Painted Churches of Schulenburg

In early 2023, the local Chamber of Commerce approached me looking to revamp their old billboard designs in the area. The goal was to highlight one of the key attractions in the town, the Painted Churches, which hold a cultural importance to the Czech and German families that populate the town of Schulenburg. The Chamber runs tours for visitors to explore and learn more about their history and importance to the immigrants who first founded the towns along railroads in the region. I was tasked with providing a billboard ad that included contact information, the churches themselves and imagery of the town. I also needed to incorporate the Chamber's new slogan for the tour service, "Is this on your bucket list?". We get a lot of older visitors in town who really enjoy the tours so the phrasing and design were definitely geared to those who are likely retired and interested in exploring niche pieces of Texas and American history. Using images of the actual churches themselves, graphics to represent the rolling hills and open skies of the area, and the new slogan, I created the original billboard shown. This has now appeared on multiple billboards alongside an interstate and major Texas highway north of Houston generating hundreds of thousands of impressions.

 

The Chamber found the billboard to be such a success that it has sense been altered into various forms to become the Chamber of Commerce's main ad in multiple magazines, newspapers, phone books, and other publications in the central Texas region.