First Christian Church Santa Maria

First Christian Church in Santa Maria is the longest-running relationship in this practice. Five years of slides, banners, social sizes, business cards, giving envelopes, sermon series art, holiday graphics, and one coffee shop logo. Over that span, somewhere around 769 finished JPEGs have gone to the communications admin alone. That number does not include working files, resized variants, or print-ready PDFs.

The work

FCC is a full-service church with multiple ministries that all need graphics. Over the years the work has built and maintained a library of repeatable assets: the Thru The Bible series, the Good Samaritan Shelter Meal monthly graphic, the Fireworks Booth campaign that funds the youth Tijuana mission trip, the annual July 4th Celebration, the Holiday Market, Christmas Tea, Easter handouts, VBS branding (logo, banners, posters, lanyards), giving envelopes, biblical counseling business cards for individual ministry leaders, and a coffee shop logo for the church's in-house cafe.

The student and young adult ministry runs its own design track, emailing directly for youth-side graphics. The worship director comes in for worship pastor projects. A newer communications admin has integrated into the request flow alongside the long-running primary contact.

The pace at FCC is steady. Some weeks it is a single business card revision. Other weeks it is a wave that comes in around the calendar, around a big Sunday push or the buildup to Christmas season.

Source image resolution is a recurring checkpoint. Images come from Google Images, from PNGs of logos, from screenshots of previous flyers. At the requested print size, each file gets checked and a zoomed-in proof goes back so the team can see exactly what the printer will see. If the file cannot be enlarged cleanly, the options are to source a better file or rebuild the graphic from scratch. That is the value of a long-term partner over a job-by-job freelancer: the question and the answer are both already known.

The coffee shop logo is one of the standout single-asset builds from this relationship. The brief from the cafe manager described a coffee cup with steam coming out of it with the FCC logo in the steam, or liquid being poured into the cup with the FCC logo in the liquid. Two strong concept directions in one paragraph. The chosen mark is still in use on signage and cups.

In their words

"Love it! Thanks, Emily!"

Student Ministry Pastor, First Christian Church Santa Maria, March 2, 2026