Working through our process for Christmas gatherings, our team faces two main challenges. Deciding if and how the promotional branding will align with the actual gathering elements and message, and delivering a high quantity of assets to our printer early enough to ensure those assets get to our locations in time to promote the gatherings.

​In a perfect world, promotional branding would foreshadow the gathering elements and message that guests will come to experience. In reality, because of the large number of print assets that need to be produced and distributed to our locations, it's common for our print deadline to fall before the actual message content is decided on. This was the case for this year. We knew the message content might lean into being lost, physically and spiritually, and include desolate landscapes as message illustrations but nothing was finalized. We used that information as our starting point and built the branding around landscape images that could nod back to that while also giving them a winter, painterly treatment that could stand on its own and would feel appropriate for the holiday season, and promotion.

Once the branding was greenlit, I built out a complete asset library with title lockups, font pairings, treated images, textures, and example assets. This way when it came time to create all of the print assets, the design team and I could pick and pull the elements we needed and had a better idea of how the branding could play out, allowing us to turn around the assets quicker.