Start here. This is Laffoon...

My design journey started back in college. Sports had always been my life, and I was going to be a sports broadcaster, but then God called me into ministry. So I switched my major to Biblical Studies and decided to intern at my church. And during that time, without anyone asking me to, I started to make things. Graphics. Videos. Set designs. I wasn't necessarily passionate about the creative work, but I cared a lot about the experience we could create for people.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to tell this like a tidy origin myth — and that's when I knew. It wasn't like that. It was quieter and slower and mostly invisible at the time. I didn't have a desire at the time to be a graphic designer (I still don't). But something was forming in my life under the surface, and I wouldn't realize it for over a decade. So I went into ministry, and the journey began.

Four years as a youth pastor. Then four and a half years as an executive pastor at that same church — a job whose title tells you almost nothing about what it is. I oversaw the staff. I managed the budget and the ministries. I preached once or twice a month. And I built and ran the creative and communications side of the church: the visuals, the messaging, the way it all looked and sounded to the person walking in for the first time.

If you want to know where a designer gets trained without design school, it's a job like that.

I learned to lead people, which mostly means learning to see what someone is actually good at, sometimes before they see it. I learned the unglamorous organizational machinery underneath every institution — budgets, systems, the reasons things break. I learned to write because I had to write constantly. I learned to stand in front of a room and hold it, because there was no one else to do it. And I learned that a church, like a brand, is an argument about what matters, expressed in a thousand small decisions that most people will never consciously notice, but all of them will feel.

I didn't call any of it design at the time. I called it ministry.

Somewhere in there, I started freelancing — side projects for friends and family, mostly for free, mostly at night. Then we moved into church planting, and the freelancing grew. I didn't think of it as a business. I thought of it as the thing I did with my hands when the other work let me breathe.

Here's the part of the story that matters most, and it happened before the part everyone assumes came first.

In 2022, at a church planting conference, someone gave me a prophetic word. Two words, really: stop striving. And then the line that came with it — whatever is birthed in the flesh must be maintained by the flesh, but whatever is birthed in the Spirit will be maintained by the Spirit.

I want to be precise about the timing, because I've noticed people expect this to be the lesson I learned after the business nearly broke me. It isn't. The word came first. It came while I was still in ministry, still planting, a year before I left. Which means I didn't stumble into it as a survivor's wisdom. I carried it into the leap, like a stone in my pocket, and then spent the next several years finding out what it actually meant.

What it meant, at first, was terrifyingly simple: if I build this on my own strength, my own strength is what will have to hold it up. Forever. And my own strength has a bottom — I've found it more than once. But if God builds it, God sustains it. That's not a slogan. It's a load-bearing question about who's carrying the weight.

I left the ministry in 2023. We closed up the church planting effort and moved to Kansas City, and I started Creative Arts Department.

The honest reason I left is that I saw God's hand on the creative work in a way I couldn't ignore. It was reaching people — thousands of them, across the country, and eventually beyond it. The math wasn't complicated. What was complicated was how it felt.

I felt like a fraud. Not at the work — at the leaving. I'd spent over ten years being able to say I'm in ministry, and now I couldn't, and some quiet part of me kept filing that under demotion. The impact I was actually making was significantly larger than the impact I was letting myself believe in. I just couldn't see it, because I was still measuring by a category I'd walked out of. It took me a long time to understand that I hadn't left the ministry. It simply changed its shape.

The early days of Creative Arts Department were not a story you'd put on a slide.

There were months where the income didn't cover the expenses, and I would sit with that number and wonder whether I was actually any good at this — whether the whole thing had been a very expensive act of self-deception. I tried to start a clothing line. I couldn't figure out how to blend ministry and business without one of them feeling like a betrayal of the other. I hired someone, and it ended up putting us upside down financially, and then I had to let that person go — which is its own particular kind of awful when you've spent a decade as a pastor, and you're wired to believe that people are the point.

It took about two and a half years before it steadied. Client work became consistent. My pricing was finally right — which is its own long story about worth. And I became confident about what I offered and could actually do well.

That's the real timeline. Not a leap and a landing. Two and a half years of not knowing.

And here's what I keep coming back to: I don't think I would have survived those years without the word I'd been handed before them. Every one of those months was an invitation to strive — to grind harder, to force it, to prove the leap had been right. Instead, most days, I chose not to apply that pressure. Not because I'm disciplined. Because I'd been told, in advance, that whatever I built in the flesh I'd have to maintain in the flesh, and I already knew I didn't have it in me.

I'm still learning that lesson. I have to remind myself of it regularly — usually right after I've caught myself doing the opposite.

I built a six-figure design business with no formal training after a decade in full-time ministry. I'm still not entirely sure how that happened, and I'm genuinely not sure what I'll end up doing with the rest of my life.

But I know two things, and they're why I'm writing now.

The first is that I've found a deep connection with God through art and through rest, and it holds no matter what else is going on. Not because the work is impressive. Because the making and the stopping are both, somehow, ways of being with Him.

The second is that I've learned a lot — through study, and through the far more expensive method of getting it wrong in public — and I've come to believe the lessons aren't mine to keep. My detours could be somebody else's shortcuts. That's the whole reason for this. There's a version of me from ten years ago who was talented and lost and striving, and he would have given anything for someone to say out loud the things I've had to learn the slow way.

So that's what I want to do here. Help you become the most creative version of yourself — and find a rhythm that doesn't burn you down to do it. Connect with the Creator you're made in the image of. And then pour that gift out on the world, freely, from a full well instead of an empty one.

I don't have it figured out. I'm just a little further up the same road, turning around to say: Keep walking.