Online Visual Identity Guide

By creating one visual standards guide for all of their online assets, we were able to give them that unified brand and strong design direction. And by creating individual standards guides for each ministry based on the original guide, we were able to make sure each site had its own unique look while still remaining consistent with the other sites.

But we didn’t just create visual standards guides. We also created style tiles, wireframes, and mockups for each different ministry to show how the style guide could be implemented for each one. In addition, we created slideshow presentations that they could use to present these new ideas to their individual boards.

To develop the main guide and all the sub-guides, we audited all four clients’ old sites to see what elements they liked and what they had used before. We also met with representatives of each ministry every week to discuss different parts of the project and arrive at a consensus about the target audience, desired design language, and goals for the CRCNA and each of the other three ministrie. Each week, we showed them the progress we’d made on the guides the previous week and received feedback on it.

We focused a significant amount of time on learning and developing empathy with their target audience. We asked detailed questions about them and created Audience Personas for each ministry based off of their answers. With these personas in mind, we were able to create more user-focused designs that their audience would understand and enjoy.

Throughout the creation of these guides, we stayed in contact contact with our clients to make sure we understood their needs, their audience’s needs, and the clients’ feedback on our work. We believe that we were ultimately able to create this repeatable design system because of our close working relationship with our clients and our deep drive to understand their goals and audience.

In the main visual standards guide, we addressed multiple website components that needed the same basic framework across all the CRCNA’s ministries.

In the guide, we explained the purpose of each element and what the standard visual guide for each should be. We included visual samples of how these elements should and shouldn’t look when following the guide.

With this unified guide approved by each of the four ministries, the CRCNA now has a documented brand style they can follow for all their current and future websites. All the sites can now look unified but not uniform.

And with the individual sub-guides for each ministry, they all now had clear direction for how to create their new sites.

Even after the visual standards guides were approved, we continued meeting with the clients to discuss how the guide could be implemented in each of their sites.

We developed style tiles for each ministry, showing the important elements they should include in their site. These elements needed to remain consistent throughout their site to give it a strong design and to tie it to the other CRCNA sites.

We also created a wireframe for each client’s homepage to show the different ways the standard page layout could be implemented.

Lastly, we created 3-4 mockups for each ministry to show how some of their most common or most important pages could look when all the design elements and layouts were merged together. We needed to create 4 distinct web looks that shared one unified design.

Each of these ministries needed to present our work to their individual boards, so we created presentations for them showing the different stages of our work and the results.

We displayed:

At the end of this 10-week project, the CRCNA had a consistent brand and design language to use to tie all their sites together. They also had a solid foundation to build on when creating new sites for future ministries.

Each ministry could now go update their site, putting our design direction to good use.

Each of these ministries needed to present our work to their individual boards, so we created presentations for them showing the different stages of our work and the results.