Afghanistan Special Report Mailing
Objective
The Voice of the Martyrs works in the worlds most difficult mission fields, but some nations are almost impossible to access for Christians outside the borders. At this moment in history, Afghanistan is one such nation.
My goal was to design a package for mailing that illustrated what the written stories described: cold isolation and looming danger for Christians inside the country.
Project details
This was a multi-piece mailing package comprised of:
- 4-Color Envelope
- 17x11 Report
- 8.5x11 Tri-Fold Response Device
- Business Reply Envelope
Unique challenges
VOM's visual language relies heavily on photography, aiming to bring readers into fellowship with their persecuted brothers and sisters in Christ. The media archive they maintain has over 1 million assets. However, the situation in Afghanistan made many of the photos in VOM's archive unsafe to publish. For approval to publish such photos, it takes between 1-2 weeks to get word from workers in the field.
At the end of the day, there was only one safe-to-use photo of confirmed Christians in Aghanistan.
Solutions
By this point we were behind schedule, with only one medium-resolution photo available to use. I turned to representative photos, some from Afghanistan and some from the surrounding region. Finally, as a last resort, I pulled the final few images from stock resources like Unsplash.
I designed the report with photos, color, and layout choices which demonstrated how Christians are undeterred by the grim reality of Taliban control.
I also participated in an art-direction role to guide the design of a landing page, the digital version of this report. This helped additional readers experience the printed report within a web context.
Outcome
The final design of the special report was enthusiastically approved by organizational leadership in July 2022. At this point, I began working with our team and vendor to print and produce the mailing. In October, it arrived in over 700,000 mailboxes across the US and internationally, bringing widespread awareness of God's work in Afghanistan to the larger body of Christ.
