White Blank Page

 

The original For Our City wall before I began the new display project . . .

 

There have been many fun design projects in the works over the past few months, and while most are wrapping up, one of my proudest is done and ready to show here on the blog! This particular project was unveiled in a strategic series of weeks as part of a Capital Campaign message series at my church, called FOR OUR CITY.

One of the things I love most about Eikon Church is that we are truly dedicated to being a church that is FOR our City—well, Hays County to be exact. We do our best to reach out to people in our community to serve them in love—not expecting anything in return—simply because we truly love where we live. We partner with our community through partnerships with the Hays-Caldwell Women’s Center, CASA Kids program, IDEA Kyle Charter School, Center Street Trick-Or-Treat, San Marcos/Kyle/Buda Fields of Faith, Day With God Prison Program, City of Kyle’s Pie In The Sky, and many more. There are so many more ways we would love to partner with our local community, but in order to do what we are dreaming of doing, we needed a way to:

1. Promote visibility of our passionate priority.

2. Provide people with easy ways to invest in the Capital Campaign that will help us make those dreams become a reality.

 

Months ago, as I sat with our Creative Team and brainstormed ideas of how to creatively display those elements, I took on a design project that would reach beyond the screen and create physical spaces to help us be and do more for our neighbors. The project involved repainting a wall with a fresh look and style, creating pledge cards that would be easy for people to use, designing a visual mural sticker to adhere to the inside front entrance of the building, and designing a window panel piece that would tie it all together. As the project neared its end, we realized that the initial FOR OUR CITY window panel piece actually needed a back piece for the other side of the window so you wouldn’t be able to see the adhesive. We decided to make a second window piece that would serve as an additional welcome to people as they walk in.

 

Computer generated concept art for the new FOR OUR CITY mural.

 

You can see the original wall display in the photo at the top of this post. Right above this paragraph, you can see the initial design concept for the new For Our City wall redesign. Here is the process my amazing Youth Intern and I went through to make it all come together:

 

Since the original wall was painting pitch black, we needed to apply two coats of primer to start with a fresh blank canvas.

Then we covered the wall back up with two coats of red paint that matched the color scheme of the FOR OUR CITY promotional materials. I also wanted red to be the background color for the wall so that it would stand out more and wouldn’t just become white noise so easily.

I used a projector that was balanced on a stack of books on top of a bistro table to sketch the logo and lettering for the words on the wall. Then my Intern and I hand painted them with a coat of primer and again with white paint. [ Just tracing the letters on the wall took about half a day! ]

We recruited some of our eKids and Eikon Youth students to help get more paint on the walls and work on lower wall touch-ups.

My brave Youth Intern scaling the ladder to do upper wall touch-ups

After adding a coat of primer and a coat of white onto the box templates of the wall, we were ready to move on to adding the pledge cards to the mix.

 

And then we added pledge cards to the wall that people could peel off, fill out, and turn in to our Info Center team. I color-coded the cards in various colors so that people could tell there was a difference in the amount and so that they fit in with the overall color scheme + style used in the campaign promotional pieces.

 

 

And after many hours invested into the wall, we have our finished project!

I am in love with the final project and it’s really cool to see pledges already coming down as people contribute to the FOR OUR CITY campaign!

 

The next phase included designing the mural to go above the inside entryway. I sat down with our Creative Arts Pastor and we decided to go with a collage that would feature photographs taken in the various cities represented within Hays County. I roped in two amazing photographers that attend Eikon to snap some of the shots featured in the mural:

 

NATHANIEL ROSALES PHOTO

and

PAYTON MOREY PHOTO

After editing the photo mural in Photoshop, I sent it off to press and LUCKY SKY GRAPHICS installed the mural. Here is the final design of the mural.

 

They also installed the two window pieces I designed. The first window piece was created to tie in the FOR OUR CITY look and informational/promotional piece. It features text from the original vision statement for the church that our Lead Pastor, Dan Matlock, created before Eikon even launched. The second window piece was a welcome graphic that would share our inclusive culture as people entered the building. It includes the words that are hand painted on a featured wall in our lobby—those words are frequently repeated in our language on and off the stage because it’s the culture we promote at our church:

EVERYONE IS WELCOME
NOBODY IS PERFECT
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE

The FOR OUR CITY Window Panel design (left) and the Eikon Welcome Window Panel design (right)

 

Here is what the final pieces look like after installation:

 

 

It was by and far my most intensive project to date, but also one of the more deeply treasured ones. I LOVE being a part of a church that is so dedicated to being a blessing and a benefit to our local community and seeing these pieces reflect those endeavors is like a warm beam of light to my soul. I’m grateful to be part of a team that truly allows me to use my gifts and talents in such a beautiful way to move the heart of God front-and-center inside and outside of the church!