A few years ago, I began to attend a church that was going through an identity crisis. Initially I wasn't aware of what was going on behind the scenes until one day after services, my wife introduced me to the minister and promptly informed him of my design background. The church was looking for a new identity and I could see the wheels turning in his head as he spoke with me about needing a new logo design. After doing some research, I discovered that the church had experienced a split from a few years before and the body was recovering and desired to start over with a shiny new name and identity. The name was originally the First Christian Church which is now Grace Community Christian Church, or as Jim, the minister who likes to be referred to as, "the preaching guy," likes to call it, GC3.
I felt overwhelmed when asked to get involved in coming up with a brand identity for a body that served God. "Is this a sign," I asked myself. Thankfully there was another person within the church membership that had a background in graphic design and she had done some work for the church prior to my joining so I wouldn't be in this totally on my own.
After a few meetings and a thousand or so sketches later (I exagerate, it was in the hundreds), we reached concensus on a logo with word mark. Some of the previous designs we came up with were described as, intimidating to the traditional body, not edgy enough, too ambiguous for the unchurched, too simple, not simple enough, and so-on. The preaching guy was also stuck on the tagline, "a growing place." So there had to be a message that would convey this tagline built into the logo.
Here is the result of the branding efforts put forth.
Logo and wordmark:
Advertising:
Invitations:
And the
WEBSITE.
I really had a lot of fun doing design work for the church and it didn't turn out to be as dreadful as I had initially imagined. I also dicovered through this exercise that God's work is never done.
Labels: design issues, graphic design
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