GRAPHIC DESIGN
How to maintain brand consistency across your church's visual identity.
Your church can have consistent branding.
What if I told you that the key to cohesive branding isn’t budget but system?
So many churches really struggle to achieve consistency with their visual identity. And that’s because we often have many different people designing for church. We might have a mixture of volunteers and staff members and many of them don’t have formal design experience, and they’ve all got a slightly different vision of what they’re trying to achieve, which leads to inconsistency in a church’s visual identity.
This article will guide you through every step of the journey to go from visual chaos to church brand consistency.
1 | Establish your Visual Identity
This might look like creating a visual identity if you don’t already have a logo and branding, or it might be a case of bringing together an existing visual identity.
I’d at least recommend having a logo, a typeface, and some colours. But you can go into much more depth. Perhaps consider things like icon style, illustrations and your tone of voice.
2 | Create Brand Guidelines
Put together a Brand Guidelines document that includes everything related to your brand such as your logo and how to use it, what fonts to use, what colours to use etc…
This could be as simple as a single page document, but usually it looks more like a booklet with lots of detail and different pages for each aspect of the brand.
At this stage as good to be as thorough as possible because it will save you lots of time later on. Try to think about the questions that people might have when they’re designing. Answer them in your brand guidelines. And then distribute them as widely as possible. Make this the go-to place for any questions to do with your brand.
3 | Train your Team
However, there’s no point giving people all this information if you don’t train them in how to use it.
So I’d really recommend gathering your team together and walking through the guidelines with them. Go through each page and see what questions they have and try and answer them together. This is going to help keep things consistent across all of your church’s designs.
One thing you could consider, if you hired a graphic designer to do your branding, is see if you could hire them to do some training for your team.They will know the brand guidelines inside out.
And while you’re thinking about training, it might be worth considering some church specific graphic design training. The Church Graphic Design Training Programme teaches the fundamentals of graphic design and shows you how to apply them specifically to a church context.
4 | Centralise Brand Assets
Provide everyone who’s involved with design at your church with all of the assets that they might need in order to apply your style guidelines. So, for example, make sure that everyone’s got access to the right fonts. Make sure that any particular brand, asset, or variations of your logo are all centralised somewhere.
You could think about having a shared Google Drive or folder somewhere. Or if your church uses Canva, you could utilise their brand kit, which is something you can get with Canva Pro, and it allows you to upload your logos and all of your brand assets to Canva so that everyone on your team has access to those things.
5 | Utilise Templates
This involves creating one model version of a flyer or your bulletin that people can edit and reuse, which can be a great tool for church brand consistency. It means your logo’s always going be in the same place and they’re always going to be using the same fonts, and even the layout remains the same.
However, I do think you should take care not to overuse templates. And let me explain why. A really simplified version of a design process is that you start by thinking about the purpose of your design. Then you might think about what content you want to include in order to achieve that purpose. And then finally, you make design decisions based on the purpose that help you include all of the content.
However, if you’re using a template, the design decisions are made before you’ve even started thinking about the content, and so you end up trying to fit the content into preexisting design. So sometimes you end up with designs that just don’t work and aren’t fit for purpose.
6 | Conduct Regular Audits
I’d recommend giving one person responsibility for brand consistency. So that person is going be your brand champion and they need to be really familiar with the visual identity of your church. Maybe once every few months or once a year, they’ll look through your website, your social media, everything you’ve printed, and look for areas where you are lacking in consistency.
If they’re regularly conducting an order of the church’s visual identity, then there needs to be opportunities for feedback as well. So consider how you could be sharing feedback with everyone who’s designing for your church. But be careful in how you do this, especially with volunteers or people who are willingly serving in this area but lacking in confidence.
And so if you’re completing all of these steps, you’ll find that your church’s visual identity transforms into something much more cohesive. It becomes more recognisable and it can even build trust with your community.
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