Adorers of the Blood of Christ, U.S. Region

Website project

Website content strategy
Brand extension for web
Web design & development of two sites (public and internal)

About the organization

The Adorers of the Blood of Christ, United States Region are a community of sisters with a main office in St. Louis, Missouri. The broader ASC family includes their Catholic sisters as well as a variety of opportunities for lay men, women, and youth. The community has a number of ministries, resources, and justice initiatives, as well as a podcast.

Project to-do list

Overhaul their unorganized and confusing pair of websites into one cohesive, clear public site
Created a secured, members-only site for the congregation to share private information with sisters
Design a visual brand for the websites that the sisters and staff could feel proud of and represented by
Address some technical & security issues for a safe, up-to-date website
Ensure that the marketing staff will be able to update the site themselves and manage its content easily

The Adorers‘ previous branding had wine paired with some bright colors and plain grays.

Project milestone

Brand discovery

First, we asked the Adorers working group (including communications team and a member of leadership) to talk to us about their branding. Favorite parts? Least favorite parts? Strong feelings in any direction?

Their answers were illuminating! They didn’t want to make any changes to the logo itself, and they knew that the wine color of the logo was an anchor of their organization. But the other colors in their brand guidelines didn’t feel much like they fit, and weren’t being used much. The team worried that the colors together were loud and overwhelming, and even hard to look at. Additionally, the typefaces were pretty boring when applied to the web.

Starting from their existing use cases, we conducted a brand audit and gathered examples of the brand in use. We looked at a compilation of this audit together, talking about what worked and what didn’t.

Finally, the team was able to land on some goals for their branding on the site. They wanted to

avoid the digital/technical feeling of their previous brand usage
move toward something warmer and more personable
focus on more organic, natural colors and elements
ensure the site represented them as human, imperfect, relational and spiritual

Project milestone

Brand extension for web

Armed with their feedback & goals (and our knowledge of web needs), we got to work exploring color combinations that would work well with the wine color.

Soon we landed on a fresh, new, natural palette that added mints, greens, and rusts to the mix. Then, we expanded each hue to have lighter and darker versions of the color.

In particular, we expanded the hues out to include dark and light neutrals. We knew that having these tints and shades would come in useful in the website design process. Instead of relying on shades of gray, we could utilize subtle bits of color to delineate sections and highlight certain areas.

The typefaces included in the Adorers’ brand guidelines matched their logo’s fonts. These fonts worked alright in print, but didn’t work as well on websites. We went in search of more readable, web-appropriate typefaces. The new choices felt akin to the previous guidelines, but afforded us more possibilities in web design. They were more clear, more friendly, and more readable online.

A snapshot from our working document with color palette expansion work

Screenshots of the website for Adorers of the Blood of Christ, U.S. Region

Project milestone

Site design & development

Our comprehensive website project with the Adorers included lots of content strategy, site architecture, and user experience (UX) work. We collaborated with their marketing team to define the content needs of the site, and we educated them on how to get all of this great new information into their new WordPress website.

When we put the strategy together with the brand extension, we were able to apply the expanded color palette and new typefaces to our site design for the Adorers’ public and member sites. The end result is dynamic, friendly, and truly on-brand.

“Christina and Jess brought incredible skill, design aesthetic, organization, patience and good humor to our project. They were our perfect partner, guide, teacher and companion for building two web sites we are now so happy to share.”
Cheryl Wittenauer
Communications Director, Adorers of the Blood of Christ

“Blustery Day Design was a godsend. They were easy to work with, created a beautiful website, and helped us suss out all our content and strategy in a lasting way. Our new site is true to who we are and a beautiful representation of our organization.”
Molly McKinstry
Communications Associate, Adorers of the Blood of Christ