Paul and the Process of a Design

You ever get asked that question, “What do you do all day?” There’s some professions where that question is not necessary. Like if you’re a doctor. It’s assumed that you’re saving lives and writing prescriptions. Or if you’re a politician. You’re out shaking hands and kissing babies. Or even a trash collector. People know you’re riding on the back of a truck loading it up with my garbage. But for some reason, I keep picking jobs that beg the question. When I was a youth pastor way back when, I wasn’t just asked what I did all day, I was flat out asked if that was a real job. So when I moved to graphic design, I thought I was stepping up in the job market, away from the questions. But they still get asked. I even get asked that from people on staff with me. What do I do all day? So I thought I’d try and answer that.

I push pixels. Tiny dots that make up a picture. I move them. Sometimes I add to them. Sometimes I take away from them. Sometimes I remove them completely. I attempt to tell a story with images. And I do this for a church. Which then somehow moves back to the original question since many people believe that if you work for a church you only work on Sundays. Oh, silly, naive people that make way more money than me!

One of my primary roles is to create key art for our sermon series. This is probably where I put most of my creative juices. When other ministries come to me for art, they have a vague idea of what they want. But the sermon series really and truly starts as a blank slate. I work on a great team of creatives and we sit and we brainstorm ideas based off a few paragraphs of text given to us by our head pastor. For the series we’re in now, he already had a title he wanted to use. “Restore.” It was our role to come up with an idea that could tell that story. We thought about the image of restoring a car. Or a piece of furniture. But we knew that the series was going to be about so much more than that. It was about restoring our world. So we threw out movies like “I am Legend” and “The Book of Eli” and the TV show “The Walking Dead” and even the video game “Fallout.” Scenes that show total destruction and hopelessness. What if we were to somehow merge that with the beauty originally found in the Garden of Eden? Could it work? Could that paint a picture?

I contacted a photographer, Eric Spiegel, and asked him to take some pictures downtown that I could then destroy in Photoshop. At first he came back with some images of the Lincoln Monument, which, while I could destroy, I could probably also be labeled a traitor and an anarchist. So I asked him to go back and find something that wasn’t political in nature. This is the picture he came back with.

The next step was to start transforming that image into something ugly. Something destroyed. Something devoid of life. So I had to remove the people from the image. I had to remove all light from the streetlights and headlamps and brake lights on the cars and vehicles in the shot. I needed to break some windows in the buildings. Dirty them up. Replace the flags with tattered versions. Add some graffiti. Deaden the trees and foliage. Add some trash to the ground. Crack the pavement and add grass coming up from it. Remove the existing sky and replace it with something dark and ominous.

But how could I do that while still showing the beauty that was the original picture? I decided to take a hand holding a polaroid picture. I removed the existing image in the polaroid and replaced it with my own. Throw some text on the frame and we’re done!

How long did it take to make from start to finish? About 1 week of working time. I used a piece of software that took a screenshot of whatever was on my screen every 5 seconds. At the end it created a movie. So here’s the time-lapse movie of the creation of “Restore.” And that, my friends, is what a designer does all day.

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