On January 16-19, I had the opportunity to co-lead a retreat for youth. Along with my co-leader, Aly, we got together with a small team to plan the entire weekend's experience. However, my responsibility was for the visual design elements. In this post, I'll share some thoughts on the design process.

The theme was "Vine" based on the John 15:5: "I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing." We helped youth explore how God works in them and how God can work through them to make a difference in the world.

Here were the initial designs:

Obviously, the designs harken to vines in a stylized way as the vines cut through the text. Basically, the idea was for the letters to branch off from the vine. Someone suggested playing around with making a letter look like a leaf, which was a brilliant idea! That birthed concept 2. I played around with a number of fonts for "winter retreat 2015." My hope was to find something that supported the wordmark above it, but at the same time getting out of the way of the wordmark.

With regard to color, I have a love-hate relationship with green. It's (currently) my favorite colour, but if mixed poorly, it can come out looking real muddy (or even puke-ish). Because it was a WINTER retreat, I chose a cool and fresh feeling green. So finally, I came up with this design:

This design was chosen by the retreat design team. I'm really proud of it and had so much fun brainstorming with the design team and spending time creating the finished product. Below are a few ways the design was implemented.

This was such a fun project and fun weekend! Good design can create timestamps in people's minds and hearts. Hopefully, whenever the youth see the logos and images in the future, they'll be reminded of life-changing moments in their lives. To see more of my design work, go over to my portfolio pages.

"Vine" - Winter Retreat 2015