After eight years as the Pray Catholic Novenas app, we are rebranding it to the Intercede app.
Eight years ago, my friend Chad and I wrote an app for praying novenas, intended as a practice project for me and a portfolio piece for him, since he was a contract programmer that did consulting.
We gave it a functional name and called it Pray: the Catholic Novena app, that later morphed slightly into Pray Catholic Novenas app for short.
While the app’s name was descriptive of what one did with the app–pray Catholic novenas–it lacked a distinctive and memorable brand name.
We are changing that.
In working with &OAK company to rebrand, we did an extensive deep-dive into what the app was about, what our values were, and what we wanted the user’s experience in the app to be.
Some of the themes that emerged were: authentically Catholic, traditional, faithful, yet modern and accessible.
Those themes are going to inform the style of the app, as you’ll see shortly in a sneak preview of conceptual images, but also we wanted to choose a great name for the app.
My technical partner Chad and I brainstormed lots of names, then we whittled them down to five, each with our favorite, and we sent out a survey to our audience.
What’s In a Name?
Here were the five names:
Venerate
Sanctify
Intercede
Beatify
Petition
We deliberately did NOT include the current app name, Pray, since we were set on choosing a new name.
My favorite name, which came in LAST place, was Beatify.
Beatify has a double meaning in Catholic circles: it means to make blessed or happy, and it also refers to the Beatification process of a faithful Catholic on their way to sainthood. When a person is beatified, they can now be called Blessed So-And-So and their prayers can be requested.
Great name. So deeply meaningful. Connected with our app since it involves asking saints to pray for us.
And it came in dead last.
So I had to eat crow and admit that most of our audience didn’t resonate with that name.
The runaway winner was the name Intercede.
I initially thought that Intercede was a bit too on-the-nose, kind of like Pray. Yes, it is very closely describing what goes on when using the app: you ask a saint to intercede for you in the novena, and you intercede for someone that you are praying the novena for.
But the name has grown on me, and we selected it as our app’s new name.
Look at Romans 8:26,27:
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
This is a direct Scriptural tie-in with the name Intercede, in this instance St. Paul is talking about how the Holy Spirit Himself intercedes for us even when we don’t know how to pray or what to ask for.
So Intercede is what we chose, and I like the name more and more as I think about how it applies.
We now have a name. That’s cool. But we wanted to bring in a completely new look-and-feel to the app, one that says authentically Catholic and that feels like a modern app yet also evokes the deep traditions of our Catholic Faith.
To that end, &OAK has been working with us for several months to develop colors, fonts, styles, and a tone that will capture these qualities.
This is still a work-in-progress, but I wanted to share several of the images and styles that we are iterating on.
Logos:
Launch Screen Ideas:
Main Novena Screen:
Tell us what you think.
Use the Send Feedback link in the Profile tab of the app when you tap the Gear settings icon in the upper right.
