Gateway Community Church
Branding, creative direction
Inheriting an unattended brand for a non-denominational church in Franklin, TN, we refreshed the entire portfolio and saw it through all possible extensions; ministries, events, campaigns, and more.
In the middle of 2018, I took a part time position as the Creative Director at Gateway Community Church in Franklin, Tennessee. It’s a medium-sized Nazarene church focused on a blend between internal spiritual growth and external community outreach. My work there started as simply volunteering where I saw areas that could be improved, but as work started to build up, I took on the position to oversee everything visual that the church put out. And those steps started here – a consistent, strong, and simple brand. We built upon the existing logo and created new systems of color and typography designed to unify all materials the church put out.
Once the larger brand was developed, we took these pieces and extended them into all the visual parts of the church. This took three main forms – suites of graphics related to the current sermon series, logos for other ministries and events within the church, and graphics for social media. Each one of these pieces was time consuming and intensive work, but it was made a lot easier by a consistent brand that guided the ship.
While the ministry specific logos were developed from the larger brand, the sermon series graphics were what drove the immediate look and feel of the church. In this area, I was able to extend the brand past its comfortable limits and have more fun with ideas that were trendy or less minimalist than the rest of the brand. They were more self-serving in that way, but I always worked within the larger brand to make something that would work for the church’s congregation. In other words, nothing too weird.
All in all, this project was a dream in a lot of ways: having crazy amounts of creative freedom to create work for a church that I was deeply invested in personally. Looking back at the scope of the work I did (probably 100+ unique projects), I’m shocked that I never felt burnt out or limited in anyway. I think that’s a good reflection on what a client/design relationship can look like when both parties are on the exact same wavelength.
