Archive for April, 2004
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Design process: Crosspoint Church
Monday, April 12th, 2004
Crosspoint Church is an upcoming church plant in Gulfport, Mississippi, where several young families are migrating. Pastor Israel Cox wanted to have a logo that served as a recognizable image for the church and that would fit into an already-designed web template.
My first thought was, “Crosspoint. Geez. I’m sure there are 1,526 other churches with that name. How in the world are we going to make this one different?”
After much research (on the web, anyway), I found there are really only a handful of Crosspoint churches, and none of them is really doing anything visually interesting with their name. Needless to say, the field was pretty wide open for a logo.
Israel had done a pretty good, concise demographic of the families the church would reach. Some of the details included: the husband listens to country music, while the wife likes soft rock; the family owns two vehicles, one of them a truck; the husband is a sportsman, and other such details. I thought I had a pretty good starting point there.
I began fleshing out the name in my head. Cross. Point. It seemed pretty inevitable that a cross would be an integral part of the design, not only because of the name, but also because of the nature and focus of the organization. Stylistically, I felt like I needed to avoid a corporate logo, though some of the initial design references the pastor recommended were fairly corporate-looking. I know now, though, he was probably reacting to the polished, fairly young look of them more than their professionalism.
At any rate, my first rough was a knee-jerk kind of reaction that smacked of corporate replicas the last five years. Don’t be too unkind…I kept going.
My next round of sketches focused on dimension of various sorts. I thought instead of looking at a static cross, maybe I could find a way to present the church as coming at the cross — or coming at Christianity — from a
“different angle,” and starting making sketches that explored angles, dimensions and the like.
This was the result of that round, and while I still think the concept was pretty sound, the pastor didn’t think it worked, and I think, too, that we would’ve ended up with printing problems and the like if we’d gone with it. The scale of the words to the icon alone would’ve caused a host of problems.
It was at this point that the web template (link above) was ready for final approval, and I got to see where the church was headed visually.
It was also the point at which I hit a creative brick wall in my sketches.
I started trying to find different meanings for the word “point,” one of which dealt with the beach idea of a point, as in “a place which meets the water,” which would highlight the church’s location on the Gulf Coast. I started trying to find ways to make beach elements form into a cross of some sort or a wave. This round of unfinished comps might show where my mind was going.
When I’d banged my head up against the wall about 50 times, begged God to give me some sort of inspiration, and finally relaxed and let Him do it, I went back to square one and found something intriguing.
I went to Dictionary.com and looked up the word “point” to see if there was something I might be missing.
There were about a gajillion definitions, but one of them interested me particularly.
Apparently “points” are the units used to create words in braille: letter and word forms for the blind. I went to a website on braille, and the icons in the banner immediately caught my attention. I was really intrigued by the negative space in the forms and my mind immediately began exploring ways to convey the cross in negative space.
I had pretty much settled on using the font I’d chosen: a freebie font called Ashby by Apostrophic Labs (I don’t have as great a font collection as I should).
In the uppercase of the font, the H’s and N’s particularly have an interesting notch in them, which I wanted to take advantage of. I grabbed those notches (simple right angles, really) and played with them in Illustrator, positioning them in different ways to see what I could do with them.
The final result was this:
I don’t know why, but this is one of my most favorite logos (of the ones I’ve done, anyway). I keep going back and looking at it, and when my wife saw it, she said, “Oh. That’s cool.” I didn’t build it up or anything. That was a good thing. I’ve also gotten some pretty good feedback from my church media friends at ChurchMedia.net, and hope you’ll give me critiques and suggestions as well.
All in all, though, I really think the logo is visually interesting, meets the specs of what the church needed, and fits in with their overall design scheme.
Let me know what you think!
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