One Logo or Many?

In the churches I have served in North America, the scope of ministry allowed for several departments within the overall organization. Each of these departments, at one time or another, desired their own "identity" separate from the church's core logo and promotional theme. So, over the years, I did quite a few student ministry logos, preschool ministry logos, worship ministry logos and so many others. It begs the question here in the "logo area" of this site: do we really need all these logos?

Separate audiences? It's relatively easy to make the case in favor of multiple logos. Certainly the preschool ministry has a vastly different audience than the worship ministry--or at least a smalle subset of the total audience. Because of this, and because that ministry may want to emphasize different aspects of ministry, a separate theme or logo might be helpful. If you see a cute, kid-friendly logo as you enter the preschool area, well that might give you more confidence that your kids will be well cared for, right? If logos are to help clarify and communicate, then a different message might be helped by a different logo.

But, twenty years later... Here I am two decades into that philosophy, however, and the interesting result is that I can't point to a single instance where I really believe that having all these logos and "sub-identities" within the church made much of a difference. In fact, in many cases, it think it was more confusing than anything else.

In the last 3 or 4 years, an adjustment I've made with respect to these separate logos is to try to unify them in some way. If I chose a typeface for the church as a whole, for instance, I'd try to keep the ministry logos in the same type family, or at least the same color scheme. This gave me more of a "family" of designs versus many completely separate elements. Here too, I ran into difficulty as ministry leaders were not as quick to embrace a design that was not totally unique to their area of service.

Resigned to it? Perhaps, to some degree, I'm resigned to the fact that many logos are a fact of life within the North American church, and it's just not that big of an issue in terms of communication. The few positives are that I have an endless supply of T-shirts from every logo-laden ministry project that I've worked on over 20 years. The negative is that a great deal of time and energy goes into these identities, none of which really made a profound impact.

I have to admit here that this could be my weakness as a designer--maybe I just don't have enough talent or skill in this area to produce effective logos. But, with overall positive feedback through the years, my perception is that I've served up logos that have been well accepted, but not particularly well used.

if I had my preference today... I would recommend to you, use just one logo for everything. I know you think that youth ministry logo is really gonna help you draw the kids on Wednesday night, or that preschool baby logo is going to look great on those free tote bags you're giving away to new parents. But frankly, I've been there and done that, and I'm going to tell you without hesitation that it just won't matter in even a year. You'll move on, your audience will move on, and that logo T-shirt is going to be used to dry the car after you wash it on Saturday much sooner than you think.

Many logos within an organization are a reality we have to deal with, but they simply are not effective.

  

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