Desiring God in the Dark
An eight-part article series and email journey from Desiring God exploring the pursuit of joy in God through suffering and hardship.
CREATIVE DIRECTION + DESIGN
The series premise is direct: the pursuit of joy in God doesn’t stop when suffering comes, but goes deepest in the hardest places.
Every image is black and white, heavily grained, pushed toward darkness. The grain treatment unites a range of sourced photographs into a single world. But bleakness is not the point. The coral color runs throughout the system, appearing against darkness the way the series argues joy appears in suffering: spare, precise, and impossible to miss.
The social carousel builds an argument across frames, moving from darkness toward a single image where the coral fills the frame. “It’s the beginning of true joy.” The color breaks through. The series calls readers to the same defiance: joy that fights in the dark rather than waiting for the light.
The identity was designed to scale across a web article series, an eight-part email journey, social promotion, and printed posters, all from a visual system spare enough to work at every scale it was asked to occupy. The series was timed to accompany the release of a revised edition of John Piper’s Desiring God, the book that gives the ministry its name and its mission.
