North Highland Church Brand Family
Project Client: North Highland Church |@northhighlandchurch
Project Type: Brand Family | Community Brand
Project Designers: Josh Whiting & Ryan Scully
If you've ever tried to figure out how to brand a church with multiple ministries under one roof, you know the challenge: how do you keep youth and kids' branding fun and distinct, while still feeling connected to the main church identity? Should the youth ministry logo design match the main church? Or should the children’s ministry logo match the youth? All topics we’ve explored before. Here's how we approached that scenario for North Highland Church in Columbus, Georgia.
A church trying to reach different audiences is best served by the community, or family, brand process. The main church identity becomes the parent of the whole logo family. This helps visitors move between a Sunday service, a youth night, and the children’s ministry check-in desk while sensing a common visual thread that connects the entire church family.
North Highland has a tower on their property that’s easily recognizable around town and was in their previous logo design version. Since they wanted something modular, clean and crisp for the main church logo design, we knew we just needed to push things further stylistically. We were able to find lots of fun ways to take apart the diamond shape elements and re-use them across all North Highland brands.
Side note: using your physical landmark as a brand mark has great rewards that might be worth exploring!
“The words “industry standard” gets thrown around a ton nowadays but I truly believe that if you need a church logo (or any logo for that matter) Bright Coal is the industry standard in this space.”
The main church logo was designed to feel on mission, slightly unconventional, and full of life. The vibrant logo colors bring energy and personality to the brand, while the bold, confident design gives the church a distinctive presence that feels modern, welcoming, and unapologetically itself. We don’t see churches make these design choices every day and we love it!
Their creative student ministry logo is loud, urban and full of energy. Inspired by streetwear and a little bit of disruption, the final identity brings bold personality built around their rich legacy of reaching students in a relevant way.
North Highland Church used to run a dancing unicorn countdown video before kids' service and the kids loved it so much that the adult volunteers said they perked up and listened better. Through our mood meetings, we decided to lean into the goofy and make a ministry tool out of it! Enter Felicia - now a fixture of their kid’s ministry content that was brought into the brand kit. These types of creative choices reflect a church that’s intentional about its mission without being afraid to have a little fun the way. Everyone loves Felicia!
“One of my favorite part of these projects was Clayton begging us not to use a unicorn in the church kids brand. Then him later falling in love with it. Felicia 4ever!”
We’ve been thankful to also work on the artwork for their other ministry groups like senior adults, an outreach campaign called North Highland Cares, and a college ministry that reaches young adults in the area. SALT stands for senior adults living triumphantly. This demographic often gets overlooked, so we were pumped to put together a flash sheet for that ministry! North Highland hosts Point University’s Columbus Leadership Campus, which is a residential, mentored ministry-training experience. (For other private school logo ideas, check here.)
North Highland also grabbed a logo animation from us that helps bring a static image to life as it moves and breathes across someone’s screen.
North Highland Church is a great example of how thoughtful church branding and logo design can create a cohesive family of brands for every area of ministry. Effective church logo design doesn’t have to look the same across every ministry. It’s also meant to be incredibly fun to figure out what will work best for the people you’re trying to reach. If we can help build a brand family for your church that uniquely reflects different audiences and each sub-ministry purpose, let’s hop on a call today.
Need more inspiration, but maybe no unicorn?
Check out the community brand we completed for Lexington Baptist Church for another unified church brand strategy example here.