I originally built this site to (a) tinker with Wordpress stuff and (b) house my online presence.

I have been slowly churning around what ThomTurner.com 2.0 will look like, and what the purpose of the site will be. I am going to be making significant changes to the look of the website and contemplating how the design change will reflect the content of the site.

As I have been mapping out what I want to do on the site I am also going to run two separate installations of Worpdress with separate themes as a way to teach myself how to use Wordpress to build a more comprehensive site. It will be a puzzle. And I love puzzles.

Beyond that, this will give me an opportunity to blog more about general life stuff that I am interested in. It will be random—the opposite of a site like Everyday Liturgy that is so focused.

The blog will be rambling with features on tips and tricks I am gaining with GIMP and Scribus. Several of my friends have encouraged me to blog more frequently, so once the overhaul is done I am going to do so. The portfolio is going to be super cool and very focused. I am looking forward to it. You should too!

Take a look at our Christmas newsletter.

Get your own – Open publication

ThomTurner.com might go through an aesthetic overhaul to make it more, well, aesthetic.  I am looking at highlighting the portfolio first and the blog second.  All through the power of Wordpress…

After a long year of tremendous work, family, and relaxation it is sometimes hard to write everything down and place it into a two or three page Christmas newsletter.  With the advent of such simple tools as Scribus and GIMP, along with a great online viewer like Issuu, a Christmas letter can be simplified and expanded by getting at the heart of the Christmas newsletter: letting actions speak louder than words.  And as an added bonus: no postage!

Our actions are captured in our pictures, and so instead of writing a two or three page verbose newsletter highlighting awards and band concerts, show people those awards and band concerts.  The newsletter should function more like a little photo magazine, with pictures telling the story so you don’t have to!  Captions can fill in the background information and the necessary biography.

Last year I created a two page Christmas newsletter and sent it out as a PDF with embedded links to pictures.  This year I decided to reverse the concept and have the pictures with little explanation—actions speak louder than words! So I picked out pictures from each month or big event from the past year and have been loading them into Scribus and using GIMP to do any heavier photo editing and for the best filter in the world: add border.  With Scribus and GIMP I know have a 16 page photo magazine ready to hand out to any one with an internet connection!

Here’s where it gets better.  Instead of attaching the PDF I am going one step further and uploading it into the Issuu viewer from issuu.com This viewer will display a standard PDF in many different ways, and can be embeded in any web page!  It eases the sharing for less tech-savvy people, because the interface is very user friendly and eliminates the step of saving and opening the attachment.

I have to add the back cover and some finishing touches to my newsletter, so get cracking on yours and we’ll see how they turn out!

“The Christianity of the land is a usurpation of the rightful place of Christianity as a voice for the oppressed and a counter-imperial prophetic demand for justice.” 

That’s a quote from my final graduate school paper “Two Christianities in America: Christendom and Prophetic Justice in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.”

Stay tuned for the whole paper in its attachment and reader glory.

I designed some Advent postcards for The Plant.  Check the gallery out:

Here’s the finished product. Please let me know what you think!

Get your own – Open publication

Where to begin when you are designing a church newsletter?  I am going to be finishing up a church newsletter for The Plant that I have “story boarded,” so to speak, outlined, and I am ready to GIMP and Scribus it away.

These are the steps I have been following to come to my final design concept.

1) Keep your branding.  Branding is so important to creating a cohesive, unified symbol of a church community.  The newsletter should share branding with the website, the pew cards, the stationary, etc.  If everything looks different it just turns cheesy.

2) Look at other examples.  Church newsletters can run the gambit from spruced up letter to blown out magazine.  It varies.  Find some you like and…

3) Choose a mode that fits your community’s culture.  Your newsletter should be an example of your church.  The product should reflect the zeitgeist of the church community.

4) Open Source it.  Let church members have the opportunity to send pictures or stories to you for inclusion in the newsletter.

5) Design away…

We’ll find out if they work right!

#22 in the AP Top 25 poll
#23 in the USA Today poll
#23 in the ESPNU Allstate Standings
and #25 in the BCS standings.

Just one more reason BCS is stupid.

Testudo is a force to be reckoned with. Fear the Turtle. And their quarterback is named Chris Turner. I have been trying to find a Turner jersey but can’t anywhere. Tell College Park to start cranking them off the assembly line!

This video is incredible. The stock picks of these “optimistic” “experts” were just awful.

What disturbed me most about this video is that Peter Schiff was not being attacked for his logic or numbers, but instead for not being “optimistic.” How can a whole population of experts become so delusional with the “optimism” opiate?