Speaker 0 00:00:00 In today's episode, we unpack nine church branding mistakes you need to avoid at all costs. Your church brand is more important than ever in 2021. Get it right. And people will remember you, but if you make some of these mistakes, you miss an enormous opportunity. We hope this conversation helps your church reach more people and grow.
Speaker 1 00:00:32 You're listening to the read-write podcast. The show dedicated to helping pastors and church leaders reach people the right way, hosted by me, Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost Ian Hyatt. We're here to help your church see more visitors and grow well. Hey guys, welcome to the
Speaker 0 00:01:01 Reach right podcast episode number 31. I am your host Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost Ian. Hi, how's it going, Thomas going goody and looking forward to our conversation today, uh, we get to talk a little bit about nine church branding, mistakes that you need to avoid at all costs. That's the theme of the day. And, uh, yeah, I think it's something church branding is, is so important, obviously, uh, church branding and making sure you really nail that, uh, and having consistency across all of your different, uh, the places that people see your brand. I think it's what makes a church memorable. That's what, uh, makes people think of you when they think of a church or when your community is looking for, uh, needs. This is what I've always found is that when, when people have a need that's when churches are at their best, right?
Speaker 0 00:01:54 So people, I think what is so important for churches is to really have that top of mind frame of reference for people so that people aren't always looking for a church, but when things really start to hit the fan, as they say, that's when they want to have a church and you want to be that one that they think of when times of crisis or trouble or those things happen in people's lives. So, uh, yeah, branding is so important. Um, you know, we've been helping churches with this for a long time. Uh, anything you have to add, I guess, about what it means to have a church brand. So our audience understands that there
Speaker 2 00:02:27 Compared to years past most pastors and ministry leaders know it's more important now than, than maybe even, you know, six years ago, it was still kind of, Oh, do we need a, why do we need a brand? We're not Nike, we're not Apple or something like that. But, uh, but now I think, uh, church leaders are catching on more and more that it, uh, that, you know, there is, we don't like to use the word competition, uh, in church life and ministry, but it's naturally there, right? Because there's a lot of churches. And like you said, you want to be stint stand out and be memorable when that time comes, that someone's looking for one.
Speaker 0 00:03:00 Yeah. And I think in a digital world, there's competition with things that I don't really think I'd say between churches. I think there's competition for people's attention in general and there's competition in answers that people could find out there. So, uh, when, when things are going poorly, when you lose a loved one in your life, for instance, there's lots of competition for people competing for your attention, for answers on how to solve that, that hurt, that you feel right, that someone may feel in that situation or when someone is dealing with addiction. There's lots of different things that are competing for your attention to try and, uh, be solutions for you in those situations. And I think that, you know, I think we know that Jesus is the best answer in those kinds of situations in life. And that's what a church brand does is it gives people that makes you re, makes them remember you when those times come there.
Speaker 0 00:03:53 And so now that being said, we have seen all kinds of mistakes over the years. Our goal today is to hit the top of nine of them, but we have seen some, uh, some crazy stuff. Uh, we've seen, we're not going to, I don't want to pinpoint any churches. Obviously we're here to, to partner with churches and help them and, and be able to, um, to come alongside them and getting this stuff right here. But, uh, we have nine of them that we picked out that are not going to be specific to any one church. Maybe you'll hear some of these and feel like, Hey, that's us. And we need to deal with that. That's okay. We see these kinds of things all the time. Uh, but yeah. Why don't you kick us off though in with the first one kind of dive into it?
Speaker 2 00:04:29 Yeah. First one is, uh, inconsistent fonts. That's what you want to avoid at all costs with your branding. And, uh, I think, you know, fonts are even more popular these days compared to, you know, a couple of years ago, you know, uh, people are into fonts more there, uh, you know, through art, marketing, whatever. Um, you know, my daughter's always like trying to find different fonts for our work and stuff and all of that. So it's, uh, so I guess the reason I say that is the temptation would be through your marketing and whatever you're presenting online or whatever is that, Oh, you know, we like this font, but Oh, we also like this one. So let's use that. But, and, and, and what people I think fail to realize there is when you kind of have all these varying fonts, it hurts that consistency, right? Because even a, a font, even though you don't think of that as like a logo image, it's still something that's very memorable. Um, you know, maybe what came to mind was Coca-Cola's font, right? They've always, that's been the big thing, right? They have that Coca-Cola and cursive and, and, uh, that's been that way for years. And you remember that,
Speaker 0 00:05:32 Could you imagine if you picked up a Coca Cola, Canada had a comic Sans Coca-Cola written on it, like, it wouldn't even feel like Coke anymore. It would probably, I would venture to say that if you gave it to someone and ask them, Hey, you told them, Hey, Coke is doing something different. And it had that comic Sans logo on there and they tasted it. They'd say it would taste different. That's where they would say that that's what people would think, because it's something that's so part of what their whole brand is. And that's an extreme case. I think most churches aren't going to have that kind of a recognizable font. Right. I think that what's important is that you, you use your fonts consistently. So when you're designing your brand, it's important that you probably write down, these are the fonts that we use.
Speaker 0 00:06:15 Uh, so we're gonna use, um, whatever they would be. You probably want something that is a sand Saraf. So it doesn't have those little kind of curlies on the end of the letters. You probably want that, uh, for your, for your headings. And then you usually, you can use some kind of a Sarah font for your body copy. That's kind of, what's on trend right now and what seems to be working. But I think the main thing is that you pick a font pairing that works together. So usually you'll want two fonts and you'll consistently want something that you use for headings or titles, whenever you do, um, you know, big, bold things for ads, and then your body copy is going to be a different font. And then you don't stray from those now, but this doesn't apply to, like, if you do a sermon graphic or a graphic for your, at events, it doesn't always have to be in these exact same fonts all the time, but whatever you're putting out copy, say like on your website, in your church bulletin, uh, in your newsletters, whatever they would be on your, um, on your tie, the envelopes and everything you're doing consistently, that isn't changing, we should try and have consistent fonts and not try and say, Hey, I like this font for this case or this font for these kinds of times.
Speaker 0 00:07:27 And just kind of be consistent with it.
Speaker 3 00:07:29 Yeah. That's good stuff. Yeah. Why don't you do that call the second one we'll do
Speaker 0 00:07:33 To, uh, one of the mistakes we see is churches using different social handles for different social networks, right? So most churches today, I think if you're going to use any social channel, Facebook would be number one, if you're gonna use a second one, it would probably be Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Same thing. If you're gonna use a third, it would probably be Twitter, unless you're considering YouTube as social channel, which it kind of is, uh, you know, maybe you're using Snapchat or tic talk and all those other things. There's lots of different options out there. And I think as long as you can consistently put out good content, you should use everything you can handle with that. Now, that being said, what I think one of the mistakes that churches make is that they'll use different handles or different names on each one of those sites, because sometimes you got started at a different time on different channels and your name isn't available. And so you're just doing the next best thing. If you're a brand new church starting out today, I would recommend that you would find something that would fit with your, your name. So let's say, you're going to start, what are we seeing a lot of nowadays, grace, grace churches, right? Every third church. It's like, it's a great church right now. We're getting a lot of those coming, uh, coming to us and looking for a coaching work with us here. So if you're a Grace Church and you happen to be in,
Speaker 3 00:08:49 Um, uh, I don't know if you're in, um, San Demas,
Speaker 0 00:08:53 California, right? You would probably want something like Grace Church, Sandy, miss, or maybe even Grace Church SD, uh, or maybe you find that it's open and there's great church CA for California, any one of those, I, it doesn't really matter too much to me, which one it is. But as long as you have the same one across Twitter, across Facebook, Instagram, there's a several reasons for this. But I just think for consistency sake, it's nice to have the same handle for all of these channels. It also helps with search engine results. There's lots of reasons why, but I see this as a mistake, a lot of churches make. So anything to add to that again?
Speaker 2 00:09:31 No, you covered most of that there, for sure. I think the consistency, just like we talked about the font, consistency is key for branding and identification. That's a word that comes to mind. Just, I think that again, people are seeing your social handles and they identify if it's mixed up somewhere else. They're going to be like, is that it like, say for example, my church celebration church, you know, we, we use TX celebration, right? And if, if we saw like celebration USA, somewhere, we could be, if someone saw that they would say, is that the same church? You know, you don't want to, you want to avoid confusion as well. I would say,
Speaker 0 00:10:07 Especially for larger churches like yours. I think that because there are going to be fake accounts made, um, that are, that that people try to impersonate your church. If you have a large following, people will start to do those kinds of things. So being consistent helps to mitigate some of that now to churches that are in this position already. I imagine there's lots of our audience that have Twitter handles that are different from Facebook handles, which are different from Instagram, handles some channels. Won't let you change. You know, you can't change your, your Twitter handle because that's kind of tied to the way you set up the account, usually like with Facebook. And if here's another thing to mention with Facebook, when you set up a, a page for your church, you'll usually just have a number that it's tied to, or at least you used to just have a number. So it was a facebook.com/one four, four, three eight nine nine seven four two. That's not a good handle for your church. You shouldn't just be using that, but you usually can change some of those, uh, where people would find you on Facebook. So I would, if possible change to whatever your Twitter handle would be if you're in this position now, and it wouldn't cause too much of a stir, but it's something you'll have to wait from church to church. That's good stuff
Speaker 2 00:11:17 Tackle the next one. This one's kind of a funny one to me, uh, here, but, uh, and to both of us, cause we've, we've, we've come across this over the years, but matching your branding to your church interior color. Um, so I think we, we still hear this a lot, probably used to hear it a lot more, but, uh, and it's all this, isn't just traditional churches. They come to mind sometimes first, because I know they're very proud of their buildings, some beautiful church buildings, nothing wrong with that. You know, that's something to be proud of. We know, of course, uh, you know, church is not about the building. It's about the Lord and his people. Uh, at the end, we have to have that discussion for marketing too. Just the same thing like for church's website, why you don't want to have just a picture of the building on the home page. Now it's okay to have a picture of the building somewhere. Uh, and it could be a landmark or something, but same thing with church interior that you don't have to match that to your branding. They're two totally different things. Sometimes it can be relevant. I mean, if you already have your logo, let's just say, Navy blues in your logo, and you ended up getting also Navy blue seats for the sanctuary. You know, all of that stuff can be consistent, you know, whatever, but it's not necessarily necessary,
Speaker 0 00:12:34 Really wrong, I wouldn't say, but it would be one of the lowest factors in choosing a color for your brand. I would say so. And we hear that all the time, right? As people will say, Hey, we're thinking about doing a new logo and we just got new chairs and they're forest green. So obviously it has to be forest green for our logo. And that's not the case. Like I think that people aren't walking into your building and say, am I at the right place? I, the logo was orange, but the chairs here are blue.
Speaker 2 00:13:03 For example, we use it as another example. So, um, our pastor used to play football for LSU and he's a huge LSU tiger. Now we're in Austin, Texas, which is home of the Texas Longhorns of course. So he intentionally chose, uh, purple seats for LSU, but none of the branding for our church's purple at all, but he understood that. But he does that just to kind of, I guess, just make the rear ends of Longhorn fans itch or something.
Speaker 0 00:13:33 So there you go. Yeah. That's funny though. I think that it's, again, it's not something that I think would rank high on your, your reasons, the one, I guess maybe exception to this rule would be for a very, um, probably traditional or even like, um, uh, a church that, uh, I think I, I think of like churches with stained glass, we work with one church where they had a beautiful stained glass, uh, kind of a cross that was in the front that was all in blue. So all of the stained glass was blue and different shades of blue. And it really was kind of iconic in the community. And when you're in there, there was that bright blue that, and that was some that really stood out for them. And so I kind of get that there, but I don't feel tied to your seating color or your wall colors or any of those that your carpet color doesn't have to be your brand color.
Speaker 0 00:14:25 You can have it be a little more diverse than that. And in fact, a lot of times brand colors are going to be more out there than what you would tolerate. You'd never have the elevation bright orange as your carpet color. Right. You can't do something like that and be crazy at a church there. So don't feel like you have to do something like that. That's good. Yep. I'll do number four. It's a, it's going to trendy. Mistake. Number four is going to trendy with specifically with your design in your brand there, I would say. And I think what this is about for me is that there's always what we say trendy. The thing about trends is that they come and they go, right? So trends are not something that's going to stand the test of time. It's something that's here for a while and it will be gone.
Speaker 0 00:15:06 So like right now you're seeing so much, that's going into like the late eighties, early nineties, kind of a style where you're seeing hot pinks and turquoise and cursive, kind of a fiery fonts and Miami vice look. And my, my daughter is into wearing t-shirts that have like, like bands that she doesn't even know who they are on them. And that's just kind of the style it's like, I feel like it's, in some ways it's kind of getting into the early days of grunge all over again. So yeah. So I think that if you make, I think it would be a mistake to do your church logo and your looking feel in that style, right. To have like a Miami vice writing font for your church font and what you would use on everything. Because while that might be great today and probably in 2022, also, I can almost assure you that in 2025, that will feel really passe and not something that we would do anymore.
Speaker 0 00:16:05 So, um, kind of like big block lettering used to be a thing. And you know, we've been in this industry long enough to see several generations of trends come and go, right? Pop Jairus font was huge for us. When we started doing websites, probably everything was in pirates and everything was these. We used to have all these people that were like these almost like stick people, but they were round balls and like geometric shape people there'll be reaching out with their arms open. That was the trend for awhile there. And that'd be embarrassing nowadays. So I think finding something that is, is timeless, uh, that's easier said than done, trying to figure out what is going to stand the test of time, but going with those hyper trends like eighties, nineties styles, I think that's something that would be a big, a big mistake. Anything to add to that.
Speaker 2 00:16:53 I liked the timeless. That was a top of my mind, you know, I think that's the thing we'd use the example of Coca Cola, but you can also think of Nike. You can also shake of Apple. Of course, those are timeless, iconic, you know, very memorable brands and logos and you know, the Nike swoosh that has not gone out of style, uh, you know, and even, even their old original thought, you'll still see on most of their shoes near it and everything. So it's, it's, I think that that is the key thing is that when you have a timeless brand, you know, you're going to be more memorable and it adds a lot of validity. I think that's the thing too, is that, um, and, and, and no one's going to come to your church. I think it's a, Oh my gosh. You know, you guys just look like a valid church that knows your stuff because of your logo.
Speaker 2 00:17:41 I mean, you hear that feedback, but that's the kind of things that it does communicate, you know, subliminally or just didn't you it's in the back of someone's mind, is it okay, this organization has it together, they're established if you're always changing that or getting trendy, um, then you know, that's a problem. And that's actually reminded me when we used to, we used to talk about this too, with when we consulted churches, the reason that Pepsi was always on the heat, one of the reasons that Pepsi was kind of always on the heels of Coca-Cola Pepsi would always have to kind of re invent their brand. They'd always be changing things where as Coca-Cola just stayed constant and, and was just that classic it's Coke, you know, and you have even people I know here in Texas, that when they refer to soda, they just say Coke, you know, even though they can be Southern about another soda all together, it is. But it also, it also does kind of just talk about that timelessness when you stick with that, it is builds up in people's minds and it sticks with them.
Speaker 0 00:18:44 So, yeah, I think that you're really right now, again, I want to reiterate easier said than done. Like it's not, I tried to find something that will be, don't set out with the goal. And I would recommend if you're going to a designer, don't say, Hey, I like the logo for Coca-Cola or I like the logo for Nike. Let's do something like that because you're not them. And that's because they've been doing it in Coca-Cola's case for decades upon decades, upon decades. Uh, and it'll probably outlive all of us, the look of that brand there. So I think that it's something that you can't really set out to do that, but have avoid doing things that are going to be on trend. Uh, don't, don't focus too much on that when you're doing your logo, I think is the parting advice for these things here in your cross. Yeah. Across the board,
Speaker 2 00:19:32 I'll hit the next one here so that you want to avoid skipping the icon. Um, so, um, this is a big deal too now, especially with just how everything is displayed online. If you just have something that's text-based and you don't have an actual icon that shows up in different places, you're going to be less identifiable. And it kind of goes back to what we were just talking about with like the Nike swoosh and, and our Apple, you know, that, that icon just being visible, whether or not it's on, uh, up on your tab or on social media. Um, yeah, we were just looking at Hillsong's website is a good example of that, you know, just kind of seeing how they had that, that icon though. It might look a little different on the website, that icon is going to always be up in the URL and the browser that our weather. So,
Speaker 0 00:20:23 No, you're right. So I think Hillsong is a perfect example because churches sometimes they'll think, Hey, we want to just go with a really good stylized font. And that's fantastic. I think Hillsong does that really well. It's just that way that they write Hillsong in that almost cursive with the kind of a, it's got a wave to the lie a little bit, but it's something that's kind of iconic, but the problem is in this mobile world that we're living in for when, on your home screen, um, of your, your cell phone, you want to have something that people can click on and I have to read an entire word. It's just something that immediately identifies you. Like you don't see the word Facebook anywhere on your homepage. You don't see the word YouTube. You just see for YouTube, that red play button that's there. And for Facebook, you see the, the white F in a blue block, and those are there. Those are there. Um, they're icons. And so for churches, it's really important that you have that like right behind your face right now on my computer, Ian, I'm seeing all the tabs I have open and I can identify what every one of those tabs are by the icon that's on there. I see my Gmail icon and I see my, uh, my ESPN icon and my Facebook icon and all those pages I've been to
Speaker 4 00:21:32 Slack. It recognizes whatever it is exactly. So you're making me look at all of them right now.
Speaker 0 00:21:38 It's good. You see those things everywhere. And it's important that your church has that too, just because there are many times where people will save it to their cell phones or they'll have it open in a browser. And you want to have that immediate recognizability that people can get when they do that. And even on Google searches nowadays, a lot of times they'll pull in whatever your icon is, as in the Google search results, when people are looking for churches. So getting your brand out there and getting in front of people's eyes, I think having an icon is an important part of that.
Speaker 4 00:22:08 That's good stuff, good stuff. Once you tackle the next one,
Speaker 0 00:22:11 Uh, it's forgetting social images, forgetting to do social images. And what this means is that it's really important that your, your logo. I know, we always think about things like making sure that we have it in our email signatures, or that we have it in our letterhead for our church and our envelopes. When we people give that's all important, it's important that it's on your website, but making sure that you're using the logo the same way on every single social channel for your brand, that's really important. So you don't want it for your personal things. You want your face on your personal profiles, but for your church, uh, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter accounts, you want to have that same branding on every single one of them. And that probably means having it in the, the place where you, where normally a person's face would go. That's where you have your icon.
Speaker 0 00:23:01 And then you'll have something designed to be on brand for like that background image. So your, uh, your Facebook cover image, your Twitter background image, those kinds of things, they all need to have that consistent kind of branding. So that includes for LinkedIn. It includes for your YouTube homepage, all those kinds of things, uh, just being consistent with your social images and having it on there is important. Um, the mistake I see most often is churches having a big picture of their building as being the main image on their Facebook page or their Twitter page, those kinds of things. And that's probably a no-no unless you are that really iconic building in your community, um, usually your brand is going to be better than that, or the mistake would be just changing
Speaker 2 00:23:46 Those, those images all the time. You know, that's a different for, you know, my own personal Facebook where I may want to put a picture of my wife and up there, uh, wife and I up there, and then the next month it's my kids or something like that. This is different when we're talking about consistency with brand and all of that. So that's good. Yep. Absolutely. Good. Good. I'll tackle the next one. So the next one is, uh, another funny one to me is, is the, uh, inconsistent colors. So, um, and, and so we've seen, we've seen some, uh, comedic mistakes, I would say, maybe put it that way over the years, uh, just with having all of these different colors and, uh, and, and, and everything, it not being consistent there as well. Colors are very memorable as well. Uh, you know, the colors that you use, um, sometimes you may not think of them as memorable as a logo or a font like we're saying, and all of these other icons, but really colors are a very big deal.
Speaker 2 00:24:43 And, and it's, I think with this one, it's easier to make the mistake churches. It we've seen it over the years, be easier to always be changing those out. Um, I remember we've done some web projects where we nailed a really good colors that we said, Hey, these are going to be very memorable. They match with your logo and everything. And then I see a month later that, you know, someone went in and just, they put all of these different conflicting colors. And I was like, man, you guys were on a good track with your, with your colors and that being memorable and standing out. And now it's just kind of a big wash.
Speaker 0 00:25:16 Yeah, absolutely. I think about it this way. So let's say you're, uh, you're grabbing a soda. You go into a seven 11, you want to grab a soda. So we're talking about soda companies earlier, and you're back there in the fridge section. All the cold sodas are there. And let's say Pepsi changed their colors for just a few weeks to black and orange, right? That's the new Pepsi color. You would not find that soda. Cause if you're looking for a Pepsi, you wouldn't, you would see, you would immediately rule out all of the black and orange sodas. You would just not even bother looking at what the logo was or anything, because it wouldn't even make sense to you. Your brain is set to process things in terms of color. So I think the same thing goes for your church is that when you use inconsistent colors in your logo, or if you don't, um, I think a lot of churches, they, they don't define what their colors are like.
Speaker 0 00:26:06 So they don't say, Hey, these are our colors. And I'll say this too, it's important that you get like, hyper-specific about this. So when you're doing your logo, you want to make sure that you have like the actual hex code, uh, for, for a web development. That's what we use. It's a six digit code that says the exact color that we're going to use on this. So it's not good enough to just say that, Hey, our church color is blue. You know, cause blue means lots of things. Blue can be almost turquoise. It can be shades of purple and they're very different even than the emotions that they carry. So I think that, uh, really getting those things nailed down and being very specific on what those colors are and using them all the time, especially in all of your digital work. Uh, that's, that's really something important that churches can do there.
Speaker 2 00:26:54 Yeah. And again, just, just like we were talking about with like trending fonts, it's still okay to, to use different colors on your events and sermon series graphics and all that important, just reminder there. But, uh, but again, we're talking about that. Can that's tied into your brand, that timeless kind of consistent color,
Speaker 0 00:27:13 Right? Yeah. I think what it is is like it, you don't want to have reds and greens, uh, on your, um, on your email signature, then your Facebook page is as blue and blue and white, and then your Twitter page is purple and yellow. And it just having all kinds of different color palettes like that. It just, it leads to people, uh, uh, it just leads to inconsistently consistency and people will stop recognizing you after time. I think it's something like that. So stay consistent with it. So that's good. Number eight, uh, it's over use of Christian imagery and this is one that we get a lot of pushback on. I would say even, but I just want to get this out here just because you're a church doesn't necessarily mean that you have to incorporate a cross somewhere in your logo on you. You can still love Jesus and not have a cross in your logo.
Speaker 0 00:28:01 You can still preach the gospel and Christ crucified and not have a cross somewhere in your logo there. And I know that sometimes people feel like that's just not the case. Uh, but I have seen successful churches that are leading people to Jesus every single Sunday who don't have a cross in their logo. And it's okay. So the ones that we see the most are crosses, I know there's, there was a trend towards getting doves in there a lot of times. Certainly. Yeah, certainly we've seen some swords in there, those kinds of things. So I'm all for imagery and having some kind of a relation to it. I pastored a church called the journey and we had a J that kind of turned into a path that kind of help people understand that your journey you're on a path of some kind towards a relationship with Jesus. That was our thinking behind it, but it doesn't necessarily have to be one of our Christian icons. So what do you have to add to that? Ian?
Speaker 2 00:28:55 I have a couple of funny stories to add to that. I would just say, and I think you'll remember a couple of them because we were working together working with these churches. And, uh, there was, uh, there, I, I refer to these logos with all of the Christian symbolism is the TB TBN logos. Uh, and so, and again, nothing against TBL that stuff, but, uh, you know, when you have the lion of Judah, you have the cross, you have flames, you have a sword. My favorite was I remember a logo, uh, that, uh, that a specific ministry had that it had the world and it had a sword pierced through the war, through the earth and God dripping from the end of the sword. And, and, and, uh, and I think we advised them, maybe it was you that we advise them, listen, we, we, we may want to change this up. And this one, unfortunately, that logo was designed by the Holy spirit, I think, is what they told what we had someone told. You said, how do you, how do you overcome, how do you overcome that and consult the church when they say it was actually designed by the Holy spirit?
Speaker 0 00:29:56 Yeah, we are, we are inferior to the great consultant, uh, that is the Holy spirit, I guess,
Speaker 2 00:30:02 Wonderful counselor. And he gets his way for sure. But yeah, so we've seen some funny examples out there, and again, that's not to demean. We know what the blood of Jesus represents. We know what the cross represents and all of that, but for branding and marketing purposes and how you want to be remember memorable out there, I wouldn't want to be memorable by blood and swords and all of that personally, if I was a pastor. So,
Speaker 0 00:30:27 Uh, yeah, I think that sometimes just even a simple icon that ties to a letter in your name. Um, so like the, we talked about Hillsong earlier with the H I think something, if you have a, a, um, some kind of a principal or a, uh, a, an action word in your name, having some kind of icon related to that is going to be more effective, uh, that having some kind of Christian imagery, again, not that we are against Christian imagery, but I just think that it doesn't really what everybody has. It, it doesn't really add anything to what we're all about there. Uh, so, um, I think that it's okay. And, um, if anybody gives you pushback at your church, maybe this is something you felt for a long time, you said, Hey, I've really wanted to get rid of, you know, that just having to have that cross everywhere in your tea, doesn't always have to be across it's okay. If you're, don't turn your tea into a cross, but maybe you've been thinking that at your church, and you've got some pushback. We are happy to be the bad guys. You could say, Hey, Thomas and Ian from reach, right. I heard a podcast, or they, they consulted me that we don't have to do that anymore. So it's not me. Other people blame it on us. We're happy to be that for you there, if it helps you in some conversations, but anyway, why don't you tackle the last one for us?
Speaker 2 00:31:37 Yeah. Last one's a avoid, not having vertical and horizontal options for your logo and your branding. So that's as maybe this is one that's kind of easily missed because you just don't think about it. But, uh, I think it's really important because your logo is going to be displayed, whether or not it's on a, like navigation on a, on a mobile. We've seen this on some sites. I kind of know, uh, mobile pop-out nav, uh, you know, and that's on maybe the left side, uh, going vertically, uh, and so on and so forth. So yeah. What would you add on that?
Speaker 0 00:32:10 I think that this comes with our modern world that we live in, where about half of things are gonna be viewed in landscape format. And half of things are going to be viewed vertically, uh, in a vertical format. Uh, and generally speaking logos, they tend to, I think the mistake is more often that churches will make it horizontal. So usually in something like icon on one side, and then, uh, you'll have texts the name of the church on the right, so left and right, or sometimes you'll have texts, icon, text, or something to that effect. Um, it's important that you realize that that often will not work well in vertical application. So on a cell phone, if that's the way your logo is laid out, it's not really great sometimes to have it vert and have it horizontal like that. And it would be better if you had icon and then underneath the icon, having text or icon, text, text, having it laid out that way.
Speaker 0 00:33:07 Sometimes that's more effective, I think for churches there. So this you'll really see, I know as web developers, we see this as a challenge that we face when someone comes to us and they only have a horizontal layout, and we're trying to put their logo onto their mobile site and the mobile variant of their site, which we designed, I think good web design should be mobile. First. You're thinking about how it looks on a, on a phone before you think about how it looks on a computer, because that's how most of our traffic is viewed nowadays. But, um, it's hard to fit that in and make it and fit other content when that's taking up a whole line of text there, basically. So give yourself options. If you're getting a new logo for your church, make sure you have it displayed both ways with icon on the top text below, and then also icon on the left or icon on one side text on the other.
Speaker 0 00:33:53 I mean, it's just a better way to do it. It's good stuff. Nothing awesome to add there. I think you covered it well, so, uh, yeah, we hope this one was helpful. Yeah, absolutely. I hope it is helpful for you guys. And, uh, you know, this, this is hard stuff to do. Uh, so we know that a lot of this stuff is easier said than done. And I know changing logos is a huge process because it's involved that it touches so many different things that you do out there. Um, you're probably building a list in your head. If you're thinking about changing a logo of all the different things, you have to change at your church, but just to be an encouragement to you, um, yeah, little bites at a time, uh, it can happen. You have to get that done. And, uh, that's why it's so important to go for something timeless because you want to be remembered that way and having something that will last and stand the test of time, uh, really is something important I would say for churches. So that wraps us up for today. Thank you guys for listening. This has been beneficial to you. Uh, it would mean so much to us. If you would rate, review, subscribe, uh, let your friends know. Also let us know in the comments, wherever you're listening or watching this, uh, any feedback you may have for this. We love hearing from our audience on this and, uh, do that. And, uh, we'll catch you guys next week.
Speaker 1 00:35:04 Thanks for listening to the reach right podcast. We hope this episode will help you reach people the right way, looking for more resources for your church. Check us out
[email protected]. If this episode has been helpful to you, it would mean the world to us. If you would rate, review and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening. And we'll see you next week. Yes, <inaudible>.
