Freedom

I went through Freedom in 2019. It changed my life, and I do not throw that phrase around. I was living in Fort Myers and going to Next Level Church at the time, and the 12 weeks did more for me than anything else I had done.

So when they started looking for a designer to bring the first fully designed version of the curriculum to life, I put my name in the hat. I wanted this one.

Freedom already worked. What it did not have yet was a form. It needed to be a book somebody actually fills in, not a booklet you read once. A workbook that sits open on a lap in a small group, gets written in, and still makes sense when you pick it up again in week nine.

There were two of them to hold together, a participant guide and a leader guide, and the leader has to find the same moment in the same week without a page number hunt.

Freedom was also going to grow past the books. Once churches are running a 12-week curriculum there is slide art, handouts, promo, a site eventually. Somebody had to decide what Freedom looks like before all of that got made by different people.

The brief we landed on was light, but serious. The subjects in Freedom are heavy, fear and pain and identity and the things people carry, and a heavy design on top of heavy content gives someone one more reason to close the book. It could not be stale either. So the pages had to feel open and alive while still being trustworthy enough to take the material seriously.

That is where the system came from: the teal and yellow, the handwritten accents, the shapes, how scripture is treated, how a section announces itself. That is what Freedom has been built on since, and it is the part of this I am most glad I got to do. The books are where I worked it out.

For the guides themselves I did the covers, the interior layout, and the print files. The handwriting is there because the book asks you to write in it, and a page that looks precious makes people hesitate. Scripture sits in the margins where you can reach it. Section headers are big and named plainly, Let's Learn and the like, so flipping to the right place is fast. Every prompt has real room under it.

The leader guide shares the participant layout and adds its own notes on top, so both people in a group are looking at the same page.

They rewrote the curriculum and brought me back for the second edition. The 2020 design aged well, which is not always how that goes. We kept it: same system, same colors. What we did was add new elements to keep it feeling current, and make room for more free writing, because the rewrite asks people to put more of themselves on the page.

In July I went down to Fort Myers for a week and worked with the team in the room. Some parts of the curriculum needed more than a file passed back and forth, so we sprinted on those together. I got more done in that week than in the month around it.

Sarah Keller, Dan Harmon, and that whole team are a joy to work with, and I mean that in the specific way: they know what they want, they say it plainly, and then they let you do the work.

Next Level reports Freedom in 15+ countries, more than 100 partner churches, and over 5,000 people through the 12 weeks. Those are their numbers and their curriculum. My part was the look of it and the guides people hold.

It sells on Amazon and direct from the authors, so the files had to be right for two different print pipelines, and that shaped more decisions than anything visual did.

I moved from Fort Myers to Madison in 2022 to help plant a church, and I still get asked back for this one. Of everything in here, Freedom is the project I would have done for free.