I’ve never read Metamorphosis… but I expect I should someday.

Various Ways of Coping With An Unexpected Animal Body

Did a video spotlighting the Middle School Ministry at StoneBridge a few months back. There was a little extra pressure to do things well: my wife runs that program!

And here’s the finished video (you’ll notice we did a few things differently, like bring Christin in as an extra interviewee:

Last week, we were talking in staff meeting about why people come to StoneBridge (the church I work at). After we sorted through a few deep, spiritual concerns, someone mentioned our sermon logos.

See, we have a large billboard at the church entrance, and we put our new sermon branding on it each time we start a new series. It was mentioned that folks have come to church here just because my predecessor’s signs piqued their interest. Then all eyes in the room turned to look at me…

…Aaaand I’m only four weeks into being the main graphics guy. No pressure.

Fortunately, we’ve got a good process in place for these things. Here’s how we got there on our most recent logo:

From an intial discussion with my pastor, some rough ideas for the main logo.

After vetting ideas in a staff meeting, I scrawled this concept on the whiteboard. It was approved.

Attempts to draw a smooth, calligraphic "Soul" font

The final product, marrying the "soul" with a great iStock image and adding a little electric glow.

This was pretty simple and readable from a distance, but it also required a little bit of a longer look to get the whole meaning (and we love forcing a second look at our material).

I think we delivered.

Went to work on updating some of our old promotional material today.

New look for some recurring events

Applying the look to the Baby Dedication announcement

Upgrade to our Haiti trip promo

Old Consignment Sale slide

Revised version

I will now take a break from anything having to do with the colors blue and/or pink for the next 48 hours…

Animator Don Hertzfeldt is a pretty cheeky and subversive guy. (You’ve seen this, haven’t you?)

I recall one time where he put a comic in this slick anthology called Flight  that was made entirely of Post-It notes. It struck me: that’s a great medium. Just looking at it, you know that it’s intended to store a quickly-scrawled idea for a short time, then be discarded once you flesh it out somewhere else. To keep it around and show it off? That’s a little subversive. It’s cool to buck the natural order and keep them around.

I’ve been trying some quick sketches on a pad in my office lately, and I like the practice. This would be a great format to do a project with, someday.

Can you spot the disguised tangent in the cowboy picture?

People in The Woodlands have a passion for disc golfing. It’s unreal. I myself don’t excel at it, but it’s amazing to see how many dudes here go out and bond over hurling plastic circles into the woods. It’s like a civilized, conversation-oriented version of the discus. Or a less-sweaty Ultimate Frisbee.

So naturally, our church has a disc golf course.

Logo idea for our disc golf course, done on my tablet with Adobe Ideas

Completed logo: combination of line drawing and Photoshop

The logo idea was my boss’s; the execution is mine. But our real brainchild is David Wittenmyer, who both built the course and designed the website for it. Go admire his handiwork.

Still hacking away at a big ‘ol comics project! Here’re some rough drafts (blue first, then pencil scribble).

(More about what this is here and here).

If you’re interested in seeing more pages, Chapter 1 is up on my Google Plus page. Come check it out!

One last thing about Christmas at our church:

We had to build a little town of Bethlehem.

Plans for a full-scale Bethlehem mockup

That’s right. The senior staff decided to build a Styrofoam replica of Bethlehem in the middle of our church lobby. It wasn’t just meant to be an exercise in nativities. Besides just looking cool– and tying into our “Bethlehem Effect” holiday logo– it was also meant to be a display for our holiday giving campaign, which we cleverly dubbed “Cause An Effect.”

“Cause An Effect” was designed to offer multiple giving opportunities. That way, our congregants could decide for themselves which project they felt most strongly about and then contribute accordingly. Our three options included:

-Funding the building of school facilities for orphans in Zambia

-Buying  nursery and program supplies for an inner-city Houston church

-And providing the homeless and impoverished in our community opportunities to stay in a shelter and get a good meal.

The first option, Aid to Zambia, came with a logo all ready to go. That’s because a group of folks from our church had already been working to raise money for the orphans since the fall, doing fundraising and hosting a charity golf tourney. We were excited to bring even more attention to an already worthy cause.

(Logo provided pro bono by adWhite, an advertising and graphics agency in The Woodlands)

After we adopted their program as one of our holiday giving priorities, we decided to design the other two options so that they’d match the A to Z logo.

Thus, for our partnership with the inner-city Houston church, dubbed “Hope for Houston,” we created this image by using a rights-free picture of the Houston skyline, plus some Illustrator trickery:

“Hope for the Homeless” was a little trickier. I kept trying to draw pictures of guys wearing ratty beanies with nappy beards looking pitiful. That was a little overt.  Then, I had a revelation. I grabbed the camera phone:

And BAM: hands outstretched, looking like a heart. That quickly became this logo:

And we had our three options designed and ready to go. All that was left was to tie it back into our “Bethlehem Effect” theme. I did that by designing a parent logo from the “Bethlehem Effect” fonts, adding three multi-colored ripples at the suggestion of my friend, David (to show the ripple effect of being generous).

Now we needed to create a set of banners for the program that would hang behind our scale mockup of Bethlehem, acting as the “sky” part of the setup.

After sending the banners off to be ordered, we got our Styrofoam and some electrically heated knives, carved and painted our town, printed up our brochures, and the little display of Bethlehem was born:

And here’s a closer view:

This is the beauty of the job. You start with a logo idea; you end up with a giving campaign housed in an artificial foam city. I love the journey of creativity that my staff is willing to take. Small starts definitely lead to big effects around here.