Titus Slides

Titus was a series at Kaleo in the book of…Titus (sometimes you just get worn out on creative series names).Titus is written by Paul to a young pastor, Titus, of a small town. This series is intesely practical. Pastor’s Bill spin was to push people to move into action.With that said, I decided to give Titus, the man, a face (well not really “a face”, more of just a body and the back of a head). Using an image with a little ambiguity helps the viewer place themselves in the concept.Enjoy.

Make Friends at Basilica

Pastor Joel at The Basilica Community does it all. He’s the pastor, the set-up guy, the tech guy, he fixes everyone’s computer, he’s one heck of a guitar player (but he’s done a good job of getting that base covered), and he designed their website, forum, members only area, and just about every other piece they’ve put out. So when he ran out of gas and asked me if I could throw something down, I said yes.

The Basilica Community meets on the campus of San Jacinto College so a natural target is college students. The problem is that most college students are smart enough to know when they are being marketed to and they don’t like it…unless it involves a credit card and a future in debt, or a free t-shirt…or donuts…But other than that, they don’t like it.

So, my challenge was to create something very Basilica, very college, and very not marketing - oh and it had to make french fries on the side.

Here’s the poster I came up with. The approach here…close your eyes, shake your head around really fast, and design something based on the first five things you see in the spots that start to form in front of you. There’s no mention of church until they get to the site. At which point they will make the connection, “This church is not like any other church I’ve slept through!” and they’ll go.

Pastor Joel LOVED this one.

The Basilica Community is Serious About This

The Basilica Community is a brand new church in South East Houston, TX. To help them get off to a good start and raise some funds, I was asked to put together their prospectus, AKA “Business Plan”, AKA “We’re serious about this.”

The goal was to keep the information brief and easy to take in. So, I tried to incorporate a lot of space to make things easy to take in smaller chunks.

They are targeting a series of suburbs that are often looked over or looked down upon in South East Houston. With that said, and at Pastor Joel’s suggestion, I used the various water towers in the suburbs to represent each city and to allude to a source of water or “living water” near by.

This book was also repurposed into a PDF eBook to make it MUCH cheaper to distribute.

Starting a new church is almost like starting a new cult…not that I would know…but the reaction you get from most people is first, a look of disbelief and then they start corralling their kids to the other side of the playground. With that said, simply looking legitimate is half the battle in raising support.

Too often churches neglect a viable and effective marketing effort and, as a result, the potential spread of their ministry and the gospel suffers.

Here are a few spreads:

You Made Your Bed!

And I made this Poster.

Ecclessia Church, in Houston, has made it a point to be part of the community they are located in. The area that surrounds their church values art, coffee, philosophy, music and individuality just to name a few. So, Ecclessia values the same things in their recording studio, coffee shop, art gallery and concert venue.

Nearly every month, the Ecclessia art gallery, Xnihilo Gallery, installs a new show complete with an artist reception. I have been asked, several times, to create the artwork for those shows.

You Made You’re Bed, Now Sleep in it! is a show featuring a series of mixed media paintings with the common theme of a bed. Using the actual artwork featured in the show, I created this poster of the corner of a room with one of the beds placed in the space.

Every show requires a presentation slide and a quarter page flyer which both followed this same concept.

Kaleo Kids gets a NEW Logo

Kaleo Kids at Kaleo Church, in Houston, has been a HUGE success. As they grow, their need to stand out does as well.

My challenge with any internal ministry logo is to set them apart from other ministries, but not apart from the church they exist for and in.

The inspiration for this logo actually came from Sue, the Children’s Ministry Director at Kaleo. She is one of the craftiest people I have ever met and one of the things she likes to do is sew. Knowing that, I thought why not just “sew” on a kids patch to the church logo. I thought there was a certain youthful, crafty, fun-ness (yes that is a word) to this approach and so has everyone who has seen it.

These variations and others can be used without abandoning the concept. The whale might be appropriate for a lesson or class on Jonah while the splat might work well for a Kaleo Kids Play Date.

The key is that each variation follow the same color scheme and basic pattern. All of the concepts include the Kaleo Church logo. The text for the word, “Kids,” is also shared between each design.

I also limited the color scheme on this version of the logo for a few reasons. First, to help it work on several future projects and second, to keep spot color printing costs low. The first media the logo was ever printed on was a t-shirt worn by the Kaleo Kids Staff. The previous design has six different colors…ouch. The new design has two…sweet!

Kaleo Bring-vitation

At Kaleo, I have split our marketing effort into two main categories — “Interruption Marketing” and “Word-of-Mouth.” Those are pretty industry standard terms so, without going into both, I will tell you about our “Word-of-Mouth” effort.

I believe word-of-mouth is one, if not the most, effective forms of marketing. There is nothing that has more credibility than someone who is NOT paid to be a walking advertisement. Knowing this, I created a small pocket size card with the vital details of Kaleo’s Sunday morning gathering on it. No fancy copy and no crazy artwork.

The photo on the front is of two actual families at Kaleo. We took them to a park and shot them…with a camera.

The copy is simple because the idea behind this card is not that it would act alone, but that it would simply be a tangible reminder of a verbal and relational invitation from a co-worker, friend, classmate, or acquaintance. They are called “BRING-vites” because we have called our people to “BRING” people to church, not just invite them. There is a strong relational element to this and we like that. The people at Kaleo liked it too — the cards have moved like free candy.

Showcase This…in your Mail Box

Every year a group of private schools and camps gathers in the Woodlands area for the annual Showcase of Private Schools and Camps.

This past year they asked me to update their identity and create a direct mail piece that would invite people to the event.

The idea for this piece was to create something that conveyed what could happen to kids when they enrolled in private schools or participated in camp. Basically, their heads would be filled with all kinds of good, wholesome stuff. I tried to illustrate the gamut of academic, creative, fun, and engaging possibilities.

Showcase This!

Every year a group of private schools and camps gathers in the Woodlands area for the annual Showcase of Private Schools and Camps.

This past year they asked me to update their identity and create a direct mail piece that would invite people to the event.

The previous logo to your left needed a bit of an update and the people who organized the Showcase wanted something that was easier to update (the year), easier to place (because the previous design had to be BIG to be legible), and something that worked with more colors.

They loved the new version.

Hopesprings Community

GO TO THE SITE

Hopesprings is a new community of Christ- followers in the Slate Belt area of Pennsylvania, made up of everyday folks who are learning to simply follow Jesus as honestly as we can, and grow in our capacity to love God, and others well. This is reflected in their mission statement- The Most important thing: Loving God, loving others.

As they were getting started they asked me to help define their identity and make their mark on the web.

Hopesprings just bought a old firehouse with thick wooden floors. They want to build it out and remodel the space to include a worship space, kids area, and coffee shop. The space and what they want to do with it were the inspiration for this site.

Once we had their identity in place, I moved to the site and tried to incorporate all of the organic, rugged, hand crafted elements of the new logo and the new building. Inspired by a previous version the Kaleo site, the team at Hopesprings requested several of the same features in this design. Of course, never wanting to visit the same place (design wise) twice, I managed to keep what they loved about the old Kaleo site while still creating something new.

To keep the site from feeling to dark and lonely, the Team at Hopesprings was able to snap a few photos for me and send them via email to incorporate in the site.

This site is built around a content management system that allows even the church secretaries to update the site through a secure, web based back-end. The site also includes and events calendar.

WoodsEdge Kids

GO TO THE SITE

WoodEdge Church is a growing, thriving church in the Woodlands, Texas area. They are just about to go multi-site via video feed in at least three campuses. In the mood for upping the anti, they decided to launch a brand new Kids Ministry site and guess who got to build it…me.

This was another project in cooperation with Dunamis Media. For this project, we wanted to capture the essence of children’s ministry but personally speaking, I wanted to do something different. They gave us a logo and creative license to build the site we would like to see. The logo included a rainbow so right away I was thinking color, bright, day time, and outdoors. Their church is called “WoodsEdge” and they are located in a woodland setting (in Woodlands, TX…go figure) so I thought, “What if we could get shots of kids outdoors possibly with trees in the background to allude to the ‘edge’ of the woods?”

Once they saw the mock up they said this:

We love the site… That little girl is on the cover of our Handbook, so it is perfect for the website.

Who knew?! We must have been on the same wave length when searching for imagery.

As with most of my sites, I try to focus on simplicity. If the site is not easy to use, than it is kind of self-defeating right? But it should look beautiful too. So I went for both, making sure the content was search engine optimized, easily accessible and well formatted while the shell that wrapped it was dynamic, detailed, and top notch.

Since the launch of this site, WoodsEdge church has asked Dunamis Media and myself to begin conceptualizing a new site for the church.

This site is built around a content management system that allows even the church secretaries to update the site through a secure, web based back-end.