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