Ecclé
Overview.
Co-founded by Dr. Uday Balasundaram, Ecclé exists to help churches and artists unlock their creative potential through thoughtful training, mentoring, and relational connectivity. What began as Marion Design Co’s support for a single event quickly grew into a deep partnership rooted in shared values and a commitment to bringing innovative, culturally grounded ideas to life. Through collaborative content development, design thinking workshop, and a multi-phase brand identity project, Marion Design Co helped shape Ecclé’s visual and conceptual foundations, ensuring the organization’s mission was expressed with beauty, depth, and global awareness.
Background.
Uday Balasundaram is the Director of Learning Innovation Strategies at Indiana Wesleyan University and faculty member at Wesleyan Seminary. Before Ecclé was officially established, Uday was already convening thinkers, artists, and ministry leaders across continents.
He led wide-reaching conversations on how faith and the arts can meaningfully respond to global challenges. His initiative, the Unmute Retreat, sought to unmute voices that are often overlooked and to model a more relational, dialogical approach to creativity and theology.
Marion Design Co’s first engagement was supporting the Unmute Retreat with audience research, a 20-minute keynote development, Q&A structure, and design thinking session facilitation. This work not only provided clarity and direction for the event but also served as a testing ground for the deeper creative collaboration to come. The trust formed through this process positioned Marion Design Co to design the full brand identity for Ecclé.
Objectives.
Ecclé is a non-profit envisioned as a global estuary of ideas, people, and practices. The brand identity needed to accomplish several goals:
TRANSLATE
Process.
Marion Design Co approached Ecclé with a design thinking process centered on listening, research, and shared imagination. The collaboration began with deep ethnographic inquiry: studying estuary systems, exploring anthropological insights, and researching artistic traditions across African and Asian diasporas. This helped set aside default Western design structures and opened up a wider palette of visual possibilities.
The ideation stage brought these findings into creative form. Marion Design Co assembled extensive moodboards, collected references from global art histories, and sketched early concepts exploring movement, water, landforms, and organic structure. Typography exploration was equally rigorous, searching for something both rooted in tradition and alive with contemporary expression.
This work led to a distinctive logo mark shaped by estuary waterways. Its organic form reveals a subtle, negative-space “e,” referencing both Ecclé’s name and the visual lineage of illuminated manuscripts in church history. The serif letterforms, based on Elena Genova’s Roca typeface and customized into a multilingual family, embody philosophical depth and gentle fluidity. Imperfect and organic details evoke humanity and ancient wisdom, echoing Ecclé’s desire to nurture creativity through relationships rather than transactions.
In addition to the logo, Marion Design Co created three separate patterns that represent the zones of estuaries from fresh water, to brackish, to salt water. The Weeds pattern (fluvial zone) represents training that happens in the weeds or shallows. The Plus Sign/Fish pattern (mixing zone) represents the connection that can occur by mixing diverse people and ideas. The Waves pattern (marine zone) represents mentoring and navigating deeper waters. These three patterns provide the opportunity for each service-line of Ecclé to own separate design artifacts, lending further clarity to what makes each service unique.
The primary color palette used Seagrass green, representing lush meadows and seaweed to evoke feelings of depth and restoration. Salt off-white represents oyster shells and sea foam to evoke feelings of expansiveness and aliveness. The secondary color palette is made up of warm, vibrant, and nature-based colors that work together in combination to create a naturalistic feeling of creativity, growth, and richness.
Throughout the process, Marion Design Co maintained close communication with Uday and his team, refining concepts, validating cultural references, and ensuring authenticity in every decision. The relational trust built from the Unmute Retreat continued to shape a collaborative, responsive, and joyful creation process.
Results.
The resulting Ecclé brand identity is a cohesive and expressive system that captures the organization’s heart: a place where creativity, theology, and global community meet. It provides Ecclé with a professional and culturally sensitive visual voice that stands apart in the non-profit space.
Translate Ecclé’s values into a visual language that reflects relational ministry, artistic courage, and global diversity.
DIVERSIFY
Move away from Western-centric design traditions, embracing visual systems rooted in non-eurocentric cultural histories.
EXPRESS
Express the metaphor of estuaries (the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems) as a model for creative meeting places where people mix, learn, and grow.
EQUIP
Equip Ecclé with a flexible, professional identity system capable of scaling across digital platforms, printed materials, merchandise, and future educational resources.
RELATIONSHIP
Ensure that every design choice flowed from dialogue with the client. This would honor Uday’s global perspective, the organization’s theological commitments, and the stories of the communities Ecclé seeks to serve.
IDENTITY
Ultimately, the goal was not only to create a beautiful brand, but to craft a visual identity that invites people into a deeper way of moving from isolation toward connection, co-creation, and flourishing.
More than a logo, the system delivers a full set of tools that can scale into websites, digital content, print materials, and merchandise. This visual identity communicates both ancient gravitas and contemporary relevance, giving Ecclé the aesthetic grounding it needs to grow its network, attract partners, and support artists and churches in search of creative wholeness.
The work itself is a reflection of the richness of the client–designer relationship: one built on mutual trust, shared mission, and a commitment to designing with and for communities. Through research-driven creativity and collaborative visioning, Marion Design Co helped bring Ecclé to life as an estuary of ideas, a place where diversity becomes strength, creativity becomes healing, and art becomes a pathway for collective flourishing.
