Ormstown Village Church

A self-initiated concept exploring how a small community church could present itself online. Nova designed and built a five-page site around photographic art direction — one colour grade, film grain, arch-masked imagery — with service times surfaced above the fold and an interactive prayer wall where visitors leave a light that persists to the database.

About this concept

This is a self-initiated design concept. Nova built it independently as an exploration of how a small community church could present itself online — it was not commissioned, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by the congregation it reimagines. Copy is drawn from publicly available information, and the photography is AI-generated placeholder art standing in for a real shoot.

The Brief We Set Ourselves

Small-church websites tend to land in one of two places: a dated template that buries the service time, or a stock-photo design that could belong to any organisation anywhere. We wanted to see whether a village church could get something genuinely beautiful — warm, specific to its own building and valley, and still dead simple to use for the two things visitors actually want: when to show up, and what it will feel like when they do.

Design Direction

The first pass used flat vector stained glass and read as cartoonish, so we rebuilt the art direction from scratch around photographic light. Every image runs through a single colour grade — indigo shadows, amber highlights — with film grain over the top, so a set of separately generated photographs reads as one afternoon in one building. Images sit inside arch-masked frames with a thin gold keyline that echoes the windows in the room, and headings are set in Cormorant Garamond against Public Sans for body copy.

The Prayer Wall

The centrepiece is an interactive prayer wall: a darkened wall of forty arched windows where a visitor can leave a light, with an optional first name and an optional request that is never published. Each submission lights a window and persists to the database, so the wall fills in over the week and reflects a real congregation rather than a decoration. A handful of lamps stay lit at all times so the wall never reads as empty, and the surrounding copy ties the feature to a mid-week prayer meeting rather than treating it as a gimmick.

Key Features

• Photographic art direction with a single unified colour grade and film-grain overlay
• Interactive prayer wall with persisted submissions and private prayer requests
• Arch-masked imagery with gold keylines, drawn from the building's own windows
• Service times and location surfaced in the hero, above the fold, on every viewport
• Full ministries directory with real schedules and contacts
• Ken Burns hero treatment and scroll-reveal motion with a reduced-motion fail-safe
• Inertia-driven page transitions across five pages with legacy URL redirects preserved
• Validated contact form and rate-limited public submissions