Creative Branding for Church Software Platform

Logo Design Contest — Parish Site
About the project
Parish Site is a website builder for tiny churches. Specifically: small Episcopal parishes, Methodist congregations, ELCA Lutheran churches, Presbyterian (PCUSA), UCC, mainline and progressive Protestant communities. The kind of church that has 40 to 100 people on a Sunday, no full-time staff beyond a pastor, and either no website or a website built ten years ago by someone’s nephew.
For $99 a year, we give them a beautiful, simple, hosted single-page website with their own domain. AI helps them write the content. The whole thing takes about ten minutes from start to live.
This is the entry-level tier of an existing church software platform. The brand needs to feel trustworthy to a 70-year-old church secretary, contemporary enough to feel current, and quiet enough to live alongside hundreds of customer church sites without competing with them.
What we need
A primary logo (mark + wordmark lockup), with all the supporting components a working brand needs: mark alone, wordmark alone, light and dark variants, favicon-ready square version.
Final delivery: vector source files (SVG and AI), PNGs at multiple sizes, and a brief usage guide.
The brief
The logo should
• Feel restrained and editorially serious — closer to a museum identity than a startup
• Use a serif as the primary typographic direction
• Work at favicon size (16–24px) without losing identity
• Suggest “place,” “gathering,” “threshold,” or “sanctuary” if a mark is included — but architecturally, not religiously
• Sit comfortably below a customer church’s own typography in a footer credit
• Look at home next to the name of a 100-year-old church
• Survive being rendered in a single color (no gradients, no effects)
The logo should not
• Use a cross, chalice, dove, fish, flame, or any explicitly religious symbol
• Reference any specific denomination
• Feel SaaS, startup-y, or trendy — no swooshes, no abstract blob shapes, no geometric tech-y marks
• Use gradients, 3D effects, drop shadows, or rendering tricks
• Compete with customer church names visually — the logo is a small footer credit on hundreds of sites; it must defer
• Feel like stock church-sign clipart or a generic religious-services brand
• Use a script or “handwritten” font
The audience
The logo will be seen by people who don’t think of themselves as design-literate, but who absolutely know quality when they see it. They’ve sat in beautiful cathedrals. They’ve held well-printed parish bulletins. They notice when something is well-made and they recoil from anything that feels cheap or trendy. The logo doesn’t need to wow them — it needs to earn their trust.
Where the logo will live
• A marketing website (parishsite.com)
• A customer-facing app dashboard
• Browser tabs and app icons
• Footer credits on hundreds of customer church sites (“Built with Parish Site”) — this is the most important real-world test
• Email signatures, invoices, business cards
• Eventually: print materials, conference booths, swag
Color direction
Single color. Default usage will be a near-black ink (#1a1a1a) on a warm off-white background (#fafaf7). The logo should also work inverted (light on dark). No accent colors built into the logo itself.
Typography direction
We’d prefer a serif that has personality without being trendy. Suggested directions to explore (not requirements): Newsreader, Instrument Serif, Cardo, EB Garamond, Cormorant Garamond. Open to a designer bringing a typeface choice we haven’t considered, as long as it’s licensed for our use.
Open questions you can answer with your design
• Is there a mark, or is the wordmark sufficient on its own?
• What single shape captures “small church” without being denominational?
• What typeface tells the truth about this product?
• How does the logo feel different at 16px versus 200px?
Deliverables
1. Primary lockup (mark + wordmark) — vector source
2. Mark alone — vector source
3. Wordmark alone — vector source
4. Light-on-dark variant
5. Favicon-ready square version (mark on dark rounded square)
6. A short usage guide (one or two pages) covering minimum sizes, clear-space requirements, and any do/don’t notes
7. Mockup of the logo as a footer credit beneath a sample church name (this is the most important real-world test)
What we’d love to see
A logo that we and our church customers will both feel proud of for the next decade. Something that doesn’t look like every other software brand. Something a parish secretary in McCall, Idaho can look at and think: “Yes, that fits us.”