Sanibel Community Church

Sanibel Community Church sits on Sanibel Island in Florida, with a sanctuary, a historic chapel, and a fellowship hall. Michele Herman ran point on graphic requests as the church's operations contact, and Pastor Jeff signed off on the bigger pieces. The engagement ran from the fall of 2025 through April 2026.

How we started

Michele used a very structured request format from day one. Every email came in with a clear template: a one-line Description, the exact Verbiage to lay out, and a Sizes Needed list. That made the work fast. I could pull up a request, drop the verbiage into a working file, build to the largest size first, then size out the variants once she approved the design.

The first wave was social and email infrastructure. Monthly header images for the SCC Updates weekly email that goes out through Mailchimp. Pre-service slides that ran on the sanctuary screens. A baptism certificate that we wanted personalized to Sanibel with the SCC logo and some beachy character.

The work

The biggest stretch of work was the Easter 2026 season. Easter Sunday worship services, Good Friday service, a Good Friday newspaper ad, the SCC Kids Easter Egg Hunt collateral set (bulletin board signs, social media, newspaper ad, plus a 24x36 A-frame sign for the campus entrance), the SCC Men's Retreat, a Women's Brunch with Courtney Bracken from Sea Glass Mission, the Second Sundays at Six Corporate Prayer Service, and a Campus Work Day flyer.

Two pieces of feedback shaped how I worked with Michele. First, when a slide was projected on the sanctuary screens, some people had trouble reading the text where the font hit a color transition in the background. She flagged it on a pre-service set in early March 2026 and I rebuilt those two slides with a contrast safe zone. I kept that note in mind for every slide design that followed. Second, Michele initially gave me dimensions in inches for digital deliverables. I asked her to give me pixels for digital and inches for print, since the two units do not translate cleanly and I would rather build to the exact spec than guess.

A specific moment

The SCC Men's Retreat slide was a good back-and-forth moment. I sent a first concept. Michele wrote back, "My men's leader asked if you could do something with an image of bacon." I sent a bacon version inside an hour. That is what good operational design partnerships should feel like. Quick rounds, no ego, the client gets exactly the version they pictured.

The Easter set carried its own moment. I had built the Easter services graphic and Michele asked whether the new request was a fresh design or whether we should update the existing one with new verbiage. I sent the existing design with the new info added in, since the Easter palette was already locked in for the season. She approved that pass the next morning. Reusing the design saved a round of revisions and kept the season's collateral visually consistent.

In their words

"I agree with you. It's my fault that we didn't communicate it sooner. We will send payment." — Pastor Jeff, May 2026

Where things stand

Sanibel wrapped in the spring of 2026. Michele wrote on May 20, 2026 to let me know the church had hired a staff designer and was concluding the subscription. The handoff was bumpier than I would have liked. The decision had been made earlier, the staff designer had already started, and the May invoice was outstanding. I sent a note to both Michele and Pastor Jeff explaining that I had set aside time for May and the invoice needed to be paid. Jeff replied the same day, owned the communication gap, and confirmed payment was on the way. I thanked him, wished the new staff designer well, and closed the engagement cleanly. Sanibel is filed as a completed subscription that ended because the church grew into an in-house design seat.