When the Carpet Doesn't Match the Drapes

Look for symbolism Just like with your church logo, you’ll want layers of meaning and depth behind your church color choices. One way to accomplish this is through symbolism. Colors are symbolic because they can bring to mind a mix of material things and abstract ideas. Here are a few examples… but before I share them with you, keep in mind that these colors are broad and have many different meanings associated with them. The symbolism I’m focusing on here is related specifically to churches, and how a church might use these for their brand colors. Don’t start using them without doing your own research as well. Okay, with that out of the way, here are some color symbolism examples: Gold Gold can communicate permanency, age, and class. It symbolizes kingship, wealth, and light. Orange Orange can communicate energy, friendliness, and youthfulness. It symbolizes flowers, fire, and sunsets. Red Red can communicate courage, warmth, and gravity. It symbolizes blood, life, love, and sometimes purity. Purple Purple can communicate spirituality, depth, and confidence. It symbolizes royal robes, heaven, and wisdom. Teal Teal can communicate balance, peace, and renewal. It symbolizes healing, water, and growth. If you want to go deeper, here’s where you can read more on color symbolism and usage (from a secular source). P.S. This week I’m focusing on church brand color selection principles, which I’ve gathered the hard way from years of church rebrands. If you want the complete guide, I’ve collected all of the principles into a single post here.

Brand colors aren’t always black and white (wink), so this week I’m answering the following questions: How do you get buy-in and agreement on what the colors should be? How do you know which colors to use more and which to use less? How do you stay confident in your colors over years and years? Those questions all have the same answer: timeless color selection principles. I’m giving you mine, which I’ve gathered the hard way from years of church rebrands. If you want the complete guide, I’ve collected all of these principles into a single post here. Sample Everything In a vacuum, it’s easy for one person to pick colors that “look good.” But when the stakes are high and the colors have look good to more people in more contexts, suddenly things get trickier. Sampling colors from the real world can be a great starting point for palettes that feel cohesive and familiar. Palettes taken from nature, architecture, and even human features translate surprisingly well to both digital and print. Scottish tweed makers will go out into the countryside, capture a swatch of colors from their environment, and use those colors in their designs. What’s stopping us from doing the same thing? Find or take a photo of your church building, its surroundings, or something in your environment that fits the aesthetic you’re going for. Pull the image into a tool like Coolors.co and start sampling. You’ll notice that the palettes you can create will have light colors in the highlights of the image, dark colors in the shadows, and mid tones which are more vibrant or less vibrant. You’ll want at least one of each. Then, when you’re feeling good about a particular palette, you can go beyond the screen to a Home Depot or Sherwin Williams paint store. Gather swatches close to the colors in your palette, and compare them in different real-life environments. If you follow these steps for sampling, it’s hard to go wrong.

Let me cut to the chase. Color is absolutely, non-negotiable critical. I wouldn’t be going out on a limb to say that color is even more important than the logo. But… which colors you choose for your church is only part of the equation. How frequently and consistently you use a color palette is what makes or breaks the brand-color association. Effective branding through color is 50% selection and 50% repetition. In other words, your color choices for your brand only matters to the extent that you use it repeatedly and consistently over time. You can organize a committee. You can get swatches from Sherwin Williams. You can look at what’s trending. You can browse Pinterest. You can research color symbolism. You can have your congregation vote. None of it matters if you don’t use your colors (or use them sporadically without patterns). This should be freeing! While selection is important, the knowledge that repetition matters more should take some of the pressure off. Picking “wrong” or “suboptimal” colors isn’t the end of the world. Just commit and use them consistently.

I just finished helping a church select and refine their brand colors, so hues, shades, and swatches are fresh on my mind. To my amusement, I started having dreams about color palettes. I’ve been so engrossed in color lately that I figured I would write down some of my process, rationale, and considerations for color selection. Why is color hard? Color is hard because it’s a perceptual thing. There’s no way to know if the blue you see is the same blue I see. Online color blindness tests can only reveal a very general problems, but there’s no way for you to know how certain color sensitivities are affecting your preferences (without more rigorous testing). ß The paradoxical thing about color is that it’s both subjective and objective at the same time. What do I mean? Well, most of us mortals get frustrated with indecision around color. We piddle and fiddle and can’t fix the nagging feeling that something’s “off.” So how come the greatest painters, designers, and photographers can reliably produce work that everyone agrees has “beautiful” color? The secrets of color The greats all seem to know the secrets. Many of them have spent decades immersed in the theory and practice of color, so maybe they’ve earned it. I’m sure you don’t want to go to those lengths, (and I haven’t… yet). So instead I want to distill for you what I have learned about color selection in a church context. The Brand Colors series will take up the next several installments of Tend Your Brand. Stay tuned for those in the coming days.

Last weekend I decided to finally clean the garage. It was dirtier than I thought - filthy, actually. That’s why I was amazed when I finished the whole project in under 3 hours. When it comes to your church branding and design, there are probably some things that you’ve thought about cleaning up but have been wary of starting. What if it takes longer than you thought it would? What if it’s going to cost you money to fix? It can be easy to ignore these minor issues until they turn into bigger ones. The problem is that we often underestimate how bad things really are. If you looked into it, you might find that your website actually doesn’t work on certain browsers, or that there are 7 different versions of your logo floating around. This spring-summer season is a great time to clean up those divergent designs and maybe even do a light branding refresh. Tending your brand means addressing problems before they accumulate for too long, or it will quickly get out of control.

For the last 8 years, my go-to work, church, and lifting shoes have been some variation of white Adidas sneakers. I replace them once a year because I have to: I take close to a million steps a year in those shoes. I didn’t do this intentionally, but those white Adidas have become core to the Braden East “brand.” Whether I chose it or not was irrelevant, white sneakers are now a part of how many people recognize me. Here’s the lesson I learned from this: Anything you say or do repeatedly will eventually become part of your brand. Once you understand this, you get to influence what your brand looks like, by choosing a message, choosing how you want to say it, and repeating it over time. Do anything consistently for 8 years, and I promise it will become part of your brand.

Building a brand isn’t as hard as you might think. When you boil it down, all you have do is decide what you want to be known for and work backwards from there. If you’re in ministry, you already have a “why,” but your core message (“what”) is the first building block. To turn that core message into a brand, you need two more ingredients: A communication plan (“how”), and consistent repetition. Distilled into three steps: Choose what you want to say Choose how you want to say it Say it over and over again in different ways Summed up in a formula: Brand = Message + Delivery + Repetition

Brands are like bodies. Everybody has one, but it takes discipline and consistency to build a healthy one. I recently saw a 15 second video that highlighted how simple something like getting in shape can really be. The three steps he lays out are: Eat 2 meals a day with 100g of protein in each. Don’t eat other stuff. Lift 3 times per week and add weight or reps over time. Put in those terms, getting in shape is simple - just eat right and exercise. Creating and cultivating a brand identity is a lot like that. It’s simple in theory, but it takes consistency and effort.

If you’re a church that does sermon series graphics, then you might have struggled with how far to push the envelope in those visuals. Do you download the latest free template from Free Church Media or Ministry Designs dot com? Do you design them in-house? For us creatives, it’s enticing to explore and use new visuals every few months. But I want to encourage you to curb that impulse. Here’s why: Those unbranded templates and graphics can ultimately work against your brand. But wait, they’re not permanent - what’s so bad about them? Over time, these graphics become part of your brand, whether you like it or not. Using templates that are fun, fresh, and modern might feel like a good way to keep things interesting, but over time that variety adds up into noise. Over time, too much variety accumulates into noise. Instead of your sermon graphics reinforcing your brand, they can start to pollute it. They start to appear disjointed and random when you sample them as a whole. To protect your brand, you need a common thread woven throughout. This is why brand guidelines are so important. They provide a fixed scope for visual styles. Robust brand guidelines will tell you not only what that common thread is, but how it should be integrated in different contexts. If you’re worried about your sermon graphics polluting your brand rather than reinforcing it, check your brand guidelines to see if there’s a way to bring that free template into alignment. If you don’t have brand guidelines, consider having some created. It’s a great way to get the most out of your existing logo and can help you add variety to your church’s communications, without feeling random.

Building a brand isn’t as hard as you might think. When you boil it down, all you have do is decide what you want to be known for and work backwards from there. If you’re in ministry, you already have a “why,” but your core message (“what”) is the first building block. To turn that core message into a brand, you need two more ingredients: A communication plan (“how”), and consistent repetition. Distilled into three steps: Choose what you want to say Choose how you want to say it Say it over and over again in different ways Summed up in a formula: Brand = Message + Delivery + Repetition

This topic is one that goes wide and deep, so I’m going to try and give a 30,000ft snapshot. A church’s identity is made up of the themes and threads from its unique past, present, and future - things which make that church distinct from the church down the road. Visual identity is the symbolic representation of that, which is why it goes so much deeper than a logo or carpet color. Turning a church identity into something visual is a tricky process, but not impossible. Here’s my thesis: Starting with your intangible identity is the only way to create a meaningful, long-lasting, and copycat-proof brand. Let’s say you hire a graphic designer to create a beautiful visual identity that’s based on your preferences and current design trends. What happens in two years when those preferences and trends have changed? By going deep on your church’s intangible identity, you can emerge from the woods with a look that actually captures the uniqueness of your church and lasts for decades. Your visual identity won’t be able to be copied or replicated, because it’s grounded in the stuff that makes your local church, "local". Otherwise, you’re probably just copying someone else.

Tending your brand is so much deeper and wider than using your logo. That’s because a brand is much, much more than a logo. Look at the image below and tell me, do you recognize the brand it belongs to? Of course you do! But wait, there’s no logo to be found… That’s because Chick Fil A doesn’t need to put their logo on everything for you to know it’s theirs. The emotions and feelings they’ve created are more than enough to identify them. This is done with interior design, photos, colors, textures, and font choices, which are a critical part of what we call “branding.” The logo is the “tip of the spear” in a brand. The logo is the “tip of the spear” in a brand, but the other branding elements, the “shaft of the spear” are what should be doing the heavy lifting. They’ve curated a style that gives people a sense of joy, trust, and cleanliness. Here’s the question: Did Chick Fil A stumble upon their style of branding by accident?