New Beginnings (Part 1)

Change is always challenging. Maybe that’s due to the fear of the unknown. Or, it could be that we are not ready to venture out of our comfort zones.

The Hamblin Trust is going through a change right now and it’s both exciting and scary for all involved. The Hamblin Centre will be entrusted to very capable new hands, and The Hamblin Vision will take up the mantle of the Trust re-focusing on the three foundations of Henry Thomas Hamblin’s teachings: Practical Spirituality, the Power of Thought and Meditation.

Caroline and I are so happy to be managing the new direction of The Hamblin Vision (THV), and have been working diligently behind the scenes and in concert with Lisa and Sharon to ensure a smooth transition as the Centre branches off.

Part of the new beginnings for THV was rebranding, and the first step in that process was building a new website. Initially, the thinking was to update the Centre’s website. Caroline was in discussion with our website developer Marcus James, who had always generously offered his time and expertise for free, but we both felt that if we are truly rebranding, then we need to start from scratch, which would be a huge job and more than our developer had time to take on. So, with Caroline’s blessing, I took on the challenge.

My approach to most things is to take a few steps forward and hope that the path will become clear along the way. First, we needed to think about a new logo and banner. I took inspiration from the Hamblin Vision membership magazine for the first design which yielded the colour gold that permeates the new website, but not the final logo design.

Then I started with finding a template that Caroline and I both liked. Now the path was clearer and I kept moving forward. There was a bit of a learning curve because I had never used our website program before, and I didn’t find it very intuitive. Once I understood its workings a bit better, a colour palette started to evolve: gold, cream, light & dark brown.

After several hours of designing, I just wasn’t happy with the recycled image from the Hamblin Vision membership magazine. Again, it felt like we needed a fresh start, so I scoured the internet for a royalty-free image that resonated. Not a small task.

Then my eyes, and spirit, landed on a sunburst image. I loved how it seemed to be in motion and radiating light. I also knew that the Trustees wanted the new logo to represent Hamblin’s Teachings and finding the light within. And its golden colour supported the direction in which we were already headed with the design. Once I added this new image into the design, along with the  ‘square’ element in metallic gold, and the wording that we wanted in a rich, dark brown tone that really seemed to pop against the golden sun rays of the image, I was off.

It took me about 30 hours to get the foundation of the new website finished. Then Caroline and I had the task of moving content from the old site into the new design, as well as creating new content. And, there was all the technical elements as well: sorting a new domain name, making sure our emails were properly connected to the new domain, and making sure the website could receive payments. If I had hair, a great deal of it would have been pulled out by this point.

But we got there. Caroline and I had a design that we were now ready to share with the trustees. To be continued…