Create a great Church Logo: What to do.
As part of my journey with designing for churches, the second most frequest request is for a redesign of their logo.
Back in the early part of 2024 I saw someone put out on a social media creative group page, this questions “Small church with a small budget. I’m the lead pastor. Need a new logo and some basic branding/marketing. Where I do start? Can AI help?”
Wow, this is one big questio, in fact this is a lot of questions that need some thought and individual answers. So let me try to do that now.
However, first let me give you a few of the answers others gave to try to help this Pastor.
- Do it yourself, use Canva – they have a free version. Great response, pointing this pastor to a brilliant resource that is out there for people, businesses and churches on a small budget, however you CAN NOT legally use Canva assets to create branding without firstly using their paid service and also secondly, without manipulating the design to suit. So great advice but not accurate.
- Hire someone on Fiverr – this is great for small budgets but it’s probably one of the top answers that makes me so sad. I appreciate not everyone has thousands to spend on a logo but when you specifically ask for branding, I recommend expanding your budget a little to include at least a conversation with a professional graphic designer who can lead you in the right direction.
- Lots of people suggested AI but thankfully a lot of people pointed out the copyright issues you may face using this, again a lot of AI software out there offers free versions and again it is illegal to use any free AI generated imagery for logos or commerical products.
- “I will do it for you for free.” – possibly the absolute WORST answer on the feed. I have been bitten by this temptation before, this shows a great heart but also a lack of value both for the designer and also for their work. You shouldn’t be afraid to both ask for payment or to pay a designer their worth.
So let’s tackle some of these points…
“Small church with a small budget.” – Ok, great honesty but you will most definitely find a designer who will be able to accomodate your budget and work to your means to produce you a great, personalised, DNA & culture related logo and also include a little bit of branding too. Stretch your budget to a monthly payment plan over a few months and you would also easily find a designer (like me) who would be willing to add some marketing products like social media templates and flyer designs. And if you’d be willing to consider an even longer payment plan of say 12 months with a designer like myself, they could produce designs for you month on month, fresh, new, unique, theme & event related and maybe also offer you basic training on Canva to then take the financial burden away but also leave you with confidence to produce great designs in the future.
“Need a new logo and basic branding/marketing” – This is 3 different subjects and outputs of design. 1. Your logo – is this an icon, a text based logo, a fully designed unique and cultural logo that represents your church, your values and who you are reaching? So many questions are wrapped up in this idea of “I need a new logo.” 2. Branding – some more really important points need to be considered here. Colour – what best represents you? Check out this blog to see what I mean. Choosing the right colour is important and should be thought through carefully. And then how you develop this into accents, imagery, icons etc – branding is a big picture idea. Also remember that your logo and branding needs to work in black and white. THIS IS ESSENTIAL. 3. Marketing – What does one mean by marketing? I could have a stab in the dark that this pastor was meaning help with social media images and maybe printed literature. This is a lot of extra work and should be considered as extra work – as I said above. I would highly recommend that a payment plan be considered where marketing is concerned to, at the very least, get some basic training to help produce great designs in the future.
“Where do I start?” – What a great question! This question I loved and yet NO ONE really gave the guy a straight answer. Where does this guy start. A desperate pastor with no experience wanting to rebrand his church, hitting a creative group for actual advice and the best people came up with was “Canva.” “Yeh, use AI” or “Don’t use AI you’ll have copyright issues” and “I’ll help (inserted their website link).”
All great but not helping this guy at all. So here is where I would start. “Hey, sounds like a great project and love that you are looking to redesign. To begin with I would sketch out some of your own ideas, put together a few thoughts about what you want the logo to represent, get a few ideas from other sources you might have seen and get it all put down on paper. This will give you a great base to start from and might help you or a designer you hire produce a logo for you quickly which will help with budget.”
I’m not going to broach the AI question as quite frankly it’s simple – don’t use AI to produce logos.
After all this, I just want to make the final point that doing a project like this should be a priority and important to any church – your logo is the first thing anyone will see, it will identify you from any other church and when people look at online sources they will know it’s you by your logo. So spend time going through the process. Don’t rush. And please get some professional advice from a designs. CONVERSATION is so important. A designer can unpick your thoughts and help you reach your goal without stress and produce something you can be proud of.
For a little bit of help….
This website shares their opinion on the top church logos around and you will see there is such variety of colour and design.