PBA Worship is an organization within Palm Beach Atlantic University that creates music, and facilitates creative Christian worship experiences for students, faculty and staff. Over the past few years, they’ve struggled to maintain any sort of look and feel reflective of the student culture. The most recent hire reached out asking me to develop a look and feel that students, faculty, and staff could get behind, and could outlast their tenure as worship coordinator.
After going through our discovery session, we identified their current audience, constructed the individuals they were trying to reach, and defined the brand. The first course of action following their discovery session was to capture the desired look and feel with the creation of brand stylescapes.
The stylescapes included a visual of their target consumers, type options, illustrative components, photography, and a mockup or two of potential album art/Spotify video assets. We went over different iterations, but ultimately landed on one that they felt encapsulated their identity perfectly.
After the stylescapes were developed and approved, we moved on to the logo drafts.
The initial drafts are all shown to the right. Each of these concepts has their own sort of look and feel to them. The top two are meant to evoke a sense of modern day alternative rock - the sophistication of the serif juxtaposed by the playfulness of the type below it.
The other drafts included both a more corporate logomark, and a sort of granola-inspired markup. I started ideating these marks by sketching out palm trees, due in large part to the constructed consumer’s obsession with tropical life. After all, this more boho, “island life” mentality is what brings students to PBA.
After some deliberation, we settled on a final direction for the revision. The final design was an illustrative palm tree encapsulated by the simplistic outline of a stained glass window, which is a nod to PBA’s desire to cling to traditionalism as an institution. A few tweaks to the wordmark were requested, and I obliged. What resulted was what is shown below…
When it came to visual elements, it was imperative to use patterns and color that felt as though they were first cousins of PBA’s already-established brand identity; it was just as important, however, to distinguish this from the corporate PBAU identity. I feel as though this was largely successful.
As it relates to type, we wanted something that felt more in-line with the younger demographic, so a nice slab-serif paired nicely with the care-free (yet intentional and purposeful) illustrative element of the logo icon.
In addition to this, the colors originated with what, once again, would be more appealing to the constructed consumer. The colors still remain related to PBA’s overall look and feel, but they feel like a more distant relative (which is what we want from this particular subsidiary of PBAU due to the students’ longing for individualism as opposed to the assimilation of what is already there).
The illustrative aspects of PBA Worship are inspired by (keywords “inspired by”) Swiss design with an overlap in a more Pinterest kind of vibe. The shapes utilize a stamp texture which elicited a more bespoke feel, while the photography treatment serves as a film-type mood. Ultimately, the question I kept asking myself was, “What would a college student look at and not feel ashamed to share on their Instagram story?”
In addition to the brand identity system and corporate identity guide we delivered, we also delivered poster templates for events, letterhead templates, social media carousel templates, business card designs, album art, one Spotify reel 1080x1920, and email signatures.
