Trend Setting Design » Identity Design

Affinity Art Gallery

Joseph Cotten — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:00:58 +0000

The Affinity Art Gallery is a new non-profit art gallery located inside the facilities of Kernersville Community Church (KCC) in Kernersville, NC. Kernersville is at the dead-center of a region of North Carolina known as the Triad. It’s an area consisting of Winston-Salem, Greensboro and High Point. KCC is home to several artists, and along with the church’s leadership and members, portions of KCC’s building have been converted into a publicly-accessible art gallery showcasing local artists’ work, sold without any gallery commission. KCC is giving their building’s space to the public in order to tangibly demonstrate love by helping artists sell their work, and by helping art consumers purchase local art at low prices. With no gallery commission being applied, the art is cheaper, and all the money goes directly to the artists.I attend KCC, and was a part of getting the new Affinity Gallery off the ground, both by designing the identity, website and marketing materials, but also with helping with the interior design and construction of the gallery space. In creating the brand for the gallery, I wanted a clean, professional presentation with a thoroughly modern feel, mixing friendly-but-precise typography and vibrant splashes of color. The circles in the “A” represent the coming-together of different audiences, drawn together by an “affinity” for each other. Much like different artists now display their work together in the gallery, and different types of consumers come into the gallery, all parties have an affinity for each other.

I used a gradient on a almost-neutral gray background to reference the spotlighting employed in the gallery and the fonts I chose are all created by Jos Buivenga of Exljbris, a Dutch typography company. The “A” is set in Museo 900 and the brand’s fonts are Fontin Sans.

You can visit the Affinity Gallery website here.

The Tap Logo

Joseph Cotten — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:00:59 +0000

This was a new logo, and by extension, identity design for a college and career ministry at a long-time church client of mine. They wanted to communicate humor while also showing themselves to have high quality standards. They had a name: The Tap, playing off the ideas of both living water and beer. I thought the best solution would be to blend the two ideas, keeping the logo primarily as a wordmark.

In the end, the favorite version of my designs was the one using good ol’ Helvetica. I usually steer away from using Helvetica too much, as it is so ubiquitous, but in this case it kept enough of an air of seriousness that it benefited this particular execution beautifully.

I’ve attached here three versions of the logo, showing it in various usage.

Identity and Branding Project: Awaken City Church

Joseph Cotten — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:25:24 +0000

I was approached by the pastors of a new church in Greensboro, NC about developing a corporate identity system for their launch. In the beginning, I was given a design brief that was fairly vague, as often happens with any brand new organization. Over the course of several months of doing sketches and meeting with the pastors, the purpose and vision of Awaken City Church became clear: target people in the inner city of Greensboro, NC primarily between the ages of 25–40, with a close secondary audience of college kids. The vibe of the church is modern, underground, inner-city, youthful, raw, hip but not polished. Their vision is to take their message into the culture and into the city.

I started with the mighty Jos Buivenga’s Museo Sans font for the precision and geometric properties, then manipulated it until it could be used as a graffiti stencil. Then I distressed it further, adding paint splatters and an overspray boundary until the client was happy with the amount of grunge. I initially used a much cleaner version where just the “A!” was stenciled, but the client really wanted some serious grunge, so I poured it on thick!

The identity system is built around the idea of graffiti. The “A!” can be used separately from the logo in various applications, as shown in some production comps I threw together:

Digital comp of the Awaken logo in stencil format

This project included several other elements, which each have their own portfolio entries:

Awaken City Church website design

Pre-launch promotional card design, tee shirt design, exterior large format signage

KCC Realign

Joseph Cotten — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:31:14 +0000

I created the corporate identity for Kernersville Community Church (KCC) in 2007 to reflect the infancy of a new vision, coming from new leadership in the church. KCC was originally planted over a decade ago, but a new, younger pastor with a new vision came to the church 3 years ago. The original identity was never correctly implemented, and the church desperately needed a cohesive brand to unite under. I designed the 2007 identity to reflect the vision of the church: outward focused, warm and friendly atmosphere.You can see the 2007 KCC identity here. I used vintage tones and lots of gradients to impart a warmth to the look, while also paying visual homage to history and age. KCC has been around a while, and the identity needed to reflect that, while also making a clear shift to outward thinking, using the cityscape and houses to communicate that.

Over the course of two years, the vision has been further refined, and because KCC is essentially a “replant” of a church, the “culture” of the church has changed drastically over two years. I helped redesign the interior of the church, bringing in modern colors and lighting to the space, and the church is now doing lots of outreach. In addition, the style of the meetings has changed to a cutting edge experience. It became clear to me that my 2007 identity had quickly become outdated. Normally a brand/identity will last much longer than two years, but in special cases, an identity can become outdated if the vision, mission, values or corporate culture of the organization change in large measure. In KCC’s case, the corporate culture changed enough to cause a disconnect with the identity. What KCC needed was not a redesign; rather a realign was the best option because the core vision and values had not changed; just the atmosphere of the church.

I kept the basic premise of the brand intact, but updated the typography, adjusted the color scheme and proportions to show a more cutting-edge, modern aesthetic, along with more aggression. KCC is a church with a lot of forward motion, so the new identity had to reflect that.

The logotype was originally Myriad Pro with Garamond Premier Pro as the subtitle. They had been chosen for a clean-but-creative look. For the realigned identity, I chose Bree Extra Bold Oblique for the title and Zapatista for the subtitle. Bree is a typeface with a pleasing upright-italic feel that exhibits lots of creative flair—KCC has lots of artists and a public art gallery in its building—and Zapatista is an aggressive grungy typewriter font. I proportioned everything inside the Golden Ratio (a.k.a. Divine Ratio) to show a sense of order amid all the gutteral grunge treatments. I also removed the vintage surround of the identity to demonstrate the shift from history to future.

My 2007 (top) and 2009 (bottom) logos

The realigned identity is being implemented slowly, as needs arise. This is done to keep costs down for this [essentially] young church.

The Easter Offering Event Promotion

Joseph Cotten — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:52:36 +0000

A local church is hosting a large, regional creative arts event, and hired me to head up the promotion for the event. I did some printed materials, as you can see above, including a 4×6 postcard design that functions as an invite card, with map and event information, and stands alone as a promotional piece, meaning that it isn’t required for a person to give any additional information to make the card “work”. I also did two poster designs: one for 11×17 output, and another smaller version for 8.5×11 output. These were taken and posted in public advertising locations, such as restaurants, grocery stores, and so forth. I also did an outdoor banner to clarify the event’s location.

I also set up a small blog site to help those involved begin to build some internet buzz around the event and created a Flickr account for pre-production photos. To help the artists and coordinators, I wrote a series of “How To” emails designed to help everyone get past some fears about blogging. It’s interesting to me how many people are hesitant to blog because they feel that their writing won’t be appreciated, so I took some time to help them catch the vision for what a blog can do, and they really are having fun with it! It’s been great to see a group of people step outside of their comfort zones, and flourish because of it.

Awaken Youth Conference Website

Joseph Cotten — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:14:27 +0000

Another marketing component to the Awaken Youth Conference, the website needed to be a simple blog format that would encourage the leaders, speakers and workshop leaders to write articles. The purpose of it is to help the leaders get to know the students before the conference begins, and to let the students start conversations with the leaders, and with each other.

Some special functionality that I built into the site includes a simple registration page that tracks all the registration information, and links to the conference sponsor’s PayPal account. I also set up Twitter integration and did all the copy writing on the site (besides the blog posts). In addition, I took care of registering the domain name, opening up a hosting account, and installing the blogging software.

Kernersville Community Church Identity

Joseph Cotten — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:57:55 +0000

A new corporate identity for a fast-growing church located in an area of North Carolina that’s an intersection between several large cities. The target audience for this was primarily “unchurched” people, or people who didn’t grow up going to church. It needed to impart a sense of “family, warm, friendly and inviting” I gave the identity an antique look to emphasize the “down-home” feeling.

Captain’s Coffee Identity

Joseph Cotten — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:00:35 +0000

A new corporate identity for The Captain’s Coffee, a business that sells unroasted coffee beans, coffee bean roasters, grinders, etc. They pride themselves on the quality of their coffee, but don’t take themselves seriously at all. Their new brand needed to show them as a fun-loving, slightly disorganized but professional company with a serious caffeine buzz.

I developed the new logo, typography choices, color scheme and overall brand image. The collateral produced included new business cards, business card magnets, invoices and a new web site.

Living Way Church

Joseph Cotten — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:22:15 +0000

Living Way Church, in Greensboro, NC is a growing church that’s getting filled up with young couples, but has some pretty deep historical roots dating back to the late 1970′s. The meetings are a mix of contemporary music, conservative teaching and people that love being together in community. I first created a corporate identity for them that would communicate those sensibilities of modern yet historical, conservative but not stodgy, clean cut without being dull. The website also had to reflect those ideas.

They didn’t ask for much, just a photo gallery, a news section that they could easily update, and an audio player for sermons. They didn’t want a blog or any other social networking add-ons, though they could want to implement them in the future.

The solution was to give them a Content Management System that would let them easily add news items and informational articles via a blog interface, without displaying the content in commentable blog format. The CMS will allow them to add social networking features in the future without any hassle.

The color scheme on the site is pulled entirely from color theory rules that were applied to the blue color in their logo. So, the orange buttons, red and tan headers, even the greys on the site are all complimentary to the blue of their logo. I also created custom graphics for the audio player loading animation, and the different website section icons. The rotating image banner is filled with pictures that were supplied to me, which I then retouched in Photoshop and added effects to give them a more organic/grunge feel. The purpose of the photos was to balance the cold/corporate feel of the rest of the site.

The response from everyone at Living Way has been positive, and I continue to do print design work for them regularly. The identity seemed to really resonate with both the church’s leaders and members. I also created business cards, letterhead and outdoor signage using the identity.

Zimmerman Carpet and Rug Cleaners

Joseph Cotten — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:38:36 +0000

Zimmerman Carpet Cleaners (ZCC) is a company that I actually used to work for. When I graduated from Design school, there wasn’t much work for a designer, as that was during an economic downturn. When’s the last time we had an upturn? Anyway, Mike Zimmerman went to my church, and had been operating his carpet cleaning business for almost twenty years. I began working with him, and stayed on full time for five years while I built my Design business on the side.

ZCC is a company that first and foremost is all about quality. If they had to choose between doing work that was of the utmost quality versus doing work that wasn’t as good, but getting more business, they would always choose losing business but keeping quality high.

I created a new identity for them, with a modified, realigned logo and typography choices, solidified color scheme and a new website.