Ensuring that you stay up to date with the design trends and digital movements that we see each week is important for anyone looking to have a career and an impact in the world of digital. If you work for a church and are tasked with creating digital products each day, you may know how difficult it can be to stay relevant, fresh and not lose touch with the industry.
It is important not to let people think that being on trend is not really needed in the Church; on the contrary! Some people may think that a good design will last forever but this is rarely the case. The world of design and digital is fast-paced and moves and changes a lot. The church must keep up and be aware of what is going on around them in order to stay appealing to the world.
Here are some ways you can keep up to date with the digital world and stay ahead of the game:
Read design and tech blogs
Websites like Techcrunch, Dribbble, Creative Boom, Design Milk and awwwards.com are great examples of places to visit daily for inspiration, advice, tips and to watch the way that design is evolving. Save them to your bookmarks bar in your web browser and schedule the time in to your calendar to spend 15-20 minutes each day catching up on the design/digital industry.
Follow people on Twitter
As well as reading the blog websites of popular on-trend companies, you can follow them on Twitter to get even more instand updates on what is happening in the industry and links to useful articles. A few people worth following are @netmag, @smashingmag, @CreativeBloq, @creationswap and of course @church_digital. Accounts like these will tweet about their own artices as well as re-tweeting other content that will be helpful.
Go to networking events and industry conferences
Another great way of keeping informed and learning new tricks is to meet up with like-minded people. You can do this at networking events, conferences and meet-ups across the country. Some quick googling will show you some of the more popular events. Some are free and some are not, but all are worth-while and necessary to keep you in the game.
Make connections and talk regularly
You may meet some friendly industry-savvy people along the way – make friends with them! Add them to your Skype contact list, or add them on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Send them regular messages to find out what they are working on, interesting articles they have read, new technologies they have tried out and any exciting examples of cutting-edge church media they have come across recently.
Do you have any other ideas of how we can stay connected and up-to-date in the church media world? Let us know in the comments below.
