LI-EL Advent Box Design.
Overview.
In April 2022, Marion Design Co. embarked on a project to help bring to life Kalina Carlson’s vision of an advent box oriented toward teenagers who are processing grief during the Christmas season. Building off of Carlson’s ideas, we created a name and brand identity for the project.
Background.
Kalina Carlson is the associate pastor of Three Rivers Wesleyan Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She came up with the idea for a grief-oriented advent box after reflecting on her own experience of losing her mother and then fielding good-intentioned attempts by friends to speak to her grief.
The advent box is meant to serve as a refuge for teenagers experiencing grief during the holiday season — a place where they can process difficult emotions without having to force a smile or summon up false “Christmas cheer.” The purpose of the advent box is also to give those grieving a way to participate in the Christmas season on their own terms, drawing closer to God while remembering their late parent or loved one.
Objectives.
maturity
With teenagers as the advent box’s main audience, the brand needed to feel mature and luxurious, not childish or cheap.
empathy
Echoing Kalina Carlson’s own experience with grief, the project had to empathize with the audience’s potentially nonlinear mourning process.
COnnection
The advent box needed to not only connect with teenagers processing grief, but also to help them move toward deeper connection with God and others.
Process.
Once we understood the vision Kalina Carlson had for the project, our design process was divided into two parts. During the first phase, our team created graphic layouts for Carlson’s five advent devotionals, which follow the church’s traditional advent calendar — with weekly devotionals focused on hope, love, peace, and joy leading up to the final devotional intended for Christmas day.
During the second phase of the project, we concentrated on researching and crafting a new name for the brand, designing a logo, and creating designs for the physical box and the custom artifacts inside it. We thought carefully during this stage about the user experience. How would the audience receive the brand’s name and visual identity? How would the design of the advent box influence the recipient’s month-long experience? We wanted to ensure that the final product would live up to Kalina Carlson’s vision, giving those in mourning valuable tools to make space for their grief during the holiday season.
After deciding on a name for the brand, we went through the steps of brainstorming, sketching, creating graphic elements, and narrowing our concepts to three versions of the new logo. We met with the client to decide on and refine the final logo, and then implemented the chosen design throughout the advent box’s materials.
Results.
The final product invites the recipient into an interactive experience, with devotionals and hands-on activities for each week of Advent. Each devotional includes a brief reflection and journal prompt, with two versions available depending on whether the recipient is mourning a parent or a loved one more generally. Our team chose to complement each devotional with visuals that highlight the idea of absence, while employing a gold-infused color scheme reminiscent of luxury.
The chosen brand name, LI•EL, brings together two images to create a deeper meaning. The first syllable, “li,” stands for the lilies which are said to have grown from the tears Mary shed at the foot of Jesus’ cross. The second part, “el,” stands for the phrase “the elephant in the room” — an empathetic reminder of grief’s heavy and ongoing presence. The dot between the two syllables represents absence, while the walls formed by the two letter L’s create a space where the audience can place their grief and perhaps watch it take seed like Mary’s grief for her son.
The logo incorporates the LI•EL name along with a hand-drawn line element and an icon which can either be interpreted as a lily or as two elephants standing back to back. The line element’s spiral mirrors the twisting and often nonlinear process of grief. Finally, the logo’s typography and design reflect a sense of maturity and contemplation. After finalizing the icon, logo, and wordmark for LI•EL, our team also created a logo for the advent box’s sub-brand.
LI•EL advent boxes are now available for purchase online. The design process for this project encouraged our team to emphasize empathy as a key part of design, always keeping in mind the audience’s needs and experience.