I’ve had the phrase “I am seized by the power of a great affection,” continually running through my head lately. It’s supposedly a quote from Brennan Manning in “The Ragamuffin Gospel,” but I couldn’t find it scanning the pages myself & my research attributed it to simply being a generic saying from the South. At any rate, it’s a phenomenal illustration of what happens when you open your heart to Christ.

Seized. Captured. By love.

I don’t often get to sit down and design just for kicks, so this was a much needed break for me. I’ve created a desktop wallpaper which you can download for free, below! Please use it for your own personal use only and feel free to direct anyone you may want to share it with back here to FrayedParent.com. The .zip file includes several different sizes, including a background texture for iPad, iPhone 4 & 5, as well as a Twitter header and Facebook Cover. This was my first time exporting it out for so many different formats, so forgive me if I screwed something up.

I hope you enjoy it! Let me know what you think @FrayedParent on Twitter. Thanks!

Download affection.zip now!

When my wife and I first found out that we were going to have a baby, we had to tackle how we were going to tell our family—it had to be good! We wanted to surprise them with the exciting news in a memorable way. You’ll be able to read more on the story in an upcoming post, but essentially I came up with the idea of recreating an image in the style of iTunes ads. At the time it was an appropriate cultural reference, and I thought the image of a baby in the womb with ear buds was suggestive of the energy & excitement exhibited by the dancers in the ads. In my mind, this illustrated a perfect metaphor for the growing life that was just waiting to be set loose on the world. We weren’t going to find out the gender of the child either, so the silhouette seemed to really encompass that there was so many unknowns ahead of us. To finish the announcement, we took the typical Apple product branding strategy for names, and came up with “iComing” as the title, with the month & year of our first child’s due date.

We printed the image, found a couple of picture frames, and gave the images to our parents as a gift—something they could hang-on to in anticipation of a real image of their grandchild that they could put in the frame someday. It was a success (I’ll try to post the video for the upcoming post as well).

I modified the original image to create some desktop wallpapers as a free gift to you guys. I’m not sure how relevant this type of thing still is, especially since I haven’t seen one of these style ads for a long while, but I figured I’d offer this one up for any of you out there who might be anxiously awaiting the arrival of a little one.

Click on the link below to download a zip file with the images in the appropriate screen sizes. This is a free download for personal use only—if you use it for anything else, I will not be held responsible for you getting sued by Apple. Enjoy!

iComing

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