Updates Coming in 2024–2025

This year will bring many new and exciting updates to Paramentics. It all began 12 years ago this October when I began selling art on a week-to-week basis. What started as a couple sets of art shared with friends and local churches blossomed into over 600 individual pieces sold to churches in nearly a dozen Christian denominations. Thank you so much for your support and the kind words that have been shared with me over the years. There are big plans ahead, and I’d like to share some of those with you.

Website Updates

Over the last decade the website has remained relatively the same—with only minor refreshes along the way. My hosting platform (Squarespace) has now given me the oportunity to upgrade the layout and design of the website without having to take it completely offline. This will also allow me to better organize my art for new and existing customers, improve search across all products, and create a robust framework for any new art and products. You will see these changes to the website in the next couple months. My hope is that it will be a more useful tool for finding art for your particular needs.

New Art

As we enter a new church year this December, I plan on filling in some gaps in artwork for the 3-year lectionary cycle. You may have already noticed these gaps based on the lectionary your church uses. My goal is to have the current art completed by the end of the year that accommodates the majority of lectionaries. You can see a full list of current and planned artwork in this linked spreadsheet.

I will also be renaming art folders to reflect their festival/proper name. For example, the sets “A01 - Flood” and “C40 - Nain” will change to “A01 - Advent 1A” and “C40 - Proper 5C”. This will help in searching for the appropriate art for a given festival or service. A downloadable index will be made available based on the linked spreadsheet above for existing customers. That will be completed upon completion of the artwork for the 3-year lectionary.

A new style of artwork is currently in the works for the lectionary, and more symbol packs will be created that feature other Christian iconography. You can look forward to those in 2025.

Templates and Fonts

While art has remained the foundation of Paramentics, worship folder templates are an important part of it as well. As a designer, I find great joy in creating functional page layouts and typography. I will also admit that the templates have grown stagnant over the years, mostly on account of the amount of work needed to update them with nearly every software change and the troubleshooting required when software versions don’t align.

My plan is to retain some of the current templates and offer them at a discount. Moving forward, however, I will offer worship folder templates and other templates (e.g., Bible studies, newsletters, etc.) only for Apple Pages—at least to start. There will be oportunities for me to create templates for Microsoft Word in the future, but the time to maintain these will be better spent on new art for the time being.

I also have plans to offer fonts outside of what is included in the templates. These will consist of symbols for spoken responses and other Christian symbols that may be used in print and digital materials. The plan is to release these fonts and templates throughout 2025.

Pricing

Paramentics was not created as a largely profitable enterprise. It has always been important to me to offer art for a reasonable fee, which has remained at $2 per set of art for the past 12 years. My main vocation, graphic design, had helped me support this endeavor in creating liturgical art for churches and Christian organizations. But there are still costs. It takes no small amount of financial overhead to maintain a website of this scale: Website hosting, domain, email, shopping integration, third-party services, taxes on digital goods, and transaction fees. Not to mention the time to create each set of art.

Because of increasing costs over the years—especially after the Covid pandemic—it has been difficult to break even. This is why prices will be increased across the website. The prices will be more in line with what is typically offered on other websites. Beginning this September, pricing for current sets of art that follow the lectionary cycle will be increased to $5. I will also be creating permanent discounts on seasonal collections of art, as well as art grouped by year (which I plan to create by the end of this year, starting with Year C). My goal is to still offer affordable art while adding increased value through products across the website.

Thank you for your continued support and I look forward to serving the Church through art and design for years to come.

Ian

Art Correction: The Word Incarnate

I've made a change to the artwork for Christmas Day, Series B that had been released last month. A couple of you have rightly pointed out a concerning portion of that artwork. In the previous version, Jesus' hair had three curls which could easily be misunderstood as being '666'. That was completely unintentional on my part and I will do better in catching those types of things in the future. The corrected version has been posted to the website, but anyone may download the set completely free from the link below. The link will be available until February 1. I will also be posting free artwork for the festival of St Timothy, Pastor and Confessor later this week. The set will be on sale until January 24.

Symbol 23: Alpha & Omega

Like the Chi Rho, the Alpha and Omega symbol is a very ancient monogram of our Lord Jesus Christ. Based on several scripture passages in Revelation, it means that Jesus is the beginning and end of all things—the one who is, and who is to come. Alpha (Α) and Omega (Ω) are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. It is often used in connection with other symbols to give adding meaning, as is the case with many other sacred monograms.

Symbol 22: Dove & Flame

While a white dove by itself is a symbol of the Holy Spirit, the addition of a flame represents the Day of Pentecost—and by extension, the Christian Church. Sometimes the dove is pictured with wings and tail aflame. In other instances, merely a flame is used to symbolize the tongues of fire, which appeared above the heads of those present on Pentecost.

New Microsoft Publisher Templates

I'm pleased to announce the release of a new template theme made exclusively for Microsoft Publisher. The new Festival theme retains many of the features from the Microsoft Word and Apple Pages templates, and also includes some new additions.

One of the first things you'll notice is the new layout. The outside margins are made slightly wider to give ample room for people's thumbs. The page layouts use a similar style to that of the Royal theme that bring back a centuries-old, yet practical approach to how text is presented on a page. For thousands of years, designers and typographers have used certain proportions in their work that are pleasing to the eye, and make holding a book, letter, or brochure comfortable to a person's hand. Likewise, the margins of the Festival theme make a worship folder pleasant to hold and visually appealing to a member or visitor.

Another addition is the option of two different fonts for response abbreviations. These fonts mimic the two main fonts used in the templates and are therefore offered in both serif and sans serif variations.

The sans serif font, Candara, is used for titling, headers, captions, and rubrics. The serif font, Constantia, is primarily used for body text and page numbers. These fonts were specifically chosen to match in style and be readable at smaller sizes. They are both system fonts that come on computers with Windows Vista installed or newer.

There is also a brand new template formatted for Ledger paper that is folded in half (8.5" x 11" final size). This larger size is great for special services throughout the year. The font sizes are slightly larger, so you could also use it for visually impaired visitors and members.

The Festival theme is ultimately based on the worship folders that I create for Risen Savior, Chula Vista, CA. You can see two recent examples below that I made for two Reformation Festival services. The fonts used are Cronos Pro and Adobe Jenson Pro. Thank you for supporting Paramentics. It's hard to believe I've been doing this for 2 years now. It's been a wonderful experience and I could not have continued doing it without you.  

— Ian M. Welch