This is the story of one church’s transition from a house of brands to a branded house. Change like this can feel overwhelming. But it can actually increase your focus on your mission.

When the topic of a rebrand comes up, it raises concerns from a variety of people about a variety of things. How can we strip the identity of our ministries? Isn’t that what our people “own”? Will people still know that we are the same church?

My hope is that the story of this brand transition will help you see the value of the change from a practical perspective, a teaching perspective, and a mission alignment perspective.

A few years prior to High Desert Church moving to a multisite ministry model, they had rebranded the church to this:

Over time, every logo in the organization had to evolve to function on each campus. Things got a little out of hand.

As you can see, they were trying really hard to keep the color scheme of each campus in every logo that had been developed. Eventually though, having to manage all these delineations became overwhelmingly complex. The sheet of logos above represents just 1/4 of the logos being managed. Each campus had a sheet of logos just like this.

Beyond the complexity of creating and managing so many logos, they began to realize that all these efforts weren’t actually helping people find their way. Logos, at their most basic level, help people identify things. The sheer complexity of the branding's evolution was making it ineffective.

So, a change was made. I led the transition from a house of brands to a branded house. 

Because this shift was expected to have an impact on everyone on the team, I created a plan to guide the transition. The organization wasn't just changing their visual identity, they were affirming their approach to accomplishing their mission. I wanted to be very thoughtful about the transition and make it clear why HDC was shifting away from a house of brands and to a branded house.

Beyond a hierarchy of importance, the approach to a branded house was driven by 5 goals. Every decision I made in the design phase needed to move these goals forward. These goals also helped our ministry leaders understand why they were “losing their logos”, and created a lot of unity around the change.

Below is the branding philosophy I developed for High Desert Church. It unpacks the highest priorities about how the brand functions in order to set a clear course of action, but also to guard against off-brand decisions which can easily creep in if not monitored.