More Graphic Design Work for St. Mark's Lutheran Church

I've been doing more design work for my church, St. Mark's. We wanted to have more eye-catching, modern, and cohesive graphics to use in the newsletter. The first is for our Bible Study and the second is for our community-building and education activities, which we call Growing Together. 

I like the way they look separately, but I especially like them together. This is what we had before. They were done by different people, years apart. 

We have a 3-part mission statement at St. Mark's. Our mission is to: 

• Nurture Discipleship
• Communicate the Gospel
• Serve the Community

Each year, we focus on one of the three. In 2026, or focus is on Serve the Community. Pastor Karen asked me to make a graphic for that back in late December. I didn't blog about it at the time, so I'll share it now. 

I love doing design projects like these. I am especially glad to be able to use my time and talents to benefit my church. 

Designing a New Logo for St. Mark's Lutheran Church

I'm on a committee to improve the digital presence of our church, St. Mark's Lutheran in Fairfield, California. That includes the website, newsletters, and social media channels. Our first step was developing a brand kit, one component of which is a logo that represents who we are as St. Mark's. On Sunday, after a lot of hard work, we debuted our new logo. 

The first step in creating a logo was deciding what we wanted it to say about us. During our two most recent congregational retreats, we have focused on how we see ourselves as a congregation and how others see us. I used the detailed notes from these retreats to identify the five key words that were mentioned the most often to describe us: Welcoming; Friendly; Generous; Faithful; and Family. Put together into a sentence, they became: "At St. Mark's, we are a welcoming, friendly, generous, and faithful church family." This sentence guided the rest of the process. 

Next, I researched the colors associated with each of the five key words.

• Welcoming = yellow (bright, cheerful, inviting, energetic)
• Friendly = orange (warm, social, outgoing)
• Generous = green (nature, balance, kindness, growth, renewal)
• Faithful = white (reverence, purity)
• Family = green (growth, stability, belonging)

Based on this, we set a color palette of green, white, yellow, and orange, to show that we are welcoming, friendly, generous, faithful, and a family.

There are countless shades of each of those colors, so as a next step, I went to the sanctuary and took photos of our stained glass and other architectural features. Then I used an eyedropper tool to pull the colors directly from the digital files to create a handful of potential color palettes. 

While the rest of the team picked just the right shades, I started designing logo options in greyscale, incorporating images and shapes that fit with our guiding sentence. The team selected their favorites and we looked at those logos in the colors that represent our St. Mark's family. From there, we selected our new logo.

If you are interested in seeing my actual presentation to the congregation, you can watch it below: 

Thanks to my fellow committee members: Ann, Diane, June, and Pastor Karen. We're a great team. I love our new logo!

More Logo Design Work

I already have a bachelor's degree (International Relations) and a master's degree (Education), but if I ever go back to college it will be in Graphic Arts. Despite a lifelong love of everything having to do with art and design, I never took any classes in those departments. I really wish I had. It took me a long time to learn what I know now, things that are probably covered the first day of a design class. 

There are a lot of problems with being entirely self-taught, the primary one being that you don't know what you don't know. When you receive a syllabus, the professor literally hands you a list of things you don't know. By the end of the term, that same piece of paper is a list of things you DO know. That hasn't randomly happened to me, where someone gives me a comprehensive list of design principles or art techniques that I haven't heard of. I only figure out what I don't know when someone mentions it, or I do research to figure out why I'm having a particular problem. Once I learn that new thing, I still don't know what ELSE I don't know.    

Anyway, I say all this because I am getting increasingly confident with some aspects of design, to the point that I have been making logos and doing basic design work for friends. I have a lot more to learn (although what that is, I'm not sure), but I feel good enough about my skills to help out friends who need it. Most recently, I made this:

I made it for my friend, Doug, who is a member of the Belmont Model Railroad Club (obviously). Doug and I go way back. Thanks to the miracle that is Facebook, I found a photo of us together at a 4-H conference in 1989. That's Doug on the left with his arms out. I am the blonde with the dark suit. (Because it's perfectly normal for 17-year old girls to travel in black business suits.) The other two are Michael and Piper, for the record. I have no idea where we are posing, but it's probably somewhere in Washington DC.

Anyway, Doug needed a logo for the model train club based on this photo:

I made the logo using PicMonkey. I know I talk about PicMonkey all the time, and I apologize if I come across as some sort of MLM cult member who won't shut up about this fabulous product that you should definitely buy, but I use PicMonkey daily and love it. 

Anyway, the first thing I did was to convert the photo to black and white. Then I removed the background using the Clone tool. I removed the numbers from the side of the train and from above the windshields.

Then I used the Posterize tool. I adjusted the slider to get the minimum number of colors to still give good definition. In this case, it is 5.

I opened a 2000 x 2000 blank canvas, then added the posterized train as an overlay. I flipped the image, then added the initials of the club (BMRC) to where the numbers had been in the photo. I played around with text options and locations before choosing a simple text from a font (Special Elite) that is part of PicMonkey's library.

Finally, I added a dark rectangle behind the text. I sampled colors from the train so that I wasn't adding additional colors to the logo. 

I sent the files to Doug and he was happy. Hopefully the rest of the Belmont Model Railroad Club will be too.

New Logos for the Patenting for Inventors Podcast

This is me in 2016 with my friend and co-author Adam Diament.

(You should buy our book.)

Adam, who is a patent attorney, has been hosting a podcast for almost a year. It's called the Patenting for Inventors Podcast. It walks inventors through absolutely everything they need to know to apply for a patent. Despite the fact that I am not an inventor and have no intention of ever getting a patent (because I doubt I should try to patent a Twinkie Narwhal, which is pretty typical of the things I invent), I really enjoy the podcast. I love learning new things and I've always been fascinated with learning more about what other people's careers. Adam is an excellent host. 

Adam needed new podcast cover art, so I happily spent some time playing on PicMonkey until I came up with this:

I thought the magnifying glass was a great way to draw attention to the podcast title. (It's left-handed because I make everything left-handed. Adam is right-handed, one of his few faults.) I chose the colors based on Adam's website and put a lightbulb next to the web address. I sent it off to Adam and waited to hear what he thought. He loved it, so I set out to make the other sizes of graphics he needed. 

The 1920x480 banner posed some challenges. I couldn't put the magnifying glass front and center like in the square graphic. When I shrank it it down, the podcast title didn't fit in it nicely. I decided to move the web address there and stretched the title across the banner. The lightbulb became the letter O in INVENTORS. 

The 1920x1080 size created a new problem. If I kept the magnifying glass and web address on the left and the title on the right, there was an area at the bottom that looked empty. I grabbed Adam's picture from his website and did a quick flip (I had to maintain the left-handed magnifying glass, of course!). I moved the web address to the bottom and everything looked balanced.

I'd strongly recommend the early episodes of the Patenting for Inventors Podcast to pretty much anyone. A huge number of things we use every day are patented. It is fascinating to learn what can be patented and what the process is that inventors (and their attorneys) go through to get those patents. Later episodes dive deeper and are geared more for inventors, but they are still very interesting. Episode 42 is particularly interesting to me. Listen to see why! :) 

Thanks to Adam for trusting me to make his graphics. If any of you need logos made, feel free to contact me at cindy.mycreativelife@gmail.com. 

Tissue Paper Sports Logos (and other sports-themed gifts)

I've mentioned before that my 11-year old nephew Timothy is crazy about the San Francisco Giants. Trevor and I made several Giants-themed gifts for Timothy for Christmas, but since he reads my blog I didn't want to show them until now.

Here's the wall hanging we made for him. I love how it turned out. It's really easy to do.

Tissue Paper Sports Logo

Materials: 

• a logo (printed from the computer, mounted on cardboard, and cut into a circle)
• orange and black sheets of tissue paper 
• white glue

Steps: 

Cut the tissue paper into small squares. Mine were about 1" square. A paper cutter makes this step infinitely faster. 

Coat a small area of the logo with glue. Crumple up a tissue paper square and place it securely in the glue. 

Continue until you have completed one entire color.  It takes a long time. 

Repeat with the other color. Here's a side view of the completed logo:

This project was very easy (no problem for a 5 year old), but it was tedious. Trevor and I completed it in two 1-hour sessions.

We also made a Giants ornament for Timothy. We made strips of orange and black patterned papers and got out the quilling tool. 

Quilling was really hard for Trevor. Look at that furrowed brow.

Here's the finished ornament. I have photographed a lot of challenging items for this blog, but this might be the most difficult. Not only is it glass, but it is iridescent. This was the best I could do, but the photo doesn't do it justice.

Our final project was to make a Giants desk lamp for Timothy. I used exactly the same steps as I did for his Giants wastebasket, with one small difference- I made sure that I was not creating a fire hazard. I carefully chose a lamp and bulb that (hopefully) would not get hot and cause the logo to potentially catch fire. Before applying the logo, I left the lamp on for 3 hours to check how hot the lampshade would get. It was barely warm. I feel confident that the lamp is safe. 

Timothy loved all the Giants-themed stuff. Here he is opening his wall hanging. (It's hard to tell, but he is wearing a Giants shirt on Christmas morning. He's quite a fan.) More Giants projects to come? Maybe!