Updating the Website for St. Mark's Lutheran Church

After debuting the new logo for our church, it was time to begin an overhaul of the website. My fellow committee member (and friend) Ann and I have been working hard on this task. We are not done, but we've made enough progress that I wanted to share it here. 

As you can see below, the new website uses our brand colors and features our logo prominently. We replaced the 5+ fonts on the previous site with a single, easy-to-read san-serif (Verdana) on the new version. We moved the menu down, and used larger text and yellow buttons to make it easier to read. The buttons are rounded to give it a more warm and welcoming feel. 

I'm particularly happy with our new header. We tried a lot of different ways to incorporate the three logos (our own, the ELCA logo, and the Reconciling in Christ logo) and no matter what we did, it looked really crowded. The logos competed with each other until we shrunk down the ELCA logo and put it the address line, then added a line below that stating that we are an ELCA church. 

We've made updates to the pages as well, but most are not complete. We plan to add a bunch of photos, then fix the formatting and make some other tweaks. Stay tuned!

A Brand Kit for My Creative Life

Yesterday, I blogged about brand palettes. A brand palette is one component of a brand kit, which typically also includes logos, watermarks, fonts, style guides, and anything else that identifies a brand. The goal of a brand kit is to maintain the brand's identity across multiple users. Any company with more than one person should have a brand kit to make sure that the company maintains the same look, tone, and feel no matter who works on a product. Universities typically have brand kits as well; check out the one for my alma mater, the University of California at Davis. 

Since I am the only one who creates content for My Creative Life, having a brand kit isn't vital. I'm unlikely to invert or distort my own logo, randomly use 20 pt. ComicSans and 6 pt. Curlz for a blog post, or arbitrarily use red and purple for my watermarks. I don't need to have discussions with anyone about tone, word choice, or the (mandatory) use of the Oxford comma when I write my posts. 

Even so, I still have a brand kit. All of my brand assets, including my logo, watermark, blog header, brand palette, avatar, favicon, and graphic ads are in one folder. I recently pulled my header, brand palette, favicon, graphic ad, watermark, and logo into a single image. Having it all in one place helps me visualize my overall branding.  

This is my most-used item in my brand kit. These are all of the colors that appear on my blog. I've added the hex number to each for quick reference. When I create a graphic, I drag this image to the bottom, then either use the eyedropper tool or type in the hex color to get a perfect color match. Then I delete this image from the graphic. It works like a charm.   

Of course, I created everything in my brand kit with PicMonkey. It's my favorite.