Tsunami Logo Design

Riverview Baptist Church was located in Bixby, Oklahoma. The fellowship of the church prided itself on assisting members of the local community and conducting missions in a bid to improve as much of the community as possible, carried out from the same location for more than five decades.

In 2006, the church reached out to our team at Matcha Design to reinvent the identity branding of their Tsunami youth ministry. This ministry was attended only by high school seniors, therefore our creative team designed a logo that was both powerful and beautiful.

The dynamic movement and distressed energy represented the power of the potential energy possessed by the members of the ministry. The circular movement and splattered design add to the existing motion and energy expected from the Tsunami youth ministry.

The fellowship of Riverview Baptist Church rooted its beliefs deeply within the principles of discipleship. As disciples of the Lord, the members of the church centered their focus around how to spread their passion and message to as many people, in as many different ways, as possible. They organized a number of different faith-based ministries to hone in on various groups, such as ministries for children and teens of respective grades and age groups. Their motto Bible verse was John 7:38, which states, “Anyone who believes in me may come and drink! For the Scriptures declare, ‘Rivers of living water will flow from his heart.”

One of the ministries available at Riverview Baptist Church was Tsunami, a group open exclusively to high school seniors. This name was symbolic of how the members have been experiencing the storm of life, a storm which would continue to blow and rage around them at an increasing magnitude. The seniors wanted a logo design that would represent the faith and energy of the members of the ministry while also continuing with the ongoing theme of the church.

Our creative team understood the importance of a vibrant, colorful logo that maintained a consistent theme throughout the portfolio of designs. We wanted to play on the name, Tsunami, when constructing the basis for the logo to tie in the aquatic theme of Riverview Baptist Church.

The largest part of the logo design was the outline, a circle which we created to appear hand-painted on in a sloppy, messy way. We used dynamic and cyclonic brush strokes to establish the motion of the outline and utilize available white space. The top of the circle splayed out in an array of small splatters and dots that create movement and direction for the eye. The circle was colored a dark, vivid blue reminiscent of the water associated with large storms such as tsunamis. This imagery of water and coloration choice circled back to the central theme of the church logo to create unity.

Our team formatted the text of the logo, ‘Tsunami’ in a thin, serif font that starkly contrasted the looseness of the majority of the design. The strength of the font, paired with all capital letters, helped to represent the might and power of those within the Lord’s care, even when in the eye of the storm. We colored the letters in a bright, vibrant orange to create contrast and add energy and spirit to the logo. The text curved within the design, beginning at 10 o’clock and continuing around to almost 6 o’clock, further reinforcing the theme of movement and water within the logo.

The portion of the circle on the left side contained an image of a cross. We formatted the image to appear hand-painted in the same way as the outlining circle, with obvious pick-ups and light spots. The same blue color was used to avoid overwhelming the viewer with excessive color or contrast. The center of the cross contained an even smaller cross in the same vibrant orange as the text. This second cross is representative of how the Lord is always in the center, or at the heart, of any situation. When Christ is in the eye of the storm, one can find calm, peace, courage, and perseverance to continue on in your journey.