Some great new free fonts...

Smashing Magazine has again featured a bunch of fresh free fonts.  Titillium is my fave so far... multiple weights, and oh-so 2009ish.

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...

Pantone Colour of the Year - Mimosa

Actually, white's not so 'in' after all. In fact, Pantone recently announced that wattle-yellow 'Mimosa' is their colour of the year for 2009. Look around and you'll see it in all the style-leading places... the Rove Live credits on Australia's Network 10, Brisbane's La Boite Theatre, and many more. It's officially PANTONE® 14-0848 Mimosa, which according to the press releases is "a warm, engaging yellow." Need more persuasion? "In a time of economic uncertainty and political change, optimism is paramount and no other color expresses hope and reassurance more than yellow." Or so they say.

Rechurch09 Video Promo

Our second promo video comes from Mitchelton Presbyterian Church, from the launch of their rechurch09 theme earlier this year. White is so 'in'.

Design4church goes video...

About time too, I hear you say. The whole world has gone video-crazy, so it's time D4C jumped on the me-too bandwagon with links to your best church-promo vids. We'll start the ball rolling with this nice "Got Questions" advert from Southern Cross Presbyterian.

More Black than Black

Just learned something I never knew over at fuelyourcreativity.com. Check out their 3 Deadly Sins of Print design to find out how to make your blacks print really black. Simple really - just add a dash of the other CMYK colours to punch your blacks right out of the page. Simply specifying K100 (100 percent black) gives a slightly grey look when the ink runs thin on the paper. That gets my tip of the month award!

Font resources

On a roll here - ready to share some more good font resources. This list points to a load of free font websites. One it doesn't mention though is the excellent Font Squirrel site, which seems way more selective than most. They're all good... though none better than Vegur from DotColon.net.

Free Stuff at ThinkDesign

Get free fonts, vectors, textures, tutorials, and loads of inspiration at thinkdesign. Another design blog worth a link. Best feature? A great list of 20 free pro-quality serif fonts if you want to stand out from the pack. In a subtle way. 

Thinking about Logo Design

PositiveSpaceBlog runs this useful primer for thinking through Logo Design. Wordmarks, letterform marks, pictorial marks, abstract marks and emblems are all explained and exampled. Seems Positive Space   may well be worth some positive space in your favourites, or your feedreader.

Wonderful script logos...

Some wonderful logo designs specialising in script styles is featured here http://www.lettercult.com/logos - worth a click!

Minimalist Communication

Check out the guided tour of the new ipod shuffle at http://www.apple.com/au/ipodshuffle/ 

"I reckon its (yet again from apple) a beautiful example of clear minimalist communication," says Bryson Smith. EVERYTHING has been thought about: the colour scheme and style of what the girl is wearing, the choice of music you hear, the absence of any backdrop, the way the girl introduces herself and then uses really plan speech...  the whole thing says "relaxed, friendly, cool style."  Simply beautiful communication.

Uncle Sam Needs You

 

"Here's a 'propaganda flyer' that'll be handed around my church to recruit people to evangelise on university campus," says Tommy Wong. It's an oldie but a goodie, Tommy - and perfectly executed. Thanks for sending.

Ephesians Makeover

"Any quick thoughts on improving this," asks Alan Radloff?

It's a nice idea, and looks pretty good. But my first suggestion was to move the globe to the right, eliminating the untidy black area of 'trapped space' between the right edge of the text and the edge of the planet. There's one less alignment too - all the text follows straight down the left edge.  That helped. Now what about making the planet REALLY big by blowing it off the page?

Praying for the Australian Bush Fire Crisis

Jens Norved says, "At our church we are doing prayers for the Victorian bushfires and also gathering donations. We will be using the following slide when praying about the situation." Thanks Jens.

Christmas Art

"Thought I'd share my design for the upcoming Indonesian Presbyterian Church Xmas Service," says Tommy Wong.  Thanks Tommy - nice job. 

When Rebranding is only Skin Deep

Mike O'Connor pointed me to the excellent new Beyond Relevance blog, which is well worth a look. Here's a snatch from a recent article:

re-Branding on Momentum

It seems like churches these days have seen the power of marketing and branding just enough to jump onto the band wagon. Churches everywhere are sliding onto the re-branding table and looking for a quick-fix for their "growing" concerns. A few recent conversations have illustrated the often missing link in a church's preparedness to go under the knife for a branding make-over.

Now, before I get into this, please note that true "branding" goes much deeper than skin deep. True branding is a plum-line from the core of who you are to the people God has called you to reach. It is a promise you deliver on in all that you do and is seen on the surface as your communication, design, image or brand. With that said... 

I was teaching a session on branding last week at the National Youth Workers Convention. I normally speak to senior pastors, so I jumped at the chance to hang out with youth leaders for a few days. It was a blast. I was challenging on the need for churches to become successful without a branding effort and that the best brands are those that learn how to connect to people and grow organically first—and then build their brand around that. A youth leader visited me afterwards almost in tears. He had recently taken a position at a new church and, as what he (and much of the church world) thought was norm, decided to launch a new youth group brand. He built that brand around a new look, new logo, new name, new everything. He developed the image of this great brand before he had built trust in his youth and momentum through his ability to connect with them and see growth. He then attempted to launch the brand with a huge event and watched it all to fall flat. The results were a disappointment for him and now his youth group is struggling and shell-shocked. He was heartbroken.

What this represents is surface re-branding. It is an epidemic. It is the concept that if we are not attracting people, it is because we do not have the right name or image, and therefore, we need to change it and re-design our look. With all the love I can muster, if you are not growing what you have, it is not because of your logo. If you are not connecting with people that come through your doors in a way that causes them to come back and bring others, no amount of design can create a long term fix. If you do have momentum however, the right brand can be a catalyst to new levels of growth.

This stuff is not taught in schools. In February, I sat down with a doctoral student at Dallas Theological Seminary who interviewed me regarding his doctoral thesis on church brand development. His brilliantly written thesis had a fatal flaw—it omitted that re-branding should only take place after momentum has been generated. To simply re-brand a church when it has not found its traction is generally just an indication to your community that you’ve tried everything else without success and in your last attempt, you’re changing your style and/or name in order to reinvent yourself. Branding done right is not a "fix". It is a swagger. It is a well-communicated sense of self built on successfully connecting with others. 

Here’s the deal: if you aren’t currently connecting with people right where they’re at, no amount of branding/design can solve your problem. Re-branding without momentum is kind of like dressing up for your prom and forgetting to court a date. Think about it.
 
Design cannot obtain what a disconnected ministry cannot reach.

© Richard L. Reising

Published on Friday, November 7, 2008 @ 12:00 AM CST

CREATE Conference Coming Soon

Our friends at FEVA are running their Create Conference on November 15th. That's soon! Rock on over to their website to register. Group discounts are available.

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall...

Lifehacker reported recently that free web photo utility MirrorEffect.net offers a cool online tool for creating Mac-like reflections. "Find an image with a clean background,  choose where you want the reflection, and tell the app if you want a scaled effect to look like light bending. You can also choose to have the reflection be transparent, but there's no sliding scaler for that effect, unfortunately. Upload the image and you'll get the result decently fast. There's not a lot of options, obviously, but for pulling off that clean, Apple-promo-esque look, it's a helpful tool for those not quite handy with an editor. MirrorEffect.net is free to use, doesn't require a sign-up." I've tried it, and it performs exactly as promised. Shame though that anyone with Powerpoint07 these days can do the same...