“Maintaining your brand's core elements is crucial to building trust with your audience. When refreshing materials, avoid altering your brand's foundation. Instead, explore new approaches to photography or video styles, update social media templates, or refine typographic hierarchies. This allows for a fresh look while keeping the brand recognizable and consistent,” suggest Matt Bullard, graphic designer at Nashville's Church of the City.
The beginning of a new year is historically a welcome time for all sorts of new beginnings. A new year brings a blank slate and a fresh start, and it’s also a natural time for ministries to implement new concepts as well.
Many churches begin new sermon series in the new year and others may introduce new ministry branding packages or even a new website design. It’s also not an uncommon season in which to introduce new pre-service slides, song lyric templates, and announcement videos or bumpers.
… it’s not as simple as throwing out a new idea and running with it.
But if the new year will bring a new look of any kind for a church, it’s not just as simple as throwing out a new idea and running with it. As with anything done anew, there should be an intentionality involved that starts with clarifying vision and outcomes and then developing a roadmap to get there, beyond just mixing it up for the sake of change. And any new changes should be consistent with whatever identity has already been established for the church itself.
“Consistent look versus change and staying current and modern and design trends: I don’t think they are mutually exclusive,” says James Harding, the director of ministry coordination at First Baptist Church of Rogers, Ark. “I think you can find the balance of consistency and current. You can have your purpose, clearly identified as a church, and then design a simple strategy around that. That strategy can be anything from the types of imagery to the language you will use and it can go all the way to fonts and colors for the purpose of brand recognition. But you have to have that purpose, that identity, defined first. If you don’t have that, then you come across as a multiple-personality, inconsistent, incohesive, and incoherent voice that just becomes clutter and noise in an already noisy world.”
Kris R. Orlowski Kris Rae Photography
Matt Bullard, graphic designer at Nashville's Church of the City shares "Our team has identified three core adjectives that align with the church's values, which must be reflected in all photography, sermon series designs, and print media. At the start of each year, we review the previous year's content to identify areas where the brand can improve. While the core branding remains consistent, how we express the three adjectives evolves to stay relevant and engaging.”
Matt Bullard has been the graphic designer at metro Nashville’s Church of the City for the last five years and notes that “maintaining your brand's core elements is crucial to building trust with your audience. When refreshing materials, avoid altering your brand's foundation. Instead, explore new approaches to photography or video styles, update social media templates, or refine typographic hierarchies. This allows for a fresh look while keeping the brand recognizable and consistent.”
“Maintaining your brand's core elements is crucial to building trust with your audience.” - Matt Bullard, Graphic Designer at metro Nashville’s Church of the City
“The church creative team I work with recently completed a comprehensive brand refresh, including new typography treatments, additional brand colors, updated photography standards, and clear guidelines for future sermon series,” Bullard continues. “Our team has identified three core adjectives that align with the church's values, which must be reflected in all photography, sermon series designs, and print media. At the start of each year, we review the previous year's content to identify areas where the brand can improve. While the core branding remains consistent, how we express the three adjectives evolves to stay relevant and engaging.”
Bullard’s team typically does a quarterly refresh of the church’s website, which includes updated pictures and video content headers. In the big picture, it makes sense for this to be one of the first things a ministry may want to tweak with the new year, since the Christmas-to-January season tends to include a lot of church visitors.
Some may use the holidays to come back to church for the first time in a while, and others may use the new year as a springboard to try and renew a commitment to attend church that had been lacking for some time.
Your website is often the first point of contact for potential visitors. A modern website communicates trustworthiness, competence, and a care for someone who hasn't been to your church yet. An outdated website can turn visitors away.
A graphic may look one way up close on an editing machine’s monitor, but how does it look live in the auditorium on an LED wall or projector screen?
“Churches should think about outsiders first with their website,” shares Brandon Rodgers, the director of media and communications at Birmingham, Ala.’s Hunter Street Baptist Church. “I believe this is an area where many church leaders are misguided. Leaders believe the website is for the church body. I'd encourage churches to consider other communication channels for the church family (email, social media, texting, etc.).”
FBC Rogers’ Harding agrees. “Is [the website] easy to navigate and find what you want quickly if you’re not already someone that goes to church there? If a website is an encyclopedia of everything you have at your church, you’re doing it wrong. The majority of people going to your website should be people that aren’t there yet. And they should be going to your website to find out: 1) Where and when can they experience [a service]; 2) Who is there and will I relate (staff and social media photos of people), and 3) What do you have for my family?”
In the same vein, taking a look at a church’s social media accounts to consider an update of graphics or artwork is also a worthwhile endeavor, but only if it’s tied in with the overall identity and brand of the church and how the church strategically attempts to reach different audiences.
“Knowing your audience is essential for creating relevant and engaging content [on social media],” notes Church on the City’s Bullard. “Regularly reviewing analytics ensures you understand what content resonates and allows you to adjust accordingly.”
“By knowing who you're trying to reach, you can maintain relevance, strengthen relationships and trust, and avoid confusion or alienation caused by unnecessary or abrupt content changes,” adds Hunter Street’s Rodgers. “Also, people will engage in your content by stopping the scroll.”
… any new changes should be consistent with whatever identity has already been established for the church itself.
In this context, a brand is essentially the visual identity of an organization. Being able to develop and implement that effectively requires a creative team to think like an “outsider” at times: how will this be received by a guest or someone not familiar with who we are and what we do? Creating impactful “external” branding hinges on a creator’s ability to see things from a different seat.
But when it comes to creating effective “internal” branding (things geared for the in-house audience, like sermon graphics, pre-service announcements, etc.), a creator must be able to see those things from a different seat as well. Literally.
Content always looks one way when viewed on a computer screen. But how does it look in the real-world application? Before finalizing any new looks, a team should always have some sort of review process to invite feedback prior to its live introduction.
“We had a student ministry choose a logo for their ministry. They thought it looked great. But it was so thin that you literally could not use it on anything except solid colors or it got lost,” recalls Harding. “The fonts you choose not only have to be legible but will have a personality associated with them: bulky, bold, serif, sans serif, lite, demi, etc. These are all factors when looking at your fonts, and colors matter as much as fonts. They should be in line with whatever the response is that you’re seeking. There are tons of resources out there about the psychology of color. There are reasons why national and international brands made the color decisions that they made,” he continues.
So, a graphic may look one way up close on an editing machine’s monitor, but how does it look live in the auditorium on an LED wall or projector screen? Can the font be easily read from the last row without squinting? For an announcement slide, is there too much text for someone to read easily and quickly (less than 10 seconds)? Do colors blend together without effective contrast, making things seem jumbled?
Taking a few minutes during the week to review this before a Sunday and even asking for feedback from co-workers or fellow team members is critical to ensure that a new look will be well-received.
Even artwork for new sermon series, which many ministries launch corresponding with the first of the year, should be reviewed in the room in advance of going live.
...whether talking about a website, social media channel, series art, or even a ministry’s overall logo and color scheme, there are plenty of cost-effective ways of bringing new ideas and looks to the table.
Ultimately churches shouldn’t change branding packages just for the sake of change. Intentionality should always be involved, attempting to drive a certain feeling, response, or end result, none of which are possible without first clarifying vision, target audiences, and desired outcomes.
But the good news is that, regardless whether talking about a website, social media channel, series art, or even a ministry’s overall logo and color scheme, there are plenty of cost-effective ways of bringing new ideas and looks to the table.
Many churches now use Canva as a free or limited-cost resource to help improve their graphic design look, and that can be a great starting point for setting up simple things like color pallets and font templates (for headers and body text) that can be built off of and shared between multiple teams to help maintain consistency.
Additionally, with the incredible quality of phone cameras, just about anyone is capable of taking fresh, high-quality pictures or video that can be uploaded to a website or social media reel, making it easier to add these features without dedicated professional videographers on staff.
But whatever the element or asset, the main goal is that there’s a feeling of cohesion through it all, whether with colors, font, design style/layout, photography style or subjects, and even video editing style. Even though an overall church is one organization, it’s comprised of different ministries, which can sometimes have their own theme or vibe in how they desire to communicate. However, there’s value in having a similar feel across the board that is governed by concrete design principles of what does or doesn’t support the church’s overall brand identity.
For churches with limited staff, or even those with larger staffs but who may always feel like they’re sprinting from one task to the next with no time to evaluate, there is always value in taking a step back to ask questions about effectiveness. Does this feel stale? Did it convey the right emotion? Is there something small (like just changing font style) we can do to make it feel more current?
Without asking these questions, effectiveness will ultimately diminish and it will be harder for a ministry to stay true to who it says it is. The first step towards change can often be the hardest.
“Put in the effort at some point as a starting point to move forward,” Harding implores. “It will require extra work and extra time, but it’s worth it!”
