Theologians are as inexperienced at being design clients as designers are at responding to the Orate Fratres. And, while these deficiency lists and proposals are not coming from an actual designer (or an actual engineer), there are ways to avoid being a bad client.
This means “between what you’re presenting to us and what we already have.” Of course you can’t. Nobody expected that. You aren’t at fault for not being designers.
But to paraphrase a real designer, Erik Spiekermann, you invited me to do something you yourselves cannot do. (Or you would have done it.) You should trust me.
This amounts to an abnegation of any and all roles that design might play. Under this precept, St. Peter’s Basilica is indistinguishable from a yurt (actually a ger) in Mongolia, even though Pope Francis has been inside both of them.
The contribution of design to comprehension and to overall enjoyment is quantifiable and has been quantified. It’s also unquantifiable and ineffable. We won’t quantify it here, but we will maximize enjoyment and comprehension.
After the fire, Holy Family did not move into a yurt or a ger, and you don’t “typeset” your materials in Comic Sans. You do act like design matters. It’s just that you aren’t designers (see above).
Putting these objections together, even if you yourselves can’t tell the difference, you condemn everyone else, starting with your parishioners, to a degraded experience if you presume that you are just like them.
Redesigns and remediations are a pain in the ass at the outset. That’s why I’m showing up offering to do most of the work, and with nearly everything costed out and sourced.
That just means rigorous. Yes, this is picky. But it isn’t way too picky.
If you know what the word rubric means, the you understand the need for rigour. So does everybody else in the house: During Latin high mass, Holy Family’s audience watches celebrant, deacon, and subdeacon like a hawk.
But nobody’s watching any other part of the figurative store.
The core issues are two, but they are conjoined twins. Holy Family does not know there are better ways (this means correct ways) to do things, particularly regarding type and copy. The other head of the twin mutters “Yeah no, we’ll just bang things out the way we always have. There’s nothing to talk about.”
Again: The Windows user’s attitude to typography is “It doesn’t exist, it isn’t important, and I’m really good at it anyway.”
If that were true, all the collateral for the RENOVATIO project (sic – it’s a word nobody can pronounce right on the first go) would have been “typeset” in Comic Sans.
Rigour, which can be taught and learned, is sorely needed.
Corollary: “We were willing to deal with a couple of deficient items, but not a lengthy, all-encompassing set of deficiency lists like these.” No part of this brief involved minimizing the brute quantity of items to be fixed. We list everything that needs fixing and try to actually fix all of it.