HOMEGROWN
Guidance & Inspiration for Navigating Your Homeschooling Journey

From the Publisher

Homegrown is a curated collection of homeschooling guidance and encouragement that offers an honest and eclectic portrait of home education. Engaging, insightful, and full of hope, this thought-provoking harmony of expert perspectives will make readers laugh, cry, and long to bring and keep their children home. Parents will gain confidence while learning from the most lauded voices in the homeschooling community and walk away with more vision and trust in home education and themselves.

This project allowed me to fully “dive in” by providing both the cover design and illustrations for the project. I designed 3 distinct style approaches using a strategic color palette selected to highlight the author’s bright and engaging writing style and culture. I also drew from her other published title covers in order to provide optimal merchandising for the author and the publisher.

While each style is unique, they all intentionally connect to the idea of home, family, and community. Each of these environments play a key role in Amber’s approach to a full and encompassing education.

Publisher: Baker Publishing, March 2025
Art Director: Laura Klynstra
Cover Designs & Illustration*: Amy Cerra

*All illustrations Copyright 2024 © by Amy Cerra

This book launched the Our Daily Bread for Kids product line. As Art Director for this product and sub-sequential product line, I cast the visual direction for the illustration and layout. All products in this line have been illustrated by the talented Luke Flowers, and design layout was done by Children’s book expert, Kris Nelson.

Creative Director: Amy Cerra

Designer: Kris Nelson

Illustrator: Luke Flowers

Author Elizabeth George (A Woman After God’s Own Heart) is an internationally loved author and speaker whose best selling books have been translated in many languages. This devotional Bible cover composition is a sample created for Editorial Portavoz, 2018.

The Bible features devotions written by Elizabeth based on her international best seller. This cover features a linen-like PU material cover that is de-bossed with the floral pattern and titling. It also features printed edges.

This product design comp was part of a collection presented in 2018 and was not selected for production.

Publisher: Editorial Portavoz | Kregel Publishing

Design: Amy Cerra

This book and notepad product were designed as a premium promotional offer to a direct Our Daily Bread mailing group. The product was designed for a targeted audience of supporting members. This book contained selected devotional readings from Our Daily Bread devotionals that revealed scriptural truths about Heaven. This encouraging book performed well and is still in the Our Daily Bread premium product line. It is part of a short series of topical books.

The coordinating letter served as the premium offer mailing to the targeted audience. These letters follow a format designed to give encouragement and a word of thanks from the ministry president, as well as invite the audience to request their book. While being formulaic, the intent was to make the mailing as complete and appealing as possible.

Designer: Amy Cerra

Publish Date: 2019

These True Woman Spanish bible cases were designed in partnership with Revive Our Hearts and Editorial Portavoz | Kregel Publishing. The bold pastel colors were chosen by the publishing partners and designed to their annual campaign theme.

What makes these covers interesting is that they featured an involved manufacturing process. They were created from a PU/vinyl material that was both blind embossed and then foiled. Coordinating stitching details, headbands, ribbon markers, and patterned tone on tone end sheets complimented the simple design.

Publishers: Revive Our Hearts + Editorial Portavoz
Design: Amy Cerra

The Proverbs devotional book exploration was a proposal that I created and made to the publishing team just before my departure as Creative Director in Early Spring 2020.

The concept was to create a beautiful and updated devotional for women based on the book of Proverbs. This book combines the inspirational devotions written by the female authors of Our Daily Bread along with the full book of Proverbs as a 31 day study.

Similar to Alabaster and She Reads Truth, this product was proposed to be attractive to women between 35 - 50 years old.

The product concept rang true and a version of the concept was published in 2021.

Creative Concept and Design: Amy Cerra

Psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit have encouraged many to put their trust in God. Speaking to the hearts of all who follow after God's love, this special edition of readings offers the poetry of freedom songs through some of the soulful responses of people of African descent. Find hope and encouragement that will remind you of God's faithfulness and the freedom He offers now and forever through Christ.

–Our Daily Bread Cover Copy

In the brief for this booklet, the publisher specifically called out the image of a tree; not just due to the obvious roots illustrations, evoking heritage, but also because there is so much history and imagery, both good and bad, in the heritage of American's descended from Africa. The publisher specifically asked for an ancient oak, and in the end selected the dramatic graphic composition.

Creative Director and Designer: Amy Cerra
Publisher: Joyce Dinkins

The Discovery Series is an evergreen line of small topical saddle-stitched books published by Our Daily Bread. They are designed to give an overview and main points of a topic in 92 pages. These books are published in many languages and distributed globally.

For this exploration I asked the question "What could a strong visual series design do for this brand?" There were many things to keep in consideration including translation requirements, cultural adaptability, limiting photography, and creating continuity similar to the Our Daily Bread devotional. The compositions deliberately used the same 4 titles and the same 4 images in order to explore options with the title, banners, and other format options.

This exploration was presented early in 2020 and was never executed.

Designer: Amy Cerra

The Biblia de una joven conforme al corazón de dios (Young Woman After God’s Own Heart) Bible was developed by best selling author Elizabeth George. Patterned after her women’s devotional bible, the Young Woman’s bible features devotionals written to a young woman and guiding them through important questions about identity and character.

For this cover, designed specifically for the Spanish market, we featured the artwork of a well known Michigan-based artist on a printable PU material, and used vibrant fuchsia PU material for the body. Contrast stitching and blind embossing finished off the cover.

Biblia de una joven conforme al corazón de dios (2020)
Publisher: Editorial Portavoz
Artist: Shelby Kregel
Designer: Amy Cerra

In April of 2019 a group of international designers gathered at the ODBM office in Michigan with a task. Four years earlier we had rebranded our ministry and updated the look of the Our Daily Bread cover and interior, but there were complications.

I was charged with leading an exploration session to update and adjust our beloved devotional cover and interior to address common areas of complaint including printing efficiencies, readability and accessibility, audience appeal, and language adaptability. When you print over 60 million copies of these devotionals in 58 languages, these improvements could add up to substantial cost and time savings.

I led the team of global art directors through a series of explorations and exercises as we identified and solved common problems. The results of that work are seen here. This project was initiated out of conversations with each global production team and art director.

The Our Daily Bread devotional is a global publication. It is published in 58 languages and distributed to over 150 countries. Our Daily Bread Ministries has 32 offices around the world.

Creative Director: Amy Cerra

Global Art Directors from Singapore, Malaysia, Europe, Canada, Brazil, and the United States

This limited editions Woman After God’s Own Heart, Spanish edition was made available for a limited time in 2018. The cover features a printed UV front panel with a linen texture spine and back cover. Design features include contrast stitching and blind embossed spine.

Publisher: Editorial Portavoz, 2018
Designer: Amy Cerra

INSPIRATIONAL SCRIPTURE CARDS
OUR DAILY BREAD MINISTRIES

Designed as a premium offer to donors, this 16 card set of 5×7 cards were designed to be displayed and shared. Featuring select scriptures and watercolor flowers, this set was designed specifically for their 70+ year female donor.

Cards were printed on premium 80pt textured paper and were a popular seasonal offering.

Art Director & Designer: Amy Cerra

Illustrations: Creative Market

This unique campaign was designed to engage supporters of the ministry with important regional updates and information about global projects. The campaign was launched in 2019 and consisted of this brochure that gave updates from regional offices and offered ways members can pray for the ministry by region.

This Prayer Guide was published in 2019.

Designer: Amy Cerra

This special Easter Edition mailer of Our Daily Bread focused on a special Lenten devotional as well as a video documentary. The mailier and booklet cover were designed to coordinate with the media campaign and this project was a marriage between the publishing arm and video arm of the ministry.

Easter special editions are extremely popular with churches and faith-based non profits as well as medical and prison ministries. These products are also used globally and translated into many languages.

The letter, mailing envelope, and book design considered these many factors in appealing to a broad audience.

Creative Director: Amy Cerra

Campaign Art Director: Heather Brewer

Mailer Designer: Amy Cerra

This Special Edition was created for the Christian Camp and Conference Association and was distributed to a number of ministries and Christian organizations each year.

The association asked for a badge-link cover that would appeal to their camp-loving teens and young adult counselors and staff.

Cover & Poster Design: Amy Cerra