Simple is beautiful.

This week I’ll be walking you the process of designing a real, live logo that will eventually be used in production over at Grace Fellowship Church’s website.

For our first day of production, we consider the question: “What design does my client need?” Sometimes getting the answer is harder than you might think, but a successful logo depends on it. Web Redesign 2.0 has a great downloadable Client Survey chock full of questions that help you and your clients define the design. I’ve also written about the importance of this “on-the-same-page-up-front” thinking in my second Tools of The Web Design Trade article. (There’s also a sample proposal in there that might come in handy.)

Tim Challies is my contact with the church. He sent me a list of the church’s goals for the logo:

• Logo is for Grace Fellowship Church, sometimes shortened to GFCTO
• Font should be neither futuristic nor antique, good balance of traditional and modern
• Plain text logo would be acceptable, though some kind of iconography is preferred as long as it is not cheesy, cliché or generic
• Must look good printed in black and white format
• Prefer landscape orientation instead of portrait, not be too long or too high
• No official colors, but would learn towards colors that are bold, medium to deep blue
• No “Web 2.0”
• Words that are meaningful to our church: Unity, Fellowship, Grace, Preaching, Diversity, Community, Bible, Truth, Delight, Humility, Scripture, Pulpit, Worship, Gospel, Cross

After looking over Grace Fellowship’s goals for this logo, I’ve decided to start with a more concrete approach and then abstract it out. I’ve also come up with a couple of questions I need to ask for clarification:

• Will this logo be used with the current design, or is the logo part of a redesign of the entire site?
• Should I use the font that’s there, or can I explore new typography?

Tomorrow we’ll look over some sketches and then decide on a typeface for our logo.