Brand Guide
for SyroMalabar Community
Over the past year, I created the first of many brand standards for my ethnic community called SyroMalabar. I captured my favorite moments below.
What is this? SyroMalabar is an ethnic group with roots from Kerala, India. My community is best described as “Indian by culture, Catholic by faith, and Syriac by tradition”. Our culture has changed and evolved massively after our parents immigrated to America and the youth realized our needs for our new community have changed as well and it was time we brought our online presence up to speed. We decided to start a brand guide.
Why was this important? Our community has a scattered online presence, each church has its own Instagram page, our parents do social media campaigns differently than us and there is no consistent message for our parishioners. A brand guide was a way to bridge the gap between our siloed organizations and appear whole to our parishioners.
Process
Below I have highlighted the steps we took to create this brand guide and there is so much more work to do.
User Research
Our team consisted of a researcher, designer(myself) and our church’s youth trustee. Each of us brought a unique perspective that made the brand guide possible. Our researcher started by interviewing 60+ youth asking them questions about their relationship with our Syromalabar church and community. For example:
What do youth seek to gain from being an active member of the church community?
On completion of their senior year in high school, to what extent do youth perceive that their needs were served by the church?
What factors do youth perceive might help them to become (more) active in church activities?
What factors do youth perceive have impeded and/or continue to impede their involvement in church activities?
She conducted hour-long conversations, transcribed each interview, and synthesized the results for common themes. We then came together as a team in our discovery session.
Discovery Session
We conducted a virtual discovery session discussing the results of the interview and asking ourselves:
Why does your team care about uplifting the future of your parish? How did you get involved?
What are your goals with your youth organization?
Why is this work important?
What’s wrong with your existing brand identity?
Who is your ideal audience? age? stage of life?
Why does your audience trust you? If they don’t trust you, why not?
What emotional benefits do you directly or indirectly offer youth or would like to in the future?
What do you want SyroMalabar to offer you?
What kind of personality do you want your organization to have?
What are some common positive takeaways your audience would say?
What are some common negative takeaways your audience would say?
What do we want to avoid? What do you want to keep?
After the session, we organized the board together and took away four core values: Be Authentic, Build Community, Grow Together, and Celebrate Value.
Take a look at our board: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lTWv_Io=/
Personas
We then stepped into establishing personas. Through the discovery session and various conversations with church leadership, we discovered 3 main persona sets within our community.
Religiously Catholic & Culturally SyroMalabar: Parishioners who love and practice Catholicism and love our SyroMalabar culture.
Not Catholic, but Culturally SyroMalabar: Parishioners don’t practice Catholicism, maybe only practice it if they spend time with their parents, but love our SyroMalabar culture. We still see these parishioners at many parish events, as long as faith is not the focus of the event.
Not Catholic & Not Culturally SyroMalabar: These parishioners don’t practice Catholicism, and do not care for our SyroMalabar culture. We still see these parishioners during holidays and church events.
Each of these personas varies slightly with age, so we also cataloged 3 age groups(High School, College, and Young Adult) for each set.
https://www.figma.com/file/DxFW2BCLn6a1JNbnUfjDGO/User-Personas-Chicago-Cathedral?node-id=0%3A1
Define Vision, Brand Identity, and Design Personality
This was the hardest part of the process and required extensive review with the team. We took a look at our interview responses, discovery session, and personas and established themes that weaved a solid foundation for the future. We spent weeks looking into the nuance and complexity of our own personas and elevating details throughout the vision, purpose & values.
Vision
We heard a common theme throughout our interviews: Parishioners talked about how they loved Sundays, they loved staying after church, grabbing lunch, and spending hours with the community. We decided to use that sentiment and brand SyroMalabar as “your home away from home” and started to ask ourselves what makes a great home? We believe a good home is represented in our values: to be authentic, strong community, growing together, and celebrating our unique value.
Brand & Design Identity
If we are to be home, what visually represents a home? We intentionally choose softer colors, a welcoming voice, and a relaxed and natural aesthetic.
Define Colors
To define our colors, we started with the interior of our parish. Our culture already has a defined color palette within its walls and we wanted to capitalize on this familiarity. By sticking to this standard, we solidified an established relationship by using a brand they are already familiar with. We also gave each color a personalized name and definition which you can see below.
Picture 1: pictures of the interior of our church, Picture 2: rounds of color picking and color-correcting, Picture 3 & 4: Our final palette
Final Brand Guide
Our team worked hard to bring the entire brand guide to life, I captured my favorite moments above, but you can view the rest of the guide here.
Personal Takeaways
Color Picking: I am not an expert at color picking, but it was my first time working with color and doing whatever I could to make sure the colors looked like our culture and tradition.
Building a Brand Personality: Combing through the interviews and working as a team to find a personality was the most exciting part of this experience. It was such a challenge to focus on what our personality could be based on the interview responses, but a good experience for our team.
Creating a Pipeline: This brand guide was suppose to serve as a why for design to last past my leadership. Our community has a habit of training the next person poorly and cycling leadership out so quickly. I was excited about the guide, but I was even more excited to see my design team use it and learn how to design for our church.