Trend Setting Design » grunge

Overflow Event Poster

Joseph Cotten — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 14:00:59 +0000

This was done for my church to advertise a city-wide worship and prayer meeting. I came up with the name and look for it – the imagery of a city being flooded represents the worship and prayers of the people “flooding” the city with hope and blessing.

This was a somewhat new direction for me, combining black and white photographs with vector illustrations and layering effects into a single unified whole.

The typefaces used include two of my grunge favorites, Megaxoid and Adler. Can’t beat em!

Identity and Branding Project: Awaken City Church

Joseph Cotten — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:25:24 +0000

I was approached by the pastors of a new church in Greensboro, NC about developing a corporate identity system for their launch. In the beginning, I was given a design brief that was fairly vague, as often happens with any brand new organization. Over the course of several months of doing sketches and meeting with the pastors, the purpose and vision of Awaken City Church became clear: target people in the inner city of Greensboro, NC primarily between the ages of 25–40, with a close secondary audience of college kids. The vibe of the church is modern, underground, inner-city, youthful, raw, hip but not polished. Their vision is to take their message into the culture and into the city.

I started with the mighty Jos Buivenga’s Museo Sans font for the precision and geometric properties, then manipulated it until it could be used as a graffiti stencil. Then I distressed it further, adding paint splatters and an overspray boundary until the client was happy with the amount of grunge. I initially used a much cleaner version where just the “A!” was stenciled, but the client really wanted some serious grunge, so I poured it on thick!

The identity system is built around the idea of graffiti. The “A!” can be used separately from the logo in various applications, as shown in some production comps I threw together:

Digital comp of the Awaken logo in stencil format

This project included several other elements, which each have their own portfolio entries:

Awaken City Church website design

Pre-launch promotional card design, tee shirt design, exterior large format signage

Awaken Youth Conference Website

Joseph Cotten — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:14:27 +0000

Another marketing component to the Awaken Youth Conference, the website needed to be a simple blog format that would encourage the leaders, speakers and workshop leaders to write articles. The purpose of it is to help the leaders get to know the students before the conference begins, and to let the students start conversations with the leaders, and with each other.

Some special functionality that I built into the site includes a simple registration page that tracks all the registration information, and links to the conference sponsor’s PayPal account. I also set up Twitter integration and did all the copy writing on the site (besides the blog posts). In addition, I took care of registering the domain name, opening up a hosting account, and installing the blogging software.

Awaken Youth Conference Promotion

Joseph Cotten — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:04:44 +0000

A longtime church client of mine is starting up a youth conference this year, aimed at inner city youth in the Greensboro, NC area. They wanted the advertising to be edgy, and have a serious tone. I found my inspiration in the song of one of my favorite bands, Underoath. Underoath is a Christian screamo/post hardcore/emo band that is really popular among middle and high school age kids around Greensboro.It just so happens that they are one of the most talented and creative bands out there right now. If you like heavy music, I can’t encourage you enough to give them a listen.

There is one song on their last album entitled, “In Regards to Myself”, which ends with the line, “Wake up, wake up, wake up, and step outside your box! Wake up wake up!” That line came to mind as I thought about this new youth conferene, which already had it’s theme: Awaken – from Paul’s letter to Roman Christians in the first century. You can find this quote in the New Testament of the Bible:

“Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. Romans 13:11

I decided to use the Brochure as an opportunity to empower the youth attending the conference to do their own guerrilla-style marketing. Toward that goal, the outside of the brochure is a standard tri-fold layout, but the inside, when opened, is an 8.5 x 11 poster with all the necessary information “built-in”. This lets the attendees take the brochure and put it places that the conference organizers wouln’t be able to get to.

In the end, I produced an outdoor banner, tee shirt design, CD label and packaging, brochure/poster and a website for the event. The end result: it worked! The conference was a resounding success.

Masquerade Ball with Ricky Proehl

Joseph Cotten — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 17:31:41 +0000

This was another city-wide youth event/outreach, with a very specific theme: a Masquerade Ball complete with masks and music. Ricky Proehl, quarterback for the Carolina Panthers was a special guest, but they didn’t want to give the night any sort of “sports” theme. I decided to go with an antique, grunge, organic feeling to the card, and was able to find some great assets for the design. The Masquerade masks were purchased from iStock Photo and I also used an image I have from the first printing of the Gutenburg Bible for some texture. The typeface used for the heading is one that’s getting overused now on blogs, but back when created this card, it was a fresh spin on grunge fonts. You can find the typeface at dafont by searching for Bleeding Cowboys.