St. Luke’s Website:
A Champion of Inclusion and Belonging
St. Luke’s United Methodist Church is an open, affirming, inclusive church with a firm commitment to justice and antiracism in Indianapolis, IN. The team at St. Luke’s wanted a new digital presence that clearly expressed their values and included more robust features for engaging with users and sharing a wide variety of content.
Finding a Way to
Show and Tell
Conflict within the church’s larger denomination and modern manifestations of racism crystalized St. Luke’s focus on supporting the LGBTQ+ community and Black Americans. Leaders wanted their website to clearly convey the church’s values and use it as a tool to share educational content targeted toward Millennial parents. While the church had already started articulating its mission through a few marketing campaigns, the website presented an opportunity for St. Luke’s to show and tell its audiences through its own key assets. I made updates to St. Luke’s overall brand identity, using the website as a starting point.
Design Process
My work with St. Luke’s included the development of brand traits that guided the direction for the new brand identity and the website design. I used new typography, a brighter color palette, and a more editorial approach to photography to update the church’s visual tone. During the website design process, we focused on creating user flows for guests and created UI focused especially on the curating weekly sermon content and related media. I wrote brand guidelines to document the changes to St. Luke’s brand identity and demonstrate how these changes could be implemented across a wider range of applications in its expanding media landscape.
Project Impact
St. Luke’s new website enabled the church to communicate with greater clarity and support its audiences online through more focused channels of engagement. These changes in turn supported the church’s addition of a new campus and the distinct needs of its congregation. Although this work with St. Luke’s followed an atypical evolution, we helped the church make significant progress in visually articulating its values and maturing its digital communications. This project helped me refine my ability to articulate the value of visual communication to stakeholders and create opportunities to use design to promote long-term change within an organization.