The Idea

Every summer Gateway Church features a "Voices" series — bringing in speakers to share from their area of expertise. This particular year the focus shifted inward, celebrating the local communities surrounding each of the church's Austin-area campuses: North Austin, South Austin, and Buda. The brief called for something that felt distinctly Texan, deeply local, and visually unified across three distinct communities. The concept: a single typographic illustration where the word GATEWAY itself becomes the canvas — each letter containing a hand-illustrated scene from the places these communities call home.

The Build

Every scene was illustrated from scratch in Adobe Illustrator and Procreate — the Congress Avenue Bridge bat colony erupting at sunset, a longhorn resting in a field of bluebonnets, paddleboarders on Lady Bird Lake, the Buda water tower overlooking its small-town main street, a waving Texas flag. Each illustration was built as a standalone piece before being composited into the letterforms. The GATEWAY type was then given dimensional extrusion and placed over a full illustrated Austin skyline silhouette, all set against a warm Texas sunset gradient. Nothing here came from a stock library — every element was conceived, referenced, and hand-built.

The Output

The system extended across screen and social deliverables — widescreen message title slides, social media graphics, speaker-specific social cards pairing each voice with the illustrated world, and weekly series assets for all four weeks of the campaign.