Branding: Church Plant Style
Our North American culture primarily communicates through image, so that’s why when formulating ideas around a logo then choosing an image that will represent the new community, there’s much that comes into play. Questions like: “How can we best capture our ethos in a wordmark?”; “Is it strong enough to appear on various mediums with ease?”; “Does it have the legs to last for the long haul?”; “Is it freakin’ cool?” 
I approached Jeff Anton (who’s done an excellent job designing artwork for me for the last ten years) with some of my intial thoughts around theStory along with pointers like this: we needed something that denoted the ‘telling of a story’; something that spoke of dialogue; something with a ‘blue collar’ feel; something easily recognizable; something that looked nothing like a church logo.
So with all that in mind, and after much discussion this was the first batch of artwork:
As you can see, Jeff picked up on our needs and strongly suggested the idea of the ’speech bubble’. We jumped all over it, but while the concept was right, none of these first itterations were. Back to the drawing board with round two:
By this point we were close, but not quite there. We definitely had a winner from the bunch, but it still wasn’t perfect. Here are some colour variations of what we decided on.
In our minds, it works and captures all that we’re looking for. Darryl’s not 100% sold, but he’ll come around.
Many thanks to Jeff for his patience and expertise, and for those in my handpicked focus group for their two cents. Can’t wait for the day it shows up on a t-shirt…
Filed by Joe at April 20th, 2006 under Creativity, Church Planting
Your better send me one of those T-shirts.
Comment by jeremy — April 20, 2006 @ 1:36 pm