to be asking those questions and looking at those services? Yeah. I mean, I, I think as early as you can, um, in terms of, you know, you're, you're planning how your organization works and how, um, who your audience is and you know, what you want to communicate to people. I think the earlier you can, the better, but obviously there's a certain level of, um, You know you have to have the budget and you have to you know plan the time for it And certainly it's an investment of those both of those things You know we're We're not as cheap as like, you know your cousin's Sister who's a graphic designer?

She can make me a logo for ya We don't don't just like make a logo and throw a bunch of options and see what yeah throw out a bunch of options and see what sticks. We're definitely a different type of design studio. It's something that has to be intentional and you have to have an appreciation for being design minded and thinking about the humans behind what you're making. What is it that you're trying to achieve and communicate at a high level?

And then we've even helped some organizations plan like how they communicate to their audience and what that looks like from a communication standpoint. Certainly, we can help you think about how your organization works and do the strategy and design thinking around that early on if you're willing to engage in that process with us. I'd like to, I really appreciate talking about some of the design and how you get there and working with the clients. I'd be remiss if I didn't nerd out a little bit and ask you some questions about tooling and how you think about the different tools you use.

There's so much happening in the space that of these giant companies that are giving creators different tools in order to make the thing. Whether you know canvas big huge investment and then what Adobe's have been doing and and all that I'd love to like and then In order for SEO we have to talk about AI just a little bit Of course, but I'd love to kind of hear like what what tools are you excited about? Are you trying anything new? Yeah, what what are you guys doing?

You know, it's interesting like we we certainly try a lot of different things in terms of How we work but we have we've kind of been on adobe train for a long time because that's kind of the standard for uh design I think you know I and people have asked me this so I know a lot of i'm i'm actually living pretty close to southern i'm like less than an hour away I know several students there who are going through the school of visual art art and design and like If people ask me, like, hey, what tools do I need to design? Yeah, you can use Affinity Designer. Canva bought it. It's free, like, right now.

And that's great. Like, the biggest thing for me is sharpening your intuition and design skills and understanding, like, you know, what is good? What is good design? What is not good design? why that's good, why that's not good.

I'm not big on the tool makes the thing. It's more about the, what is the saying? I'm blanking on it now. The bow or the Indian.

Is it the bow or the Indian? I'm more on the Indian side. If you have a good Indian, you can make good work. As long as you know the standard, the basic.

Production standards and and know how to produce something and execute on it. But But yeah, we we are as a studio mostly using Adobe project products We have dug into figma a bit You know and in more the digital work But really Adobe product products is our our main Toolbox. Yeah, and how do you as a follow-up to that? How do you see the workflow changing with the new technologies that are becoming available with the AI?

Like how far away before that starts affecting you or like, what are your thoughts? Yeah. I literally had somebody ask me this last weekend. Oh, my daughter's in high school.

She's thinking about going into design. Is there going to be a design field in a few years? Like, is AI just going to do away with those jobs? The design of the groups?

Yeah. I think there are a lot of different thoughts on this. We could probably have a whole podcast just on this but You know, I think the the biggest Discussion around AI for me is what is the value that is giving? There are certainly a lot of integrations that AI That like Adobe is doing with AI that that are making our job easier.

Just for example, Photoshop, like generative expanding photos, right? I used to spend hours with the cloning brush in Photoshop, just like going a little bit at a time, making sure it looks natural, you know, to expand the photo. But now you can just like recrop it and it's there. And so things like that are amazing.

I think they're super handy and um helpful as a tool obviously there's the whole like discussion around um writing content uh we fortunately don't have to do a ton of that so you know we'll use it here and there but mostly we try to you know be creative and and write ourselves yeah but and ai is is huge like synthesizing information um you know we use it for all our meetings We don't have to take notes in meetings anymore, which is great because we can focus on the conversation and just be more present. So there are a ton of tools out there that make it useful. But as of right now, I don't feel like it's replacing the strategy or the creativity that we can put into our work. And a lot of that comes with like with every brand design, there are a thousand different decisions that we're making throughout the process.

And that process may be kind of stretched out. Like with Campo Sable, we've been working on this for, you know, not quite a year, but a good portion of the summer and just the branding process of us going through and internally discussing things and why does this work? Why does this not work? You know, trying to figure out what's worth showing to the client and what's gonna get cut.

And so there's a huge amount of process there that I just don't see AI being able to match that kind of creativity that's innate in humans. Yeah, my hypothesis is that your job is more secure than ever in the sense that... there is so much bad design out there that needs to be fixed. And so much of it was not approachable by companies. They couldn't, they didn't have time to do it.

And maybe a Sabal's project will take three months in the future. You know, maybe that's where it is and you can get through them quicker. But like I was thinking of someone talked about like radiology, like, oh, radiology is going to go away. And like, yeah, because AI is really good at looking at fractures or cancer, whatever it is, but there is so much radiology that needs to be done.

So it's actually still a booming field. There's so much bad design all around us is that, yeah, I'm so glad AI is coming, but it's not coming for our jobs. It's coming to make those jobs hopefully easier and more approachable and better. There's a lot of bad design out there.

Yeah, and I think it can do some layout and it can do some text design. It can do some flyers or posters, kind of one-off things. Those type of things, yeah, maybe there'll be less of those projects out there because some people would just go to AI and get a poster made for their bake sale or whatever. Certainly as a student, I started out doing one-off posters like that.

Feel bad for the design students who are like just give me any little job. I'll take it, you know So, you know, there's that sort of thing that's taking away but it it's Yeah, the the more strategic side of design I don't I don't see it replacing and we also deal a bit a great bit with like physicality of materials We do a lot of printing We have the Conflict Beautiful books, the Light and Life collection. We pick materials based on how they feel in your hands. We deal with fabric covers and wooden bookcases and paper stock and texture of paper.

Like the Campo Sable stuff, we're starting to look at signage and what materials can we use to build these signs. For the NED stuff like exhibit design You know, this is space planning and and thinking about how humans fit into space And this stuff like I don't know that AI is gonna be able to do that stuff You know and replace the human experience of what those things need. Yeah so for people that are ministry leaders, because the majority of our audience are people who are either ministry leaders or they work with the church or whatever that might look like. In a lot of those places, there is an understanding that good design is important, but there are still, as Adam was pointing out before, there's still a lot of space for good design because there's still so much bad design out there.

If you were talking to someone who is not design minded, And it's your responsibility to convince them to care about design, to reach their goals for ministry. How would you articulate that? What are the reasons that those people should care about good design and investing in good design? Design is how you communicate.

And it's not, you know, making things pretty. It's making things that actually have a message and people will see and Understand what you're trying to say to them so if you want to understand your audience and understand the best way to tell them what you're doing and Why they need to be interested? Then that's what design is for and so Yeah, that's kind of the the short Pitch I think is is just you can you can write words on a paper all you want but if It doesn't look and feel like you're you're wanting it, you know wanting to communicate Then it's not gonna come across the way you think it's coming across. Oh Brett it's been such a pleasure to get to know you a little bit better and to kind of explore these different projects I am in awe of the work that Types and Symbols does.

And if somebody else out there is also in awe of the work of Types and Symbols and would like to meet you, learn more about the work that you do, how would they get in touch with you? Sure, yeah. You can feel free to email me. It's just Brett, B-R-E-T-T at typesandsymbols.com.

We're on Instagram and Facebook if you want to follow us at types and symbols and then Our website is types and symbols calm this types T Y P E S and a nd s y m b o l s calm Yeah, and we're not hard to get a hold of so cool feel free to reach out we are we're Always looking to have good conversations. That's great. Yeah. Thank you for your time and for teaching us.

I learned a lot and I love walking through these, these projects because yeah, every project starts with that problem. And what are we going to do? And the Campus Sobble where you're literally in a snowstorm trying to solve their problem. That's, that's pretty exciting.

Can't wait to see how, um, how, yeah, we think we'll be able to see some of the designs for Campus Sobble here pretty soon. I'm not a hundred percent sure. I know David had some health stuff that he was dealing with so We're not sure exactly when they're gonna launch but We can keep you in touch. We'll be posting I'm sure on on Instagram as soon as we can We'll definitely tag us and that we'll have to see see how that turns out for sure for sure Thank you guys so much.

All right. Thank you Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Blue Vinyard podcast. For more episodes, information about our services and more, please visit bluevinyard.com.