In 2021, I had the opportunity to join a 5 day design & build sprint with a small team to create a website and some branding work for a ministry that provided retreats, coaching, and other help to pastors, ministry workers and their spouses.
With 42% of pastors considering leaving the ministry in the past year, the need for places where they can be filled up and refreshed spiritually, physically and emotionally is high. So with that, we wanted to make the whole brand feel calming and restorative.
I then led an exercise with the founder and team to come up with a few words to describe who they were as a brand. Then focused on a mission statement to easily describe what they do and provide a solid standing in their own minds of who they are.
After working with the founder to create a mood board of images and colors that seemed to have the feeling and emotion of the brand, we settled on colors first to set the tone for the rest of the brand guide.
I then started focusing on their logomark. They had already come up with the name “The Rock & The River” so I did my best to represent that visually.
I tried to make it as simple as possible, focusing on those 2 elements. I decided to add in the rising(or setting) sun to add in a calming element to the scene.
With the brandmark text, I wanted to use a thicker weight font, to provide balance and a “solid and steadfast” emotion to the lock up.
Typography was set to be simple, easy to read, and calming.
We then moved on to the website. I was able to work with the team to lay out a site map, and iron out the best hierarchy of information.
From there, I worked with the developer to choose a template in Webflow, and customize it to our needs. Since this was a sprint, we really only had 5 days to complete all this work. So using a Webflow template and making slight adjustments made our jobs so much more efficient to build a full website.
The team consisted of:
Dusty Beach - Founder
Daniel Hobbs(Me) - Branding, Design
Josh Kennedy - Engineering
Michael Garland - Engineering
John Vaught - Brand Voice, Content Writer
Jessa Sexton - Brand Voice, Content Writer
You can learn more about The Rock and The River’s ministry here.