Diocese Design System

ConstraintConstraint

The coat of arms was the only asset I was given, and I didn't draw it. Typeface, palette, structure and layout were all mine to propose. Whatever I made had to be operated weekly, from a phone, by people who don't design.

DecisionsDecisions

I derived the ground from the only thing they owned. The mark is too detailed to sit small and too specific to redraw, so I used it at two scales instead: enlarged past the edge as a watermark, and tiled at low contrast as a pattern ground. Both read as texture before they read as heraldry, which is what lets a 19th-century shield sit under contemporary type without a fight.

I anchored the identity to one fixed element. The diocesan lockup sits in a dark rounded panel in the bottom-right corner of every piece, in every format and every colourway, with the category pill opposite it. The frame changes proportion, the colour changes with the liturgical season, the photograph comes and goes — the anchor does not move. That single constant is what makes ten different-looking pieces read as one institution.

I let the subhead enter the rag. A display headline never fills its rectangle. Instead of dropping the subhead to the next line, I set it into the space the display type leaves behind, aligned to cap height. The measure changes with every headline, so no two pieces have the same silhouette.

What I handed overWhat I handed over

The empty template, not the pieces. Two text fields and one image field. There are no design decisions left on the other side — a parish worker changes a line of copy and the composition changes with it, and it still looks like the diocese.

Both orientations, from the same parts. Feed and story are not two designs. They are the same anchor, the same rag rule and the same container in a different proportion.