Not too long ago I was able to complete a theme design for a month-long campaign that Kingdom of Heaven Ministries is hosting. The theme is “El Favor de Dios”, for my non-Spanish readers its: “The Favor of God”. After much thought, I was finally able to come up with a concept I was comfortable with for this theme. The question I kept asking myself was “what symbolizes favor?”.

This is one of those words that can’t be Googled for an image (I tried, and all you get are party favors, you know… party hats, souvenirs, etc.).  In my research I did find that favor is mostly associated with one giving another a gift.  Perhaps because one is being graceful with another, meaning that by receiving  a gift one has found favor by the giver. Now that is deep stuff!

OK. Well, back to the concept. The gifts I portrayed in this composition, if you will, are as follows: a) Growth. b) Prosperity. c) Productivity. and d) Multiplication. Pictured below you can see different variations and sizes of the theme design on the left. To the right is the stock photography that I used for this composition. By the way, I use stock photography for two reasons.  Reason one, I am not a photographer (or at least I don’t consider myself  to be one).  Reason two, if I was a photographer, I really don’t think I’d have time to set up a photo session for each projects. So there you have it, I’m not cheating. I’m being productive!

Getting back on track, lets not lose focus now! I found that the plant growing from the coins was an excellent example of growth. The coins, of course represent prosperity. The picture of the city is a panorama of New York City. I used this to represent productivity, because New York City did not get to where it is by being passive. It developed into the great city we know today by being productive! Lastly I used images of crowds to represent multiplication (crowd images are not shown below because they were too many, I didn’t want to strain your eyes!).

One thing I had in mind since the beginning, was the color scheme. When I converted the image of the city into black and white, and after some adjustments, I felt it was really the right choice. As for the red, it goes with an ongoing theme about the blood of Jesus that Kingdom of Heaven Ministries is using. Also, in case you don’t know your color theory, red is the most powerful color in the spectrum.

I hope this article has given you a good understanding on the importance and power of symbolizm in design. Please feel free to leave a comment, I would love to hear what you think and I’m sure others would too.