We are breaking the usual pattern of Tuesday tips and Friday fill-ins this week to bring you a special article on our progress to come up with a new logo and packaging design for Visual Liturgy Live. As well as being lots of fun, we are working hard with our designers – Rareform London – to establish a new brand style for VL.
As more versions of Visual Liturgy have been released with Methodist and Church of Ireland editions joining the Church of England and others in the pipeline (which I can’t tell you about now), the limitations of our current branding are starting to be felt quite keenly.
As a result, we are looking at doing some new design work for the logo and the box which can then be carried throughout the software and onto the website as we incorporate this blog into the rest of the site (which definitely needs to be spruced up).
We thought you might be interested to see how our thinking and the designers’ work has been progressing. We’ve prepared a short Powerpoint slideshow to show you how the work has been progressing and how our thinking and the thinking of our designers has developed. If you don’t have Microsoft® Powerpoint, you can install a free Powerpoint Viewer from Microsoft’s website.
Download the presentation (designprez.pps, 4.65Mb)
We also thought you might like to give us your feedback on our current big decision!
The big decision
We have boiled our choices down to two possible logos for Visual Liturgy. Which one do you like best?
Option 1
The first option has a resonance with our existing logo and the use of the book. It cleverly hides VLL in the actual design and also has symbolism from praying hands – both at the altar (the V with arms outstretched) and alone (the two L’s as hands clasped together). The colour black in the logo may be changed.
Option 2
Option 2 is more of a departure from what has gone before. It is based on the Icthus fish symbol and is actually a collection of 8 fishes in a cross pattern. It is meant to resonate with classic Christian imagery – the fish, the cross, celtic knotwork – but also reflects a control key on keyboards and thus carries a contemporary, computer edge to it as well. The colour yellow in the logo may be changed.
Your comments are very welcome!
I think I prefer the second logo, but not in yellow. Having checked out the powerpoint presentation, I see that one possibility is to have the fish logo in two different colours – which I liked even more.
I prefer the first logo, as it does at least imply something is being read, whereas the second looks simply like decoration — or is it a mass of electrical cables? However, I’m not sure about ‘LIVE’ in grey — it looks a bit half-hearted.
The first design is clearly a much better option. This is quite a clever representation of the acronyms. It also hints at the access to the lectionary and other worship books and resources, which this software provides. However, please change the colour. If not the present red, then some other liturgically neutral colour. I think the red has worked because of its infrequent use in the course of the church year.
Unlike the comments I have read, I still like the original VL icon. If you really must change the icon, please use the red & whte background, it standss out so well from the other maze of icons which are currently being used
Thanks for posting to all – please do keep it coming. Unfortunately the existing red/wite logo isn’t an option because we’ve navigated ourselves into a denominational/provincial cul-de-sac with the increasing number of different versions of VL that exist around the world. However, the point about trying to keep it ‘standing out’ on your desktop is one we will be trying to keep up.
The first may make a better logo to leave on screen to call up the programme, and is rather clearer about what it represents.
I guessed what the first one was at once, but “this is enough fish to feed 20,000 people” left me guessing. It’s a bit too subtle.
I am a late arrival at the VL ball. I have only just discovered this Site/Blog or whatever the correct term is.
I much prefer the first logo, but the Icon on the desktop still should be Red and White. It stands next to my Libronix icon, and the two main powerful tools of my ministry stand out clearly from all the rest.
Peter
David U – I was once a member of Kingston Hill – we mest several times in a previous millenium!