Intro To Graphic Design For Churches

Welcome to the wonderful world of graphics!

This course is your starting point for making great designs.

We’ll be covering how to design for online as well as print.

Here at New Creation Network we use the Adobe Creative Cloud. It’s a bunch of apps that allow us to create on purpose for a purpose which is ultimately building people .

The first course we’ll be covering is Photoshop.

Think of Photoshop as a “digital collage”. This application uses layers, masks, and effects to create design for a variety of applications.

Photoshop is great for online/social content as well as certain print applications. This application will help cover some basic terms:

Size

How big does our digital canvas need to be? That depends on your application. If you’re looking to design online you’ll be using pixels as your measurement. If you’re doing design for print you’ll be working with inches or centimeters.

Some sizes to be familiar with:

A “social square” is 1080x1080 pixels wide.
A typical youtube video will be 1920x1080 pixels wide
A regular piece of paper is 8.5x11in

Resolution

Now that we have our size let’s talk about another aspect of our image resolution . You might hear pixel density, or pixels per inch, but it’s all the same thing. Pixels are tiny, tiny, dots that make up an image. The more pixels you have in your image the clearer it will be and the easier it will be to scale.

Photoshop’s default is set to 72 which is fine for online content, but more often than not you’ll want your design to look great across multiple forms of media.

“It looked fine on my computer screen, but when I print it out it’s blurry! Help!”. We’ve heard that many times. You need to remake your project with more pixels per inch. Your file size will be bigger, but it will look clear.

Color

What’s your favorite color? Is the dress blue or gold? When we talk about setting up your project we’re really referring to the color space. There are two colorspaces we’ll focus on:

RGB & CMYK

RGB stands for red, green, and blue. If you're making a design for online or social media you will use this color space.

CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (“K” is black just roll with it). Anything you do for print will be CMYK.

“But what if I make my graphic in RGB for social purposes, but later decide I want to print it?”

Your graphic will still print, and truthfully, you might not even notice the difference… HOWEVER: when it comes to critical color you will want to be aware of this.

“Bit depth” refers to how wide your colorspace is. For all intensive purposes you can leave this set to the default.

With that we can create our first project! We hope you learned something! Go through this article as many times as necessary as you begin to familiarize yourself with these terms. We can’t wait to see your first design!

How The Church Can Use Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) Effectively

Everyone Gets Mail

The United State Postal Service makes Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) available to anyone who will go through the process to get their message heard. While the process can be kinda of extensive, it also can be a very effective tool for churches trying to get the word out.

How Can The Church Use EDDM?
Imagine it like "postal evangelism". Chances are there are people in your city who could drive to your church or event in minutes, and yet have never heard of the great things you are doing. What if someone opened their mail and saw a mailer from you that says, "We are praying for you, right down the street." How much would that change things every-time they pass your church?

So, how does EDDM work practically for churches?

Decide Your Message

Create A Mailer

Select A Route

Decide Your Message
Saying the right thing in the right way is important when communicating. You want to ensure people know you're genuine, that you really care, and that you have something to offer them that's worth their time. Topics like love, encouragement, information or invitations are great places to start when deciding what's going to go to people's inbox.

Create A Mailer

The EDDM process has specific sizes that must be followed to make it onto a carrier route. This makes things very simple for churches, because you can create a template you like and run the same campaign multiple times with ease. If you're proficient in graphic design (or have an awesome team who is), just download these templates and let them loose. Bright colors and big fonts are great places to start when creating your mailer. If you don't have access to those tools, no worries. Sign up for a free account in our print editor, and you can modify some of the templates we've already created to be custom to your liking. It's too easy NOT to do!

Select Your Route
Carrier routes typically are included by neighborhoods. With our online tool, you can see a carrier route near your facility and select how large you want the radius to be. The larger the radius, the more it costs to purchase that list. Recently, we had a project where the EDDM list contained over 2,000 addresses and the total was less than $50.00!! Can you imagine getting your message in front of that many eyeballs? Where every carrier route is different and pricing changes can flex up and down, in general it's a great way to get your message out.

New Creation Network believes in the power of mail and we've made it as easy as possible for you to interact with the services that business are using every single day. If you have any more questions or want to get started, please give us a call. We are happy to help you with every step of the process.

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Intro To Graphic Design For Churches