When people come into contact with your brand—whether it be attending your church, visiting your website, or getting a flier in the mail – it needs to be a familiar experience each time. This is made possible when your brand is coherent and consistent. Coherence with your brand is about consistency across all forms of media. Consistency identifies the core of who you are and strongly affects the success of your brand. It establishes the feel of a strong organization.
All the design elements must be consistent.
When someone comes into contact with your brand, it should speak a unified message. This is why it is important to keep everything consistent. Your logo and other design elements need to look like they belong together.
For instance, stick with a certain color scheme and limit the number of fonts you use. There should be a primary font for the organization with several supporting fonts but no more than 4. This keeps your environment, handouts, website, and other elements tied together as a whole. Standard graphic backgrounds are also helpful to keep a brand consistent.
There are exceptions to these limits but as an overarching principle churches should limit branding elements to keep media coherent.
These set boundaries are a good to protect the brand. When you stray from the plan, things can get messy. Youth groups are notorious for using too many different fonts without any specific kind of strategy. Even with good intentions and a desire to create an exciting environment, without a well-planned strategy, consistency and credibility are lost.
Uniform quality is important.
Keep the brand quality at a high level. To ensure this, the branding process is best done by a professional. When a design professional creates your church logo, a brand guide comes with it. This includes the colors, fonts, and variations of the logo. It also outlines the dos and don’ts and provides guidelines for whoever will alter the logo by any means. This way, the church will stick to the limitations that keep the branding superior and consistent.
Remain flexible.
Professionals understand all the aspects of creating a logo. They know that the process is more than just making something for the moment or that just temporarily satisfies a current need.
A logo should be timeless in the design approach so it will last through all kinds of trends. This is accomplished by the design being simple and punchy with fonts which are designed to be timeless. Think of lasting logos such as the the NBC Network Peacock, ABC Network circle and Apple Computers icon.
The brand needs to be able to work across different types of media. Branding elements should work well on print pieces, on the web and in video.
Jeffrey Smith Ministries logo
The logo created for Jeffrey Smith Ministries is punchy and simple to allow for a strong brand across all media. The font used is call Avant Garde which has been around for decades as a widely used font in the design world. It will be well used in the future which allows the logo to be timeless. The mark is able to scale to any size and does not have a lot of detail to limit its production on print pieces.
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