Each week I get to develop the sermon title into something visual: a title slide, a bulletin front for print, presentation backgrounds, social media slides. Some pastors and speakers are open to collaborating on their message titles - they bounce the idea off of me like a sounding board and there's a little back and forth. I love working with pastors who are conceptual and who, like me, love symbolism and a good visual pun.
Here's a smattering of sermon titles that I enjoyed working on from 2016-17.
"An Acceptable Gift" Sermon Title Slide
The pastor's main message idea was that we are to bring our best to God. A 2 or 3 year old brings his daddy a plastic doughnut and it means something because that doughnut is precious to the child, but the same gift of a plastic doughnut isn't as wonderful a gift if a 30 year old brings it to his dad. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to put a plastic doughnut on the sermon title slide so I found on in the preschool toys, a coworker took a green screen photo of it for me and the pastor loved the end result almost as much as I did.
[Photoshop CC on Mac OS - Feb 2018]
"Jesus Loves the Little Children" sermon title slide
Painted the wound onto the wrist in Photoshop, added the long sleeve. Photos from Unsplash. [Photoshop CC, Mac OS, 2017]
"Sin, Hell, and the Love of God"
Sermon Title Slide [Adobe Photoshop CC on Mac OS - 2015]
"Pre-Mortem" Sermon mini-series title
This is a social media image from the set of images I created for this message series. The other images had the feet standing on one of those old style wooden caskets that I digitally built from some source photos of wood slats. This photo collage was created from various sources and some photos taken by a staff member. I'm pretty happy with the card and the twine's shadow shape, but now that I look at it with two years behind me, I think it needs a little subtly to look more real.
I enjoyed collaborating with the speaker to narrow down title options and worked a few angles on the imagery until we arrived at something we were both happy with. It was a little out of our comfort zones, but it worked well for the messages.
Premortem is a managerial strategy in which a project team imagines that a project or organization has failed, and then works backward to determine what potentially could lead to the failure of the project or organization. Using the little known term in the sermon title with a pair of upright feet with a toe tag [a tag that would've usually been added after death, not before], the visual symbols echoed the "examine your life now" and "do the work of a disciple now" themes he was working with.
[Adobe Photoshop CC on Mac OS. 2017.]
