Church
Being a Mormon gives you ample opportunity to develop and nurture your talents---whether you want to or not! And a lot of times in church callings, you inevitably have to make posters or flyers for various events. Fortunately, that aspect of church work is actually pretty enjoyable for me personally.
The following pieces are samples of graphic work I've done while serving in church callings. Merely click on the thumbnail images to view the complete work.
Watermelon Bust
Fall 2000
This is one of the first designs I've ever truly been proud of. I created this poster as part of my calling in my BYU Singles Ward as the Ward Public Relations specialist---which, for the record, is my favorite calling to date. The main purpose of this calling was to help get announcements out to the rest of the ward. The bishopric sponsored this Watermelon Bust and therefore asked me to make a poster to advertise it.
The inspiration for this poster was a flyer I had seen in the Jesse Knight Humanities Building on campus. I had been so impressed with the flyer's overall design that I actually pilfered one of the extra posters (after the event it was advertising was over, of course). I still have the poster in my files to this day.
I really love this poster's use of white space and the balance of the composition. I also like how the title has a sense of depth to it because of the contrasting colors of the text. I liked this design so much I employed it again in a few later designs (see the Gemini party). Other people must have been impressed with it as well because, after seeing this design, one of my fellow ward members later asked me to create a poster for a huge party he was throwing. I was flattered and agreed to help him (see the design entitled "Sunk").
Children of the Eighties
Summer 2001
This particular summer, I was serving as one of the Ward FHE co-chairs in my BYU Singles Ward. I absolutely loved my fellow co-chair Sarah Bainbridge. We had amazingly similar personalities. Anyhow, this poster was made for one of our ward FHE activities. It was a pretty fun activity.
The border of this poster took me forever to create. The text comes from a nostalgic essay (no, I didn't write it myself) about the eighties that I thought people would get a kick out of if they actually read it. Kind of like a really obvious Easter Egg, I guess.
It was actually pretty tough to find images of kids. What I would have given for an internet image search engine back then. It might have also been nice to know of the existence of stock photography websites. Oh well. The photos which are on the poster came from a Gap Kids website. (Shhh... don't tell.) I would guess that they aren't on their current website any more.
Giant Twister
Summer 2001
This was a poster I made for another Ward FHE activity. BYU's Outdoors Unlimited store had a giant twister board for rent and we were able to get one for this activity.
I've recreated the original poster here in Flash for your interactive enjoyment. (For the original poster, I just cut out little arrows and made the poster a spinner using a few brads.) I hope you enjoy it because it took a really long time to program it.
The inspiration for this design came from 1) the concept of Twister (obviously) and 2) my good friend whom I miss dearly: Megan Thomas Eckhart. Megan forwarded me an email from her friend Dan (who she would eventually marry). It had a list of "creative" ways to entertain yourself. I took some of the ideas from this list and created a few others on my own (with a little help from the Internet). Although this may not be one of the "slickest" designs I've created, I feel this is one of my more humorous and creative designs. I hope you like it.