Neighborhood Church Rebranding Process - Part I

This is an attempt to document the rebranding process we have kicked off at Neighborhood. If you’ve been following along, you know that this rebrand is part of a much bigger role I have been leading since coming on board last summer at Neighborhood. We have been laying groundwork in creating a communications department for a better part of the past 10 months and now we’re beginning to move forward with a unified look and communication plan.

Some backstory: Sometime in the 1990's, the internal structure of Neighborhood Church was setup like a mall, each ministry creating their own graphics, adverts and ultimately their own “identity”. There wasn’t a creative director or a focused creative team, thus a house of brands was born and a disjointed, siloed ministry culture thrived therein.

Sometime in the mid 2000's, Neighborhood adopted this Saturn-esque logo mark and attached it to the walls, letter heads and that faux concrete Manute Bol sized coffin-sign you see sitting at the entrance.

My direct supervisor Todd Skinner and our leadership team were eager to abandon this mark and open to ideas that would represent the vision of Neighborhood: “Helping people find and follow God.”

In the first phase of exploration I worked with patterns, shapes and colors in an effort to wrangle the current “house of brands” setup into one visually cohesive logo mark that could be applied across everything, a parts-making-up-the-whole concept. Interchangeable shapes and forms. This is a sampling of that direction.

These concepts were too rigid, too corporate and yes, that guy in the middle is quite “Tetris-y”. I couldn’t see them scaling well and so they and many others were shelved. Carry on.

A line of projects pre-Christmas took me out of the branding process into the New Year, but I continued to sketch out and explore ideas as the need for a new mark and new website are of urgency.

I continued toward the letter “N” for the primary mark. I had earlier in my sketching played with the concept of paper in the shape of a “N”, but it was too abstract. I revisited that idea on a train ride back from vacation - diving into the concept of pages, notes, letters, the Bible backing up or making up a solid letter “N”. Of all the concepts I had worked with, I could see furthest with this mark and jumped from my sketchbook to my MacBook to explore this look further.

Through exploring this concept, a “flat” version of the logo and a “dynamic” version of the logo came about. The layers behind the dynamic “N” came to serve as a device for the logo to adapt to various ministries within Neighborhood. This dynamic adaptive logo mark is all experimental at this point, but I’m giving it a go in some of the initial transitional signage.

A couple more posts will follow covering typography and color choices, signage and a look into the new online home of Neighborhood.

Thanks for reading along.
El Clinto