Date & Venue:
Antioch Church Emmanuel Building, 2nd floor
Theme “Christmas”:
Due to a variety of other events happening in the fall semester, the best date for the 5th annual One Accord event was December 12. Therefore, I suggested we make it a Christmas event including caroling and hot drinks.
Inspiration
Inspiration for the designs came from three main sources:
- Josh Wilson’s Christmas song: Jesus is Alive
- Isaiah 9:6 and some Mars Hill Church designs I’d seen previously
- “Keep Calm and Carry On” Posters
The main Font used on the designs is: Keep Calm Medium (based on the Keep Calm posters). I also felt that “Keep Calm and Carry On” was a wonderful message to send for Christmas as it was similar to the message carried by angels in Luke 2:10.
T-shirts
There were two t-shirt designs I created:
- One red with “Jesus is Alive” at the top
- The other wine colored with “Emmanuel” at the bottom
The churches ended up deciding on the second design (“Emmanuel”) in red.
Banners
I wanted to create banners for this event that could be reused for Christmas church services in the next few years, so I avoided putting any “One Accord” logos or event specific information on them (date, time, location). The old Christmas banners are still usable, but with this Christmas event I wanted to add a second set to our collection.
Inspiration
Inspiration for the second banner came from two sources:
- My favorite Christmas song is Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus (particularly this video)
- The first banner announces Jesus’ birth with “Jesus is Alive!” So the second banner awaits his return with “Come, thou long expected Jesus” – thus, the second verse uses a verse from Revelation 19:16 that prophesies how he will return
PowerPoints
I created a number of PowerPoint backgrounds for the event and created the entire slideshow in Google Slides.
Later, for the Christmas sermon at church, I wanted to use the same concept but modify the PowerPoint backgrounds slightly for a unique event look.
Websites
In addition to the designs above, I also created an Event page on the church’s website, and I began coding a website that contained lyrics for Christmas caroling later in the evening.
My thoughts were:
- Printing booklets requires time and money and the papers would get scattered, lost, or littered
- Plus, they’d be hard to read in the dark while caroling
- But, these days everyone has a smartphone with Internet access.
- So, if I simply:
- created a one-page website with links to the carols that would
- scroll down the page to the lyrics,
- everyone would be happy and have a much easier time.
Unfortunately, I was unable to totally finish adding the lyrics to the sample site (and I haven’t uploaded the site “officially”), but the site structure and functionality is mostly intact on my CodePen page:
The site was built with HTML5, CSS3, and a little bit of jQuery.
Event pictures
The following are some pictures from the event featuring my wife and daughter:
