Designing the Sermon Identity for The Beautiful Mind

One of the core principles of our church is that put a large value on teaching. We value teaching most in our Sunday morning services where we gather to hear the Bible preached. We believe that the message from the Bible is best exhorted when preached as a whole in context. That means when we preach we typically will preach through entire books of Bible on a week by week basis. Depending on the content and length of book our sermon series can stretch for months.

This fall we began a brand new series going through the Book of Philippians titled The Beautiful Mind. 

The Title

Every sermon series we design starts with the selection of the book we will be preaching through. Once the book is selected our teaching pastors and assistants outline the book and break it into different themes. We also come up with one major theme that drives everything.

For the book of Philippians everything centers around "having the mind of Christ."

Once we have the theme the goal is to come up with a memorable title. Sometimes in this process it comes right away and other times we never really find that "ahah" moment. For this series we...

We obviously didn't want people thinking about the movie "A Beautiful Mind" so we initially steered away from that but nothing else seemed to work and I loved the imagery of that phrase. To differentiate I suggested we use "the" instead of "a" Not only would it sound different but it places a singular emphasis on the importance of Christ's mind.

Creative Elements

Once the title is set I sit down to create the overall visual identity of the series. In creating the main visual or series logo I wanted to incorporate the main themes of fellowship, love, joy, unity, and excellence. My initial ideas were influenced by a couple other designs I had created before: A Visual Theology piece, Think on These Things and After Your Heart.

Many times after we come up with the title I'll have an initial idea in my head for the visual identity. In this case the image in my head I couldn't shake was that of Da Vinci's anatomical man along with other medical drawings of anatomy. I've done several designs in this style before and the final design for The Beautiful Mind was influenced by those.

Obviously a line drawing of the brain would serve to illustrate the concept of the mind, but I had already done that before. I needed a different, more creative way to visualize the mind or the brain. I get a ton of inspiration from the artists that post their work on Dribbble. I will typically go there to research ideas and trends. From my travels through Dribbble I found one image I thought was brilliant. It conveyed the idea of the brain but shot from an overhead view which I thought amplified the concept of the mind over the physicality of the brain. 

In using this image I re-mixed it to have a little more variety and connectivity. But it didn't completely work as black and white. I felt it needed color in this context to really convey the idea of beauty. The color also brought out the idea of movement and neurons and electricity running through an actual brain. I also really liked the symmetry of the circle which makes it work well for an overall logo. Symbolically it also helps to bring the idea of the heart and mind being one.