A rush project that came to me about a week ago was designing a giant Bible for the set of our new monthly Kenneth Cox series, Give Me the Bible. This series will run four consecutive days each month, throughout each month of 2009.

The overall design and physical construction of the set (including the columns, flaming urns, vines, and other graphics) was the work of others. The Bible itself is a three-dimensional structure, with the open pages gracefully bowing out from the center and tapering to the edges. The page edging is painted gold, like an actual gilt-edged Bible. This structure was the work of Chuck, who is on The Voice of Prophecy team. My role was creating the Bible artwork that would be applied to the page surfaces.

All of the work was done in Adobe InDesign, which allowed me to create the page at actual size. On this scale, the smallest type on the page is 120 points. (Talk about a large print edition!)

The project wasn’t too difficult, as much as it was time consuming. The biggest challenges were: (1) creating a very classical page where all the lines sit on even baselines across the page, all columns end flush, and there are no widows or orphans — more difficult than it sounds with seven chapters of short verses on the spread; and (2) creating the Hebrew sections for Psalm 119, in which I was greatly aided by the program Font Examiner — one of the best type applications I have ever purchased. 

When complete, everything was printed on our Epson 11880 wide-format printer, on canvas. I was quite pleased with the results.