My Story

I didn't start with a design degree, or expensive software. I started with an iPhone 5S and a one-word search in the App Store.

I was thirteen or fourteen, sitting in my church youth group in Batavia, New York. Around that time my dad, Nathaniel Lake, stepped up to become my youth pastor — someone I watched lead with faithfulness. Being under his leadership, something in me started stirring. I looked around that room and thought: I want to contribute to this. I want to do more than just show up.

There was an old flat-screen TV sitting in the corner of the youth room that nobody really used. One Sunday I found myself staring at it, thinking: what if that screen could do something? What if it could help people remember the announcements?

I downloaded an app called Poster Maker. That was it. That was the beginning. I made a slide for the fall festival, one for Thanksgiving, one for Christmas. Nothing fancy. But something clicked.

Then 2020 happened. Everything stopped. Church shut down. Youth group shut down. For a kid who had just found something he loved doing for the ministry, it felt like the door had closed before it had really opened.

To stay connected with my friends, I started playing Fortnite — a squad with my brother Malachi and a couple of friends from youth group. Then I got an idea: what if I started a YouTube channel? I called it TheLakeEffect, and suddenly I needed graphics — real ones. Thumbnails, channel art, branding. Poster Maker wasn't going to cut it, so I found Canva.

I know what that might sound like — a gaming YouTube channel as the origin story of a church design studio. But that season taught me one thing above everything else: how to hustle. I ran a channel with two uploads a week and a weekly livestream on top of being a junior in high school. There was one night I stayed up until 3:30 in the morning to finish a video, with school starting at 6:30. That wasn't wisdom — it was commitment. And that commitment carried over into everything that came after.

By the end of my senior year, my parents and my pastor encouraged me to consider Bible college — just one year, they said, just to see what it was like. On May 22, 2022, I uploaded my last video. Deep down, I already knew: God hadn't called me to be a video game YouTuber for the rest of my life.

I started my freshman year at Vision Baptist College in Berlin, NJ, on September 1, 2022. From the moment I walked in, I found people who cared about the same things I did — using creativity for the church, using design for ministry.

That first year I met a man named Brad McGilligan, who managed Audio Visual at Solid Rock Baptist Church. I knew right away I wanted to spend as much time around him as I could. Later that year, in an introduction-to-ministry class, his story — along with the stories of other ministry mentors who came to speak — helped make something clear to me: I wanted to help Baptist churches, as a whole, look more presentable.

Through prayer, God made it clear I was to stay home in Batavia, serving my local church, rather than pursuing ministry somewhere entirely new. I surrendered to that, even though part of me longed to design for churches everywhere.

My sophomore year changed everything, design-wise. That was when I was introduced to the Adobe Creative Cloud by my graphic design teacher, Heather Lynn Gibson — a painter, an artist, a designer with decades of experience. She ran her classroom like a professional studio. We started with Photoshop, then InDesign, then Illustrator.

If you were one minute late turning in a file, she marked you off. If you were one minute late to class, she marked you off. She would look at you and say, calmly, that professional graphic designers have deadlines that must be met. We all knew she was right. She wasn't being harsh — she was preparing us for the real world, and she poured everything she had into that classroom. Not for recognition. Not for credit. All for the glory of God.

She strived to see young people use their design gifts for the ministry — not for any credit or callback to herself. It was all for the glory of God.

In early 2025, less than a year after she finished teaching my classes, it was discovered that she had a large brain tumor. She was only fifty-four. The people who loved her were told she didn't have long left. It's a different kind of weight, realizing someone spent some of their final years of health teaching you how to design for eternity. No graphic design class at Vision has been taught with quite that same passion since.

Junior year, then senior year, brought a well-rounded multimedia education: photography, principles of great design, web development, powerful storytelling. Every class was another piece of the puzzle, and every project for a real church was a reminder of why I'd started in the first place. Not for likes. Not for subscribers. For the church. For the Gospel.

Graduation. Marriage to Morgan Woollett. A move back home to Batavia. A new role serving alongside her as Audio Visual manager at Blessed Hope Baptist Church. Any one of those would have been enough to call a full season of life.

I thought that was the whole story. It wasn't.

Ten years ago I was designing youth group announcements on my phone in a church in Batavia, New York. Now I run my own graphic design studio — built to serve churches, priced to be accessible, founded on the conviction that the local church deserves excellent design, pursued as unto the Lord.

The gift was always there. God just kept shaping it. I'm not sure what the next ten years look like. I am sure of who holds them.