Solid Joys had been Desiring God’s daily devotional for over a decade: a short, substantive reading from John Piper for every day of the year, available in written and audio form. The product had an icon and little else. The creative task was to build out a full visual identity and redesign the digital experience from the ground up: more approachable, more accessible to a broader audience, and built to scale.

Two design problems shaped everything. The first was the imagery problem. A 365-day devotional needs a fresh visual for every day, but the content moves across the full range of the Christian experience, from exultation to lament, anchored trust to wrestling. No illustrative approach could keep pace without becoming either impossible to sustain or reductive. The solution was to stop trying to match image to content and instead treat the imagery as atmosphere. One piece of abstract painting per month, divided into weekly crops, then further divided into daily thumbnails. Twelve paintings yield 365 images. The system does the work; the art provides the feeling. The paintings shift with the months, giving the experience a sense of seasonal rhythm without demanding a new creative decision every day.

The second problem was scale of a different kind. Rather than designing solely for Solid Joys, the interface was conceived as a devotional engine: a shared design system capable of hosting multiple devotionals. Solid Joys was the first to run on it, but the navigation logic, the mobile-first reading and listening experience, the language switching between English, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese were all built to be reused.

The wordmark pairs a geometric sans with a high-contrast serif, the two typefaces that anchor Desiring God’s broader typographic system, brought together into something warmer and more inviting than what existed before. A horizontal bar of cropped painting runs beneath the logotype, functioning as both brand signature and color index for the twelve months. The paintings themselves, vivid and tactile against clean white type containers, carry the identity across podcast artwork, daily email, social media, and video.