Dehonians – The Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Dehonians – The Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (also known as SCJs, the initials that stand for Sacerdotum Cordis Jesu, the congregation’s name in Latin) is a Roman Catholic religious congregation of priests and brothers founded in 1878 in Saint-Quentin by Léon Dehon.

During the work on organising their communication, Dehonians decided to develop a professional and uniform corporate identity for their congregation, and contacted Studio Otwarte for the brand work. “Corporate” is exactly the right word here, as Dehonians are a large congregation, actively engaged in international missionary work, with over 41 chapters around the world.

There were several versions of Congregation’s coat of arms used at the same time, some of them very interesting. What was missing, however, was a single official version based on historically correct symbols. In cooperation with a historian Fr. Józef Marecki, PhD and Centro Studi Dehoniani in Rome, we studied the history and genesis of this symbol very closely. We took our inspiration for the contemporary styling of the coat of arms from the stained glass in a religious house in Germany. Taking it as a basis and including necessary heraldic corrections, we created the final official version to be used commonly by the whole congregation, alongside their non-official but very popular symbol – the Dehonian Cross.

Branding work included complex key visual and graphic design of materials, for both official and daily communication, colour scheme, typography and layout constants based on the unified grid.

The project also featured the development of an extensive website, or rather two different web pages: for external and internal communication.The first one addressed to priests, brothers, the faithful and anyone interested in the life of the religious community, is an official unified medium of the congregation and provides a base for the development of websites dedicated to single provinces.The second one is a major forum for communication within the congregation, including various functions within different levels of access.

In both, official and promotional use, we decided to use Rubik (designed by Philipp Hubert and Sebastian Fischer) in view of its availability around the world and its multi-language extensions. The seriffed caps used for the stamp and the motto Adveniat regnum tuum (“May your kingdom come”) underneath the coat of arms is Mercury.

The project is currently waiting for acceptance from the Congregation. Read and see more on Studio Otwarte’s website.