If you work at a church and are responsible for designing graphics but aren’t a graphic designer, you’ve likely pulled your hair out a time or two. If you don’t have experience in graphic design, it can be hard to come up with fresh ideas that look the way you want them to.
But the secret is that you don’t have to have a graphic designer at your church to make eye-catching, creative, and informative graphics! We’ve outlined our favorite tips and resources so your church can stand out—without a graphic design degree!
What Are Church Graphics?
At their simplest, church graphics are images with text used to share information. This could include social media posts, sermon series graphics, worship presentation slides, physical posters, email headers, website banners, and more.
What Makes a Good Church Graphic?
Clarity
Above all else, it needs to be clear what exactly your church graphic is advertising or sharing. For example, if you’re making a sermon series graphic, you would likely want the title of the series to be the main focal point. Or, if you’re advertising an upcoming food drive, you want the words “Food Drive” to be the focus.
Simplicity
Along those same lines, keep your designs simple. You don’t need to include every piece of information—only the most important. A good rule of thumb is to succinctly address what, when, and where in your church graphic. For more information, you can forward them to a Facebook event, your website, or the person in charge of the event.
Readability
Lastly, church graphics need to be easy to read. Choose high-contrast colors and limit yourself to a few colors per graphic. Select fonts that are easy to read, and make sure they’re big enough for everyone to decipher.
How to Make Church Graphics without a Designer
Use Premade Templates
In a previous blog post, we shared a list of free graphic design software, one of which is Canva. Canva has thousands of templates for every type of graphic your church could need, making it a great resource for churches without a graphic designer on staff.
You have the freedom to change out colors, images, and fonts within each template, but don’t feel pressured to get creative if you like the template as is.
Be Consistent
It’s more than fine for graphics for different events to have a different look and feel to them—it helps differentiate events from each other! But there are a few ways you can help all your templated designs feel cohesive, even if they look nothing like each other.
First, you can limit yourself to a color palette. This can be a general guideline, such as no neon colors, or you could select 5 to 8 colors that your church has identified as its brand colors.
Second, you can include a small version of your church logo on each graphic. Especially for social media, this can help your graphics feel like they’re branded to your church.
Get Feedback
Many church graphic design problems could be solved by bringing in a few trusted opinions. If you have other staff members at your church, ask them for their feedback. Sometimes others will notice something you completely overlooked that will make for a better end graphic!
However, we’ve all been in situations where too much feedback is given and it unnecessarily complicates a process. To limit feedback overload, you can ask specific questions like “Is this font hard to read?” or “Does this yellow show up on your screen?”
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