Partnering with Staff: Prayer Booklet

One of the things I love about my job is getting to work with other staff to create useful resources for campus ministry. Recently I teamed up with the staff at Ohio State University to design a prayer book for their students. This book contains guided morning, evening and night prayers, as well as helpful ways for students to combine personal with mission-focused prayer.

The original design was very simple (not bad at all, actually), but when the staff at Ohio State came to me asking for help, I was excited to improve upon what was already a great resource.

before and after - prayer booklet cover

One way I helped improve the design was to think about how the information in the booklet was organized and try to figure how to make it as easy to use as possible. In the original booklet, there is a Psalm-reading calendar chart that takes you through the entire book of Psalms three times in a year. The chart was three pages long and somewhere in the middle of the booklet.

original chart for Psalms reading

In my design process, I thought that if someone really wanted to access this chart on a daily basis, it would need to be easier to find and easier to read. So I decided to move it to the back of the booklet and consolidate it into one page.

my redesign of the Psalms reading chart

Additionally, I added a bolder header row and alternated the rows with white and gray so it would be easy to read across each line. All of these elements are what I hope to be improvements in making the chart easier to use.

What's great about this project is that I not only provided a service to the staff and students at Ohio State, but I also gave them a platform in making this resource more widely available. Since twentyonehundred has the means to order larger quantities of things, we decided to publicize the resource for others to use and make them available on our InterVarsity national online store. Within a couple months our first order of 1,000 ran out. We're now on our second print run and I've heard they're going fast!

Although I don't work directly with students, it excites me to know that my design work is helping them learn how to pray and practice it in their daily lives. I get to influence students to interact with God more regularly and more deeply. What a privilege!

A story about a blue cup

One of our biggest projects of the past few years was the Red Cup campaign, an evangelistic project that engages passersby with the question "What are you thirsty for?" and the familiar image of the red Solo cup used at many college parties. However, on some campuses and for some students, it's a blue cup that's impacting lives.

My friend Carole, on staff with InterVarsity's International Student Ministry at the University of Michigan recently included this story in her update:

"Last year, Carla stopped by our information table and picked up a blue cup. These cups have 'welcome' written on them in many languages. At the end of the year, Carla said 'something that really caught my attention about ICF was the blue cup... The fact that it had "SELAMAT DATANG" on it was one of the things that made me feel even more welcome, as in the first few days, some people I met didn’t even know where Indonesia was or what it was.' Carla was changed throughout the year and came to know God more, and her initial contact with us was a blue cup."

I'm thankful to see how my design work, in partnership with the work of staff on campuses, is transforming the lives of students!