Building A Brand to Build A Beloved Community

MY ROLE

Lead Designer
Brand Design
Illustrator

TEAM MEMBERS

Morgan Allen - Rector
Beth Atherton - Director of Stewardship

CLIENT

The Episcopal Church
of the Good Shepherd

As a part of my position at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd I had many hats. I developed a bi-yearly magazine, for which I was the photo editor, layout designer, and print master. I designed wedding invitations, funeral notices, and even re-branded the church’s logo, as well as the logos of other churches within the Episcopal Diocese of Texas. However, one of my favorite projects at Good Shepherd involved working closely with the the Director of Stewardship to create the brand identity for the campaign to raise funds for the the addition and renovation of several buildings as part of the expansion of the Good Shepherd campus.

The Rector and the Director of Stewardship wanted a cohesive way to brand the effort raise funds for a much needed campus renovation. The Rector in particular gave the direction that he wanted the branding to be simple, recognizable and tied into the aspect of the title of the campaign called “Build the Beloved Community”. The branding should appeal to all members of the church community as well as invoke the need to move forward from our old buildings to the new.

Click on imAges to enlarge

Brand mark based on the building design and building blocks.

Typography and color choices for the Build the Beloved Community brand

An example of a facebook cover banner created during the campaign to promote Lenten dinners.

An example of invite sent out to the church community to promote a fiesta and update concerning the BBC Campaign. As a side note the copy for this was provided by the vestry.

An infographic of the BBC timeline as featured in a special BBC issue of the church magazine.

The completion of the new main facade and Narthex courtesy of Heimsath Architects.

After meeting with the Rector and the Director of Stewardship I launched into a discovery phase wherein I researched the history of GS and it’s buildings. My idea was to convert the image of the very well known facade of the church into logo built from blocks that would tie into the initial ask given. When it came time to choose colors for the branding I was fortunate in that we had re-branded a few months prior and one of the aspects of the new logo was a blue tile that was designated as the “Giving” tile. I chose to go with a set of deeper blue hues to drive home the idea of stability, strength, and innovation, but also noted that the lighter blues could be used as accent colors to provide optimism to any collateral pieces that would need to be created. Fortunately the brand fonts already in use for Good Shepherd were perfect for this and was something that did not need to modified. I presented my findings and ideas in a comprehensive design brief and was able to get sign-off from the Rector, the Director of Stewardship and the Vestry.

The use of the blues and the iconography was so distinguishable that we were able to use it create several collateral pieces to promote all events an updates surrounding the campaign. We produced letterhead, note cards, envelopes, invitations, banners, and infographics all tied to the branding creating to “Build the Beloved Community”.