Media Tip: Design Blogs

Tip of the Week #4

The best way to find freebies and cool ideas for your church is to read design blogs. You're taking the first step by reading this one right now! Since my blog is relatively new in it's conception, you probably got here from a link I posted on Facebook or through Blogger's most recently updated blog link. That being said, if you are new to design or working with your church's media there are plenty of good websites and blogs out there. It was because of these very blogs that I started mine in the first place. While these blogs may not be geared specifically toward helping church's or church media, they still have a lot of valuable services to provide.

My personal favorite is Blog.SpoonGraphics. It is very well designed, clean, and easy to use. The author, Chris Spooner (hence the name), offers great tutorials for those who have programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, as well as Freebies for everyone. Both of these can be valuable if you use them properly. Tutorials that you will find include backgrounds, textures, logos, cute vector creatures, and even a t-shirt design stencil. Freebies can include all of the same things, except they're free and already designed for you! This is one of the blogs that inspired me to start my own.

The next blog that I've found helpful is Media Ministry Blog (website no longer exists). This blog is great for churches. It also is clean and very well designed offering helpful insights toward church media. This, too, is a site that inspired my creation of Media Missions. However, I felt that Media Ministry Blog did not go far enough. The author posts about once every three months. When he does, the posts he makes are extremely helpful and very well thought out. It is my goal to take this approach toward assisting churches and make it more current, posting new design tips and ideas as often as I encounter them in ministry.

 

Additionally, I subscribe to PSD Tuts+. Every time a new tutorial is posted, I am informed through my email. If a tutorial is posted that I like or that I think I can use, I give it a try. The purpose of tutorials is not to show you how to reproduce something that someone else has created, or else they would just offer it as a Freebie. The purpose of tutorials is to teach you the basic principles that went into creating that graphic. Then you can use those principles to create your own graphics.

Since I mentioned subscribing, the next thing you need to do is subscribe to that blog. Do you like the blog? Subscribe to it. I subscribe to all three of the above blogs. Subscribing is giving your email to the blog's system so every time a post is made you are informed. If you are kind of hesitant about giving out your email: Don't worry! You will only receive an email when a new post is made. Feedburner, the program most blog subscriptions run from, even says something along these lines "New post, new email. No post, no email for you." Subscribing saves you time from checking the blog every day only to see no new post, at the same time it helps us just in case you forgot about us and we've made 10 new posts since you've checked us out last. To subscribe to this blog hover over the black boxes to the right of the screen and one of them says subscribe. Click it, and then enter your email. Hit enter, and it will prompt you to enter a randomized set of letters to prove you are a real person and that's it, it's that simple.

The web is filled with resources for the church media designer. But with so many websites, it's hard to keep track of all of them. When you find one you like, write it down, bookmark it, or subscribe to it and return to it often. The best websites will have the best material. Use the resources at your disposal and the do the best you can for God.

Posted in: Media Tips, Tutorials