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Coram Deo Church
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I was on staff at Coram Deo Church in various capacities for many years and served as a one-man creative shop. The work that I have created at Coram Deo has included everything from a website overhaul, sermon series and class graphics, podcast logo designs, and even art directing a stained glass installation. It has been a labor of love and required more than a little caffeine.
Several years ago, our lead pastor decided we were going to release devotional books for Advent and the weeks leading up to Easter. These were some of the most collaborative projects that I've worked on in my time at Coram Deo, incorporating devotionals written by our pastors, (myself included!), and liturgies written by my wife, Brynn.
I cut my teeth in graphic design back in 2007-2008 by designing sermon series graphics. When I started working at Coram Deo, no one was in charge of making anything visual. I saw the need and thought "I could probably do that." So I taught myself the basics of design and jumped in head first. They all have their own origin stories, but the Genesis graphic is probably the most interesting. I poured potting soil on a large white sheet of poster paper in my kitchen, moving the dirt around for a long time until it looked mostly legible. Photoshop took me the last 10% of the way to clean it up, which is more than I can say for the mess we made in the kitchen. (Over the years, I had the opportunity to teach several of these classes as well: Listen to a few of my favorites.)
Several years ago, we branched out into the world of podcasting, which made for some fun visual identity projects. (I even hosted my own for a short period of time!)
This was a bucket list project if ever there was one! I have often longed for more beauty in our worship space, (a tall order for an old warehouse turned church), specifically dreaming about creating a set of stained glass windows that would tell the overarching story of the Bible. You can imagine my excitement when, unprovoked, an actual stained glass artist from within our church body approached us about creating a set of windows to install in our sanctuary! Maureen Hosford generously donated her time to build the windows and we hired Peter Voth, (one of my all-time favorite designers and a check off of the bucket list all its own), to create the designs. I served as art director, project manager, primary vision-caster, and budget wrangler for the project. To say that these windows have turned out to be incredible is an absolute understatement!
After I had quite a few website designs under my belt, I made the case that we ought to redesign the church website. At this point, I had been building sites on Webflow for a number of years and we (I) decided it would be the best platform for the new site. In addition to refreshing the look and feel, some of our goals were: to upgrade to a responsive website, make it easier to give online, create a master blog roll for all content, and harness the power of Subsplash, (our app and primary content platform), to create a more robust content archive. (I also learned on this project that promising a completed website in a single weekend is overly ambitious.)
Churches host events. Events need promo graphics. Capiche?
Every now and then, it's ok to let the tail wag the dog just a bit. We had perfectly functional men's and women's ministry graphics but I really wanted to redesign them for some unknown reason. One thing led to another, aaannddd...we had some sweatshirts made. Sorry, not sorry. (Also, at one point we planned to launch a women's ministry podcast called The Home Front. I'm not sure what happened to it but I really like the graphic which features a drawing by my lovely wife, Brynn!)
My primary job at Coram Deo was to lead worship and part of that work has been writing new music for the Church to sing. I particularly enjoy finding old, dusty hymns that haven't seen the light of day in many years and reimagining the music to revitalize the old words. During my time at Coram Deo, I had the privilege of recording many of my original songs and we have released two recording projects.