A Church Full Of Non-Designers Needed A Brand That Designs Itself.

The Rename

Garden Church was planted in 2009 as Anthem CDA. In 2026 it changed its name to match what it had actually become, and a name change is the moment every inconsistency in a brand becomes visible at once.

A church puts out more design per week than most startups. Sunday slides, series artwork, event graphics, social posts, bulletins, signage, the site. None of it made by designers. All of it made on a deadline that does not move.

The staff did not need a designer. They needed to stop needing one.

"Green is the garden floor. Cream is the light through the trees. If a page feels loud, it has lost the green." Brand Guidelines, Section 4, Color.

Every week a volunteer opened a blank canvas and made a decision a brand system should have already made for them. Every one of those decisions was a small drift away from the last.

I was brought in for the rename and the brand system, but the actual brief underneath was operational: build something a team with no design training can run correctly on a Saturday night without asking anyone.

That reframes the deliverable. A system is a set of decisions already made.

The Approach

I drew a nine-point symbol and locked it to a wide grotesque wordmark, locked as one unit, supplied white-on-green as primary and green-on-cream as secondary. It is never redrawn and never cramped.

Forest green is the ground, warm cream is the relief, charcoal carries the reading text, and sage tints but never shouts. I specified the proportions as ratios: green holds roughly sixty percent of a branded surface, cream twenty-five, charcoal ten, sage five.

That ratio is the single most useful thing in the document, because it answers the question a volunteer actually has, which is how much green goes on a wall.

Photography is where church branding usually goes wrong. Stage closeups, flash, crowd shots, production gear in frame. I wrote the direction to run the other way. Lead with the sacred ordinary, people in relationship, natural light and breathing room.

"Guidelines nobody follows are decoration."

The System

Thirty-nine pages across six sections: story, identity, typography, colour, photography, and voice.

I wrote it to be read by people who have never opened a design file. The photography direction names the high-priority subjects and, more usefully, the low-priority ones. The low-priority list is the one people actually use.

The Website

Built directly in code, serving both the current and the legacy domain so nobody arrives at a dead link after the rename.

The site is the one asset the volunteers never have to maintain, so it had to be the reference for everything they do make. Building it in the browser meant the type scale and the green ratio were proven on a real page before they went into the book.

The site is live at gardencda.com.

The Results

Ninety days, one system. A thirty-nine page brand book handed over rather than a deck presented. Zero designers needed to run a normal week. Two domains served by a single build.

"The measure is whether it still looks like itself six months later, made by people who were never trained as designers." Garden Church, handover.

What I Would Do Differently

With more time I would have run the training session twice, once before the guidelines were final and once after, because the questions people ask when they are actually making something are different from the questions they ask reading a document.

The brand book was half the work. The operational half is what decides whether any of it survives.