Josh Starr breaks down what 47 churches designed this week and what their requests reveal about smarter creative planning for Christmas and beyond.
This article comes from episode 8 of Church Design Weekly, our short weekly podcast on what churches are actually designing. Listen to the episode here.
One week in a design queue can tell you a lot about where churches are mentally. This week, 113 new requests came in from 47 churches, and 115 projects were delivered, meaning the team kept pace with demand. The mix of what came in, from Christmas Eve graphics to batch sermon series submissions to last-minute rush orders, points to a few patterns worth paying attention to if you oversee creative at your church.
Multiple churches submitted Christmas projects this week, including Christmas Eve graphics, Advent series branding, Advent bumpers, and banners for Christmas services. The calendar date when those requests came in: the second week of October.
That might feel early. Josh points out that it actually isn't. Your congregation will walk into a grocery store this week and see Christmas displays. The churches that have their creative assets ready before November arrives are the ones who get to be intentional with their communication instead of reactive. The ones who wait until late November are squeezing their designers, approving work too fast, and often settling for something that doesn't quite represent the service they've worked so hard to plan.
If you haven't opened a Christmas project yet, the practical move is to start this week, not after your next staff meeting. Even a rough brief with your series title and a few directional notes gives your designer something to work with and puts you ahead of the curve.
One church this week submitted six or seven installments of the same ongoing series all at once rather than trickling them in one per week. Josh noted this as a standout pattern, and it's one other churches should consider copying.
When you plan and design a sermon series as a whole unit, a few good things happen. Visual consistency is easier to maintain across the entire run. Gaps in the schedule surface early, before they become a Thursday crisis. And the creative decisions you make for week one actually inform weeks two through six, instead of each week feeling like a fresh start.
The weekly-drip workflow feels manageable until it isn't. Batching takes more planning upfront but removes a recurring source of stress for everyone on your communications team.
Two requests this week came in flagged as urgent, with capitalized labels and asterisks in the title. Both were from the same church, and both were for the same series that was already sitting in the queue through those back-to-back batch submissions.
Josh's read on this: a rush order is usually a planning problem wearing a deadline costume. The request itself may be urgent, but the urgency was created upstream, in a calendar that didn't account for design time, an approval process that ran long, or a series that got planned too close to its launch date.
The fix isn't faster turnaround. The fix is a creative calendar that stretches further than two weeks out. When your design requests are submitted well ahead of when you need them, most of those emergencies simply don't happen.
If you want support putting these habits into practice, a free consultation is a good place to start talking through what your church's design calendar could look like.
Ideally, your church should begin designing Christmas and Advent graphics in September or early October at the latest. By the time November arrives, many churches are already scrambling, approval cycles are compressed, and the quality of the final work suffers. Starting early gives your team time to get the creative direction right, run it through proper approvals, and have assets ready before the season demands your attention elsewhere.
The most reliable way to reduce rush requests is to build a creative calendar that extends at least four to six weeks ahead of any event or series launch. Most urgent requests aren't truly unpredictable. They result from series being planned too late, approvals taking longer than expected, or design time simply not being factored into the production schedule. When you plan further out, the calendar absorbs those delays without everything becoming an emergency.
Submitting all your sermon series graphics together in one batch is generally the better approach. It gives your designer a full picture of the series arc, makes visual consistency much easier to maintain, and surfaces any scheduling gaps before they become a problem. Submitting week by week can work, but it creates a recurring deadline pressure and often leads to inconsistencies in style or tone across the series run.
PixelPainters works with churches and ministries on exactly this kind of ongoing creative work, from sermon series and Advent graphics to social content and event materials. If your team is heading into a busy season and wants reliable design support, you can get started here. Your first two weeks are free.