The leadership at Hickory Grove Baptist Church approached me in the summer of 2012 to create a design treatment for their new objectives and direction as a church. They were going to start realigning all their programs and endeavors to be more missional in nature, stripping things down to their basic elements, and they wanted a graphic treatment that would reflect that.

Hickory Grove sent me a rough draft of their thought process around their new direction. There were 5 main ideas that encompassed everything that the church did, these were Worship, Connect, Serve, Pray, and Give. Everything fell under these 5 categories, and these were the conduit through which they would accomplish their primary objective, which was to be evangelical. It was also necessary to incorporate the strategy into the story, which was three-fold: Exalt Christ, Make Disciples, and Pass the Torch.

I liked the idea of the overlapping shapes, but as I explored more options, I thought about making the square shape 3-dimensional, and if you turn a cube a certain way, it starts to look like a hexagon.

After that, I incorporated my original periodic table elements back into the shapes, and I had a strong set of icons for the objectives that could be stacked and aligned to one another, and each was able to stand alone fairly well.

From this, there were a multitude of graphic treatments that could be created to support the objectives, and when it came time to create icons for the 3 strategies, the shapes derived from the hexagons worked well, and tied the whole campaign together. They each used shapes found in the hexagon to construct an icon that was an abstract interpretation of the piece of the strategy they represented, and they were also color-coded based on the objective they most closely corresponded to.

All that was left from the original document was to communicate the idea of sending disciples through the statement "I am sent. We send." and an icon to represent that idea. I also wanted the icon to communicate the idea that this was an ongoing mission, not simply something that happens once, but something that is reciprocal. I designed the word "go" into the infinity symbol, and though this rarely happens, there weren't many explorations or iterations on this design before I found the right treatment. This one came by a stroke of inspiration, but usually, these things take a little bit more work and iteration.

Each individual ministry could could be color-coded based on the objective that they supported, and the graphic treatment of that ministry could be built out of these building blocks. Along with the new objectives and direction came a new initiative to welcome visitors to church and guide them to the right areas on their first time, both a welcoming and wayfinding mechanism. It was called First Impressions  and it needed a new brand as well.

The icon in the green talk bubble was a simple solution to a complex problem. This logo had to communicate the ministry name "First Impressions" to insiders who are working in that area, but the same mark needed to communicate the idea of "Information" to those who were new to church.

So the icon is a number One and a letter "i" to tie in with the name First Impressions, but it is also a visual cue for Information that ties in with the common mental model, so that new visitors would know where to go for directions and information.