Mattson Creative

New Hope Brand Identity

Last week I had the privilege of spending the day in Portland with the leadership team of New Hope Community Church. Last year we redesigned the New Hope brand identity and the church has since asked me to serve on their advisory board. We meet a few times a year to discuss vision, trends, technology, community and branding. It’s always an inspiring conversation and I love being involved.

Over the years, I’ve worked on branding projects for several faith-based groups. For me, the most exciting engagements have been with organizations who seek to transcend the typical or expected religious expressions. I love working with groups that interested in blurring the line between the secular and sacred.

New Hope is unique in that they’ve purposed to radically transform their church environment and their church experience in order to engage their local community. Through strategic partnerships they are in the process of a complete redevelopment of their land to realize a vision for a new, vibrant community gathering place that will be more accessible to the public.

Currently called Eagle Landing, the new development will be a mixed-use lifestyle center with retail, residential and hospitality components. The project will comprise 35 acres of new development containing 450,000 square feet of retail space, 750,000 square feet of office space, 700,000 square feet residential area—including a five-star hotel, lofts, senior active living and assisted living.

When complete, the center will offer an array of world-class restaurants, entertainment experiences, activities and community gathering areas.

What will differentiate this particular lifestyle center will be the integration of the church—the intentional fusion of a faith-community with a commercial environment. It’s a very exciting project for me to be a part of. I’ve worked with New Hope over the last year to help them redefine their brand as they redefine their environment. We started with a Brand Ideation engagement where we worked together to craft a verbal articulation of the New Hope brand. Then we addressed the brand identity.

This was the original logo. The mark was outdated and it did not represent the church’s new vision.

We looked at multiple concepts, but quickly gravitated toward the concept in the bottom left.

This is the final identity. Inspired by the colors of stained glass, the symbol is comprised of multiple overlapping quadrants. These forms converge to create both a cross – the central icon of the Christian faith – as well as an intersection, which represents the community it seeks to engage. We chose a lowercase, sans serif type to communicate modernity and approachability.

I also designed a new stationery system to show how the look-and-feel from the brand identity could extend into other applications.

We did an initial exploration of how the identity might look within the context of the new development – applying the mark to banners and posters. I really like how clean and vibrant the visual system is. It will be exciting to see the how the new identity continues to roll out for New Hope. They are heading in a very exciting direction and it’s been great working with them through the process.

Speaking Engagement at CBU

Later this month I will be speaking on design at CalBaptist University. I was honored to be asked to share and I’m looking forward to meeting the students in the program. Hopefully I won’t be too boring. The plan is to keep it short, show lots of work and get to the Q & A. Should be fun. Go CBU! (What is the CBU mascot? I’m writing this on a plane so I can’t check. It’s a Christian school so I’m going to guess it’s an Eagle.)