A New Look for PewPlan — and a Few Things That Now Work Better

PewPlan looks a little different today.

The icon, the colour palette, and a few details inside the app have been updated. None of it changes how PewPlan works — but it changes how it feels, and we think that matters for something your congregation looks at every Sabbath morning.

Here's what's new.

The new icon

The previous icon was a blue gradient with a sparkle. It was fine. It didn't mean anything in particular.

The new one does.

Four pew benches, narrowing toward the front of the nave. The second bench is lit gold — the current item in a running service. That's the whole idea behind PewPlan: everyone — your team building the programme, your congregation following along — knows where the service is right now.

It's a small thing. But when you open PewPlan on Sabbath morning, you'll see a symbol that actually reflects what the app is for.

Deep ink and gold

The previous blue gradient used for buttons and highlights has been replaced with a deeper, quieter palette — a dark navy gradient that feels less like a tech product and more like something that belongs in a church context.

Gold is now the colour of active — the selected programme type, the active tab, the current filter. Just like the lit bench in the icon, gold marks where you are and what's chosen. It's a small visual vocabulary, but once you notice it, it's consistent everywhere.

The base blues are still there for text and links. The change is in the emphasis — what's primary, what's selected, what's live.

Images in sub-items now show properly

If you've been attaching posters and images to Announcements blocks, you may have noticed that on a wide screen, images would sometimes stretch to fill the full width of the card — distorting a portrait-format poster into an awkward letterbox, or turning a landscape photo into a banner.

Images now display as tiles. The full image is always visible, always at its correct proportions. A portrait announcement poster sits at its natural shape within a neutral frame. A landscape photo fills the card width cleanly.

Tapping or clicking the image still opens a full-screen preview. Nothing about how you attach or manage images has changed — only how they look in the editor and on the shared programme.

A small note on performance

Alongside the visual update, we've also shipped a set of under-the-hood improvements:

• Faster sharing. Share links now use short-window edge caching, so when a hundred congregation members open the same link at once, the server isn't hit a hundred times per five seconds. Updates still reach viewers within seconds — the underlying mechanism is just more efficient.
• Safer saves. The app now handles concurrent edits more carefully. If two editors save the same programme at the same moment, their changes are merged rather than one overwriting the other.
• Safer media. A bug where deleting an image from one programme could remove it from other programmes that used the same file has been fixed. Images shared across multiple services are now always preserved.

None of these should be noticeable when things are going right. They matter when things go wrong — which is exactly when you don't want to be debugging your service programme.

Still the same PewPlan

The workflow is unchanged. Your existing programmes, your team's access, your congregation's share links — all exactly as they were.

The new icon will appear on home screens and browser tabs once the update has rolled out. If you've added PewPlan to your phone's home screen, you may want to remove and re-add it to pick up the new icon.

As always, free to get started, and free to stay. Sign in and have a look →