SNAC Shop Logo

The latest design opportunity that I have had was to work on a few logos for our church. I hope that these logos will provide inspiration for you. I will also walk you through the steps I went through to create the logo. I will feature more of the logos that I created in the days to come. We'll start off with just one today.

The first logo is for an upcoming event, the SNAC Shop. SNAC stands for Sunday Night After Church. The SNAC Shop will provide coffee and snacks after the evening service in the fellowship hall to promote church fellowship and raise money for the youth group.

Here is the finished product:

To begin. I searched the internet for various church logos to get ideas. Unless you've got an amazingly creative mind, searching for inspiration is essential. I often get ideas from looking at other works and putting my own spin on it and rarely have epiphanies that come to me out of pure ingenuity.

I search places like CreationSwap, ShareFaith, and Graceway Media. You can check out my review of each of these sites in a post I made several months ago.

I found this logo on CreationSwap and it was the basis of my idea for the coffee icon.

The circle came based upon a series of info graphics I found on the web, and the rest of the "design" complimenting the circle was just from messing around to see what looked good with the same sort of a theme.

However, the most critical part of most design is the font selection. You can visit various sites like dafont.com, 1000fonts.com, or fontfreak.com to find some good fonts. This particular font was Neometric and was downloaded from DaFont. You can download it, if you like, by going here.

The coffee cup was created in Illustrator using various tools like the pen and pathfinder. I have created a step by step Illustrator tutorial for creating a basic graphic like this. It wasn't difficult, but you do have to know what tools to do in order to get the desired effect.

Some additional designs are shown below:

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The Amazing Race: Mildura

A few weeks ago, while I was in Australia, we hosted a church Amazing Race teen activity. It was a great blast and a lot of work. We had three video cameras present and we tried to get as much of the race on film as possible. The final product is featured below for your enjoyment. I have also supplied the rest of our meager "designs" for you to look at too.

This was the envelope design. We printed directly onto envelopes. It wasn't difficult to make. Just use all caps, a black or thick bold font and mess with the letter height percentages in any Adobe program.

These were our clues. We printed them in black and white for sake of saving money on color, but I designed them in color. It was pretty easy. Just a bunch of rounded-corner boxes and I used wingdings shaped like travel icons for top. We had detours as well, but you can get the just of the design from this.

Most of the rest of the activity was just planning and organizing. That's the only design aspect. But don't let it fool you. Writing all of those and having them printed, then sealing them in envelopes is a lot of work! I hope this will be an inspiration for you to do a similar activity at your church! It's great fun!

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Men's Conference Flyer

My activity here on the site has been low to nil recently, but in my day-to-day life I've been busier than ever working on two design items for Murray River Baptist Church as well as a host of other activities.

I'll talk about just one for today, and as I have time I'll talk about the other, which is a cool Teen Activity we are doing on Saturday.

The Men's Conference for Murray River Baptist Church this year is focused on a journey through the book of Proverbs. Pastor Steven Maldoff titled the conference "Wise Words from a Wise Guy." I needed to come up with a design that was both simple and clean as well as communicated that message of Wise Words.

Below is the design I came up with. I hope that it will be an inspiration to you, both to have a Men's Conference at your church as well as with the design for any of your materials.

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The Awe-Inspiring Design of the Creation Museum

My wife and I visited Answers in Genesis's Creation Museum today and we're going back tomorrow to finish up what we didn't get to today. I have only one reaction: Amazing. All of the exhibits are so finely crafted and the design work is phenomenal. As a matter of fact, I thought their design was so powerful, I wanted to share it with you, and give you some ideas for your church.

I show you this for one reason and one reason alone: It proves why you need media and design in your church.

Answers in Genesis could have sat us all down in a big lecture hall and spent an hour telling us why the Bible is true, and why we ought believe what we do. They could have stood there behind a lectern interesting the intelligent few, boring the impatient most, and even putting a few to sleep. Instead, they gave us the same message in an interesting and attractive, easy to read poster.

While you may not be able to design this sort of thing, you are perfectly capable of displaying such a poster on your church projector through Powerpoint which you purchased and plan to use in the next month (Right? You did do that correct? If not, read this). If I have to repeat myself, it will increase the attention of your congregation and increase their learning and memory retention. That alone should be enough for you start using it as soon as possible.

The photo below kind of destroys the cleverness of the design. It's a clean black wall (yes, wall) with bright orange text. The light and exposure time kind of counteracts the effect.

The following two pictures are great diagrams that would be perfect compliments for a series on Genesis 10-11. You could show something like this during the sermon itself. 

Here is an interesting idea for church website. This is a virtual tour for the upstairs level of their dino exhibit. It's for those who can't make the steps. The Creation Museum also has a virtual tour on their website. I'm not sure how you'd do it, but you could google it. Creating a virtual tour for your website would allow people to get to see your church before they come. It may be counter productive and time consuming to make for a church, but I thought it was cool.

This is the importance of an identity. It's a clean design that says, "This is who we are." From this, you understand the focus on believing, defending, and proclaiming Creation. It's powerful and effective. My church has something similar to this just inside our church. Our logo is large and displayed hanging off the wall like the picture below. It's a great way to emphasize our identity as Pine Forest Estates Baptist Church.

These are posters, but they are great inspiration ideas for brochures and handouts. There's a nice welcome from the president. How about a nice welcome from the Pastor? You could place that right in the door of your church if you went with a poster, or hand it out as a brochure for advertising. Put it in the newspapers, get it out there.

"What do people need?" They need answers! AiG answers the questions about Creation. Maybe your church wants to run an ad about Answers, but they're answering to life's big questions and the Bible has the answer and your church is sharing those answers every Sunday.

Take some of these ideas and use them in your church. I'm serious. Don't just look at this and go, "Oh that looks nice," or "I wish we did something like that." Take the idea and run with it. An idea without action stays an idea, but an idea plus action changes lives.

Did you find this inspirational and motivating? Share it on Facebook to get your pastor and friends fired up, too. Have any other insightful comments? Let me know about them using the box below.

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20 Great Church Powerpoint Slide Ideas

This week's set of Design Inspiration features none other than...Powerpoints! I've already mentioned it earlier this week: There are plenty of different ways to use Powerpoint in your church services. This post features a variety of those different options including some freebies for download and use in your church this Sunday. Update: Thanks to a reader, I was made aware of some really great resources available at West Coast Baptist College's website Ministry 127. Check it out for more great free slides.

This first one should look a little familiar if you saw my post yesterday afternoon. I'm not trying to be proud, but I am trying to advertise. I'll be putting out a lot of great free material for your use and I want you to know that it exists. Below is a collage of my first Powerpoint set. The set includes a Welcome, a sermon title and slide, announcements, events, trivia, and Scripture reading. Click on the image and you'll be directed to my Downloads page, from there choose either PSD or JPG download.

The next couple of images are from CreationSwap. Click on the image and you'll be directed to a page where you can download these free files.

Father's Day is coming up. Here's a great slide.

These next two can be included in your queue as just spiritual reminders to encourage your church folk. They also break up your announcements and give folks something to look at.

If you click on this link you'll be treated with the option of downloading over 10 different plain backgrounds like this for your use.

These four are more like optional announcement type slides that you could have playing.

I'm not sure where this one came from, but it looks like a good Twitter slide. You would just have to add your church name or address.

This next set is from Graceway Media and is only available if you purchase their membership. The pictures posted below are preview images available on their own website. They are for your inspiration only.

Here are some sermon titles and their corresponding open slides for your sermon points.

 

The following are some more of the random slides that might give you some ideas of what you can include in your Powerpoint slides.

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20 CD Label Designs

I had a really, really (and I mean REALLY) hard time finding good CD label designs. I would like to stick with a certain theme each week and deliver you with the total package on that theme. This week's Media Tip featured a portion on printing CD labels for your church. Well today's Design Inspiration post is about church or Christian CD labels.

I want you to do something. Yes, physically do something. If you have a CD from your church or another church lying around your house, go and get it. I mean it. Go and get it. ...I'm waiting for you to go get it. So hopefully you went and got it, or maybe you don't have one on hand. If you don't have one, go take a look the next time you are at church. Take at look at the design on your church CDs. Chances are they can be improved. Like, really improved. The problem is there aren't a lot of good examples of what your CDs should look like. For this reason I'm preparing a tutorial for creating clean CD label designs that will be featured tomorrow.

Here are 20 good (and I use that term loosely) CD designs to inspire that creative flare we all know you have.

These first couple are just random designs I found around the web in no particular order. Nothing is exceptionally WOW about these, but they are better than a lot of the boring generic stuff I found (Pictured right. Yuck!)

This next set is from CreationSwap. They cost money, about $7, to purchase the whole set. I believe it gives you the PSD and so you could purchase the design, change all the text, and then use it for your church if you wanted. The intention is to be for a one-time event, however, you could use it as your generic church CD if you so desired. You can find a few more designs here.

The best designs I found were on a new design blog I discovered called EntheosWeb. The designs they posted are pretty cool, but they too cost money if you desire to purchase them. Otherwise, just use them for inspiration in designing your own CD labels. Check out the full post here. There are several very clean designs here without any particular theme obvious. Some of them, though, are a little cluttered, but still very colorful and better than the ones above.

Do you feel inspired? Is your brain just welling with ideas after seeing these designs? Maybe you should go write it down. No, seriously, go write it down before you forget it. Then share your designs with your pastor. It's a way that you can help your church out and get involved in serving God.

Have any particular designs you want to see? Maybe posters? Maybe church bulletins? I'd like to hear about it. I want to focus our content to you, the reader, so that it benefits you the best. There are several ways you can do this. Leave a comment in the box below or click the link above called "Suggest a Topic."

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