Interview with a church-sign designer

Today I called All Nations Church in Clapham to talk with them about their great church advertisement signs. After speaking with the very nice and ploite secretary Lydia, she let me know that it was in fact the pastor and founder of the Church Leslie who had started the sign tradition about 20 years ago, and was stil the mastermind and designer behind them.

She gave me his home number and I gave him a call. He was a very nice, older man who semed like a very social inteligent and polite. He knew how to express himself in a clever and smart way to say it like that.

This is what I got out of the conversation (taken from email I sent the pastor after our phone conversation):

- Main goal with the signs is to catch the eye of people passing the church- you've got one second to get attention, so its important to make the most out of it.
You aim to provoke people, no matter what if people reacts to the signs positive or negative- as the signs either way has made people think and reflect over what the signs are communicating.
You are the designer and concept maker of the designs, and have been doing this for the past 20 years.

The signs consists of yellow squares that stands outside the church towards the highway permanently, and you change the text on them every two months or so. The letters are vinyl letters. You make the decisions when it comes to the text hierarchy, and the usage of colors and words that might stand out visually. Then you go to your printer to get consultation, and they help you scale and make the final decisions so that they fit your format as good as possible.

What you do is to come up with the quotes, witch you try to make contemporary and often humoristic to not scare people away, as your impression is that many people are afraid of religion. You can understand why people think like that, and you, and you're church community don't look at All Nations church as "religious", but as a forum and place to be in touch with God, and you look at God as a friend.
You normally come up with the text yourself, but in a couple of occasions you have used quotes from the bible as well. In terms of inspiration you have not been looking at other churches and their approach, but you are aware that there are other church communities that has a similar kind of approach.

You have had a lot of feedback on your signs, mostly positive and some few negative ones from people that don't believe in God and that gets negatively provoked. When you get new mwmbers in the church, many of them say that it was the signs that made them join, often because they felt they described the church as a welcoming and friendly environment.


After we talked I sent him these aditional questions:

1: Have you got some examples of other quotes you have used?
2: Have you got any pictures available from your earlier slogans?
3: Have you got any ideas for future signs?


Signs from All Nations Church: