The Village Church

MPC is launching a new church plant on the edge of Kelvin Grove Urban Village. We're calling it "The Village Church" and aiming for students and young urban professionals. We threw around a few ideas for logos, and settled on the second, grungy version. I still kinda like option 1 though...

MPC Style Guide

Steve Cree from Southern Cross Presbyterian suggested that we post the MPC Corporate Style Guide here on design4church. While there's maybe a bit of 'yuk factor' in juxtaposing the words "church" and "style", the guide is simply an attempt to standardise the use of fonts and logos across our church organisation. Otherwise, left unbridled, everyone will have a 'word from the Lord', and they'll all be in the most ostentatious fonts they can find. Now we've got a style guide, the challenge will be to get people to stick to it!

Click here to download the pdf.

Font makeover

Here at design4church we're often pushing the importance of font consistency in your church publications. Finding a consistent and coherent set of fonts with nicely contrasting weights and sticking with them relentlessly is the challenge. Every few years, though, it's time for a total refresh. At mpc, we've moved from the Eras font family (with lots of useful weights from ultra light to ultra black) to a slimmer Bell Gothic phase, which we're now - after about 5 years - retiring in favour of a new font family based on Bitstream's Humanist 777 Condensed. I was looking for something slim, sans-serif, modern and clean. Apart from the unlikely name, the only problem with the Humanist777 family was that it looked a bit 'sterile' on the page. Clean, but too clinical. So with the help of the excellent Type2.2 font editor (and its freeware partner TypeLight), I set about making some mods. Putting it simply, I slightly bent the stems on abdgmnpqr and u. The results? A little bit of swing, and a subtle warmth on the page. Here's a sample...



After working the same minor surgery on the light and extrablack fonts and renaming them to a more corporate-friendly MPC Black and MPC Light, it was time to start work on a matching serif font. Painstaking - but no worse than knitting. All my TV watching time in the past week or two has been spent adding carefully styled serifs, and the result is a very tidy body text that fits perfectly with the sans serif fonts... MPC Serif.

Finally, our favourite handscript face - Desert Dog - got a makeover to raise the x-height to match the rest of the MPC font family as MPC Hand. Here's the final result...