Comments on: NewSpring Church Rebranding Process Part 1: The Logo

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:49:16 +0000

Beautiful and simple. When I spotted the Gville marquee my first thoughts were how it managed to look so fresh, clean, and new and yet still be so simple. Good job.

By: Justin C.

Justin C. — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:21:23 +0000

Yes indeed, critique is a wonderful and glorious thing, but blanket criticism that is not backed up by some demonstrated personal expertise (ahem personal portfolio) is kind of lame city.

Not to say that this Mark dude doesn’t have any. Maybe “Mark” is short for “Massimo Vignelli” or something.

(I say this, naturally, as a man who hasn’t had a personal portfolio online for months and months. Oops.)

I do find it interesting to see what designers who have never worked in the church/ministerial realm have to say about that particular area of design. It definitely demonstrates how important it is to understand the needs of the client in order to truly understand if the solution is effective. The needs of a church are so often light years away from the need of a corporate client though on the surface perhaps they appear somewhat similar (i.e. look attractive, sell your product).

I’m enjoying this insight into your process, thanks for taking the time to compile it.

By: Kjell

Kjell — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:38:16 +0000

university is overated. I love the simplicity of the new design. I think it’s very personal. It makes me feel happy.

@mark have you seen the logos of 90% of other churches? Most take for granted graphic identity.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:17:00 +0000

Sorry you’re disappointed Mark. And I doubt you’re the only one let down by the logo. But the thing is, the job of the designer is to solve the problem and please the client. Whether essentially anonymous commenters on the internet like my solutions for clients doesn’t matter.

And I don’t know many first year university students who spend 5 months working on complete corporate identity packages, but I didn’t go to university, so who am I to question?

Let’s turn this into actual constructive criticism; how would you have solved this design problem, Mark?

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:54:23 +0000

first in = first year

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:53:39 +0000

wow are you guys serious? Am I the only one that was let down with the logo? I’ve been checking this blog for ages now and I always felt Joshua was a good designer but all these NewSpring logos are so first in university project like.

They are all first ideas and need to be taken a step further. They are very generic and the winning logo is just so urgh. Wasn’t the swish dots mentioned in the top 10 most cliche logo designs of last year or something?

By: Ty

Ty — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:03:13 +0000

Nice exploration into a logo, you’ve already done quite a few iterations.
For the final take of “Wordmarks with a little something special”, that might lead to a whole new name and call it “NewBling”, probably not.
I’m wondering how qualified the decision-makers would be to pick the final version that suits the vision best.
You seem to have some expertise here, I hope they chose a logo that you liked as well then.

By: Bernard Shuford

Bernard Shuford — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:49:25 +0000

Really enjoyed this and look forward to more!

By: dan s

dan s — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:19:59 +0000

very interesting stuff, thanks for sharing!

By: Grant

Grant — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:02:53 +0000

Thanks for the insight into your process. I especially appreciated hearing how you worked with the decision-makers to hone in on what they really were looking for. For me that is always one of the hardest – but, when done right – most rewarding parts of the logo design process. It’s a good feeling to find the solution that complements, but is just beyond what the client was envisioning.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:48:42 +0000

@Sam – that was a proprietary favicon from our previous CMS provider. It was among a number of things I had no way to control during our tenure with them.

Overwriting your customer’s favicon with your own = bad idea.

By: Sam

Sam — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:04:38 +0000

So whats up with the favicon that showed up on the site for a while it was three colors and looked like a refresh of the 4 e logo?

By: chriswho

chriswho — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:45:24 +0000

Looking forward to the rest of this conversation too. Always interesting to see how different organizations run through the process. So far, glad that the logo that won won. I really like how you presented significantly different versions. So often I’ll get stuck down one path and find it difficult to provide “quality” ideas that go down a different path – obviously you did a great job.

Glad that the triangle pyramid one didn’t win… by joining the “w” and the “s” together and having it all caps, the word “News” jumped out at me, not “NEWSPRING”.

Your process regarding colors and gradients are something I think more web designers need to hear. That is one of the painful things that has come out of the design side of “web 2.0″ are all the gradient/reflective logos. Those things are quite painful when it comes to setting a cross-media brand.

Hooray for the solid wordmark and good taste of NewSpring. Good work sir.

By: sj

sj — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:27:46 +0000

Thanks for sharing man – very cool to see the whole process. I wish we were able to work on a more detailed project back in the day – we didn’t even get to scratch the surface of what you were capable of :)

Looking forward to the rest of the series…