Everyone is always looking for amazing custom church graphics to use. Whether it be for their Sunday morning on-screen presentations or in their online content.
In this article, I am going to provide you a few amazing resources that will help you with your graphics design and how you deliver your content to the web.
How many times have you been searching on the web or stumbled across an amazing looking image on Facebook, Instagram or other media outlets and thought to yourself “man, I wish I could create graphics like that to use for our church?”
Well, there is some great news. There are a few places that I am going to provide you links to that will help you create those stunning graphics to use both in your morning slide presentations, social networking posts and other places to use extreme imagery that has a lasting impact.
Getting started in creating amazing custom church graphics actually may be easier than you think. Even if you are by no means a graphic designer, I am going to present a couple of places for you to check out that will deliver the tools you need to help you get started.
What’s even better, is that there is no need to invest any money, unless you just decide you need more power from the programs that I am going to provide you links to.
By far one of the most amazing places that I rely upon to create our morning graphics for our “Upcoming Events” at Crow Mountain Baptist Church is Adobe Spark.
If you are looking to create some highly engaging graphics to utilize in your visual displays on Sunday mornings, Adobe Spark is by far my personal turn-to choice in creating eye candy for our morning worship services. There are other services out there as well, such as Canva. However, if you are looking for the best available royalty-free images to help you achieve your look, Adobe is the ultimate path to turn to.
Now when you begin creating your visuals, the one thing you will need to keep in mind is exactly where will you be using the images. So let’s say that you are going to use them during your Sunday morning worship service, most churches today are relying upon visual display software to present their visuals.
Our church happens to utilize Proclaim, which I feel has to be the best software platform for delivering everything from pre-service announcements, the actual worship service material, as well as providing tools that tie directly into it such as Logo’s Bible software that your pastor can use and have it synced into it.
Every place that you choose to share your images has specific dimensions in regards to the size of the image itself.
That being said, let’s say for our particular needs, when I am creating a graphic to use in any aspect within proclaim, I need to ensure that the image is 1024 x 768 px. Every software program may have its own specific set of parameters that are required and also based on the aspect ratio of the screen or monitor that it is being viewed upon.
If you will be using the image say for a post on Facebook, then you will need to specify the correct size to use on their platform. Sames goes for the rest of the social networking sites as well. Here is a link to the most commonly used sizes on Facebook and Others so you have a reference sheet to go from. I encourage you to bookmark that site and keep it handy.
Behind every amazing image, you see across the web has a thought behind it or it was designed to provoke you to think. That’s how marketing truly gained a foothold into our lives. We see images everywhere we go. It causes our minds to drift off into faraway places or draw us into deeper levels of thinking. Think of an image as a building block of sorts to help captivate your intended audience.
It doesn’t do you any good to develop an image to use that shows apple pie if your intended thought was for an upcoming Easter celebration. Does that make sense?
An image should be a visual representation of what it is you are trying to communicate, or at least as close as you can to help drive the thinking process to engage based upon the imagery.
What’s the one thing that nearly each of us has immediate access too? Have you figured it out yet? It’s our cell phones.
With the cameras on many popular cell phones, such as Samsung and iPhones, capturing the perfect image is probably tucked into your pocket or in a holder that is attached to your hip.
Gone are the days of needing to invest in a high-dollar DSLR camera and assorted lenses.
Here is an amazing photo that I captured with my Samsung Note 10 Plus. As you can see by the image the colors are very vivid and draw you into the scenery almost.
Now let’s talk about another issue that is very important when dealing with custom church graphics, and that is image compression and optimization.
The above image’s original size is 2048 x 1536 px and 836kb in size. If I was to take that original image and upload it to any online platform it would take forever to load, particularly on mobile devices that were trying to look at it.
However, I am using a Mac and rely upon my special image optimization tool, which is called “ImageOptim,” which you can download for free on a Mac.
By resizing the image itself and running it through my plugin on my desktop, I was able to reduce the total file size to 224kb, which is a huge reduction for the file size, thus allowing it to load quicker if used on the web.
The same principals apply if you are using any type of visual presentation software to display your church graphics from. The smaller the file size the quick it will load in the application as well, thus allowing the machine that is serving it up to run smoother and more effectively for you.
Just in the event if you don’t consider yourself the “Photo Magician,” if you will, there are still places to obtain amazing images that you can use freely both on your websites and other online locations without having to worry about any copyright infringement related issues.
I highly encourage you to check out UnSplash or Pexels to see their entire line of images. All you have to do is search based upon what you’re looking for and select the image that is closes related to the point you are trying to communicate.
For those of you who rely upon the power of WordPress to deliver your church’s online content, I definitely encourage the use of UnSplash, as they have an amazing plugin to use on your website that allows you to search for the image directly from within it, download it, then use it either on a page or a post that you are creating. You can learn more about the plugin here. The best part is that the plugin and the images are FREE.
Sometimes you just need a little inspiration along the way to help you begin to develop amazing custom church graphics. Don’t worry, I have you covered.
Check out these images here for a little added inspiration to help you begin to think visually.
Creating an amazing image or graphic for either your morning worship service or even a sermon series requires a little thinking sometimes.
Furthermore, the one thing to keep in mind is “What message are you trying to communicate?”
Remember the images that you see frequently across the web and those that cause you to actually click on them? You’re trying to achieve exactly the same thing.
You bet I can. Having been working with online presentations, web development, graphics, and other related items for hundreds of churches across America, I can certainly assist you in getting a better understanding of how to create the exact type of images you are looking for.
It’s pretty simple, just leave me a comment below and I will be glad to schedule an appointment with you during the week anytime before noon, or we can meet for coffee on Saturday at either the Waffle House of Starbucks to help you get started. Just remember, bring or have your laptop available with an Internet connection available.
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