Church Graphic Design Kit - Graphic Design for Non-Designers

1. Class Trailer - Church Graphic Design Kit - Graphic Design for Non-Designers : Design can be expensive, but it doesn't have to be. Over the last six years, I have worked with countless churches to produce a wide variety of design and video content. I wanted to take everything that I've learned in teaching church staff that you don't need a large budget to market for your church. In fact, you can do most of it for free. You just need to know how this is not a class for professional graphic designers. This is a class for the average church staff member who wants to see their church armed with a design material that they know they need. In this class, I'm going to break down 11 unique design showing you how to create and edit them using 100% free programs such as Canva, Unsplash and coolers. In addition, that you'll also receive my project files to use as a template for your own church. So by the end of the class, you will walk away with the knowledge of how to make these projects and the template to make them faster. Design can be expensive, but it doesn't have to be. So let's get started. 2. Lesson 1 - Introduction to Church Design: Churches all over are doing their best to reach people in this modern world. Churches have live streams, social media content. They hire outside contractors to produce super high-end content for their media streams. And in this world we live in, sometimes your first impression is your only chance to get someone into your church. But not every church has the resources to produce high-quality content on social media in print or even in your services. That's where this class comes in. In this class, I'm going to go through the fundamentals of how design can be used in your church. And at the end of every lesson, you will walk away with a design that you can use in your church immediately. And the best part about this class is that we are going to be using 100% free programs for all of our designs. Even though design can be expensive, it doesn't mean that we can't make high-quality projects on a budget. And with this class, you've gained access to the template of every single product that I'm going to cover in this class. So even if you aren't interested in sitting through all the lessons, you'll have access to the templates to quickly and easily create these designs for your church in Canva. 3. Lesson 2 - Building and Using Your Brand: Branding is the cornerstone of any organization. And most of the time when people hear the word branding, they think about a logo. But we're more interested in touchpoints. Are touchpoints are, touchpoints are any interaction than individual has with your organization. That can mean a time they visited your website. It can mean reading a pamphlet. It can mean visiting a service live anytime than individual interacts with your organization, they are interacting with a touchpoint. A strong brand will have touch points that relate to the core of your brand. This means having color palette, means using similar imagery, means using your logo across all of the different assets that you're designing. If you don't have a color palette or a logo for your church, don't worry, we will be replacing a logo with simple typography. And if you don't have a color palette, we're going to be designing one right now. The first thing you're gonna do is go to coolers.co. The link is in the notes of the class, or you can go to C-O-L-O-R dot c 0. Once you're on this website, the first thing you have to do is sign up for an account. We're going to use this account to save all of our pallets into one place. Once you've made your account, you're all signed up. You're going to click on the Explore tab. When you get to this Explore tab, you'll see hundreds of different palettes, all completely free and available for your disposal. Normally, color palettes are designed by a professional graphic designer when branding and organization. But because we're trying to do this in a way that is budget friendly and also high-quality and quick. Using this Explore tab to find professionally made color palettes is an easy way to find that one that can work for your church. When you find a palette that you like, click on the three dots on the bottom right hand of the palette and click Save palette. From there, you can name it and save it. If you already have a palette for your church, what we're gonna do is inputted into coolers. We can do that by going to the generate tab. Once you're there, you can input the hex codes of your palate into the generator and click Save. This will allow us to access our palate the same way that we would if we were getting it from the Explorer tab. Now to find our palette, you're going to click on the top right-hand corner towards your name, and click on your name. There, you can find all the different palettes that you've saved over time. Here are two different palettes that I worked on for full gospel church. And this is the one that I'm gonna be using to design all of our assets today. To be able to use your colors quickly. A feature of coolers that I love to use is that you can click on these colors and it will copy the hex code. A hex code is essentially a shortcut that allows us to quickly access specific colors. When we're designing different touch points, we can copy and paste these to get the exact color that we want on all of our designs. Now that we have our color palette, Let's learn a little bit about the program we're going to be using to design all of our touchpoints. 4. Lesson 3 - Introduction to Canva / Service Invite #1: The website we're gonna be using to design all of our touch points is a website called canva.com. You can get to the URL from the notes of the class or go to canva.com to get to the website. This is a website use by plenty of professional graphic designers. It has hundreds of templates and icons and different resources. For the sake of simplicity, I'm gonna be walking you through some of the most important parts of this website. Once you've signed up and made an account, you're going to find yourself on the home screen of Canva. The first thing we're gonna do is create a design. On the top right-hand corner, click on the creative design button and click on one of the top suggested dimensions. For me, it's social media. For you. It might be something else. It's okay. We're just gonna go through how this works. The three main things that you'll see when you're on this page are gonna be our sidebar, our canvas, and our top navigation. Right now we've selected templates, which allows us to see hundreds of different templates that Canva has available 100% for free. If you click on one of these templates, it will completely popularly your canvas ready to go and you can change this information to be whatever you want. But let's say that we want to try a different template and see what else we can do. Let's scroll through and click on a template. I'm going to click on this travel social graphic, get lost in Stockholm. When we click it, it automatically populates our canvas with a brand new template. And the best part is that all of this information is completely editable. So instead of saying get lost in Stockholm, let's say visit us this Sunday. And I'm gonna make this text equal onto different lines. And we'll say here, Sunday, May 3rd. And down here we'll say the name of our church. For the sake of this, I'm gonna be using full gospel church, Livingston, New Jersey. Now, let's see what else we can change in this template. If you double-click your main text and highlight the whole thing, you can go to the top-left and C. These are your font settings. If you click this, you'll be able to see hundreds of different fonts available through Canva. And if you click one, it'll automatically change the font on your image. If that doesn't look right, you can change the font size, let's say 88. Now the, now the image looks perfect. If we want to change something else, maybe the image and say, well, that's not really a picture of our church. We can go to the upload section where you can upload images or videos straight onto Canva, like clicking on this button and uploading your files or just dragging them straight into the upload section. I've already uploaded an image right here. So I'm going to take that, I'm going to drag it on. And just like that, this picture of Stockholm is now a picture of our church. If you double-click that, you'll be able to change the positioning of the photo to be however you want. I think that looks pretty good. The only thing that we might want to add is maybe some new elements. If you click on elements in the sidebar, you can see hundreds of different shapes and lines and gradients and pictures. Let's say I want maybe some sort of abstract line. Let's just say lines or maybe shape. Let's see if there's anything that we want to add to our image. I'm gonna go ahead and say, this is a pretty cool shape. I'm going to add it. Put it in the corner or on the side here. And think, you know what, doesn't really look right. I can't read the text anymore. So if I click on that element on the top right hand corner and click on transparency. And let's say that we want this to now be about 10%. Now it's just a really subtle shape on the side. And if we wanted to, we can even make that a little bit more obvious. Let's say 25. It just adds a little bit of texture to the image, but was added super easily and with complete control. When our design is completed, there's a couple of different things we can do with it. First, we can download it by clicking on this button here. Press download. You'll have it as a bunch of different options if you're going to use it for social media, for instance, you might want it as a JPEG. If we were printing something out, maybe we have it for print and we want to do something like a PDF. In this case, we're going to use JPEG. We can make the quality 100 size one times, which just means that it's going to be the size that you originally designed it at. And click Download. And just like that, Canva will take your design, prepare it for download, and then download it right onto your computer. And now your designs ready for social media. In addition, all of your designs are also saved in Canva, right here you can see it says all changes saved, which means that your design has been saved to your account on Canva. And when you're done, you can click on the homepage to get back to the original page we started on. Now that you have an idea on how Canvas works, Let's start designing touch points for your church. 5. Lesson 4 - Service Invite #2: So now we're going to create a social media invite that we can post on our Instagram stories that we can share it with our congregation and staff. First click on the Create a design button and type in Instagram story. Click on that button and it'll bring you to a canvas that is formatted for Instagram. Once we've made our new document, the first thing we're gonna do is add some text. So let's go to our text tab. Scroll down a little bit until we can find something that we like. I'm going to click on this Happy Holidays button. Once we've clicked that it will populate on the canvas. I'm going to double-click the word happy and replace it with join us. And I'm going to double-click the word holiday and say Sunday. I click on this group and hold the Alt key. Drag from the corners outward. It will make the entire text bigger and scaling uniformly. Now, let's add an image into the background. Click on Upload where you can upload your own photos. Like I mentioned before, I'm going to use the same photo that I did last time and click on it. As we've been doing this entire time. Hold Alt, take this top constraint, bring it all the way to the top. Hold Alt to the side constraint, bring it all the way to the side. And now we can see that it's in front of our text. So you can right-click and say Send to Back to make sure that our texts is showing up on top. Now we're getting the same thing where the text is kind of hard to read, like we've been doing this whole time. Let's take our transparency, drop that down to maybe 25%. So now our post looks okay, but it, maybe it's a little boring. Let's go to those elements that we were talking about before. Typing rectangle. We now have this rectangle in the middle of our canvas and it looks a little weird. Let's do this thing that we did before. We're dragging it all the way up. But instead of going to the very top, we're going to go just a bit before so that it adds this frame. We can change the color to whatever we'd like. If we wanted to keep this whole thing black and white, we can do it that way. Now, our post is looking a little bit more interesting. I'm gonna go ahead and add one more line of text. And instead of using a template, left-click, add a little bit of body text. This is going to allow us to make some custom text and style it however we want. By clicking this move key, we can bring this down. I'm holding Shift to make sure that I'm going completely straight the entire time as I'm scaling it. I'm going to make this instead of 12 point. Let's try 32 point. I'm going to double-click it and put the name of our church, pull gospel church, and on the next line, Livingston, New Jersey. Now I want to make that all of this uppercase. So I'm going to click this button right here, which is uppercase, and now our text is uppercase. Now, I'm not really loving this text anymore, so let's change it. Let's double-click the word. Join us. Click up here, and type in Montserrat. This is one of my favorite fonts to use on Canva. It's simple, it's clean, and it is a perfect font to use, whether it's in print or web. Let's click Montserrat there. And for Sunday, let's see what other options there are. I'm going to click on the X to get rid of Montserrat and look in the handwriting button to see if there's any fonts that I think look really nice. I want something that maybe looks a little bit cleaner than the font that we have right now. So let's start clicking on fonts until we see one that we like. Not really loving that. I'm not really loving that. Now that one looks nice. It's just a little small. So let's go to the font size. Change to 250. Maybe that's a little bit. Let's try to 30. Now suddenly that looks really good, but our formatting is off. Now if we tried to move this from here, it's going to grab the entire thing we have to do is ungroup the text. So click on Sunday, right-click and click on the ungroup button. Now, we can change this, join us texts to be anywhere we'd like. I'm going to move that down a little bit and I think that looks a little bit better. So let's select all three text boxes holding shift as we click on all of them. And let's move them up until our guide show us that we're in the center. Now, we have a social media invite ready for our Instagram stories, just like we did before. Click on the download button, press Download, and our design will be prepared and immediately downloaded as soon as it's ready. So far, we've created two different touch points for social media. The first was a way to interact with our congregation, and the second was an invite that we can use to bring new members into our services. Next, we're going to make an advertisement for an event we're hosting at the church. 6. Lesson 5 - Bible Verse Graphics: The main point of social media graphics is to get people connected and to interact with your church online. Most people spend the majority of their day on social media. So it's important that the church has content available for people to see when they're scrolling on their phone through Facebook or Instagram. So the first thing we want to design are some social media Bible verse images. To do this, let's create a new design. You can go up to the creative design button and type in social media. From here you can click on the social media button and it'll bring you to a new canvas. I've already gone ahead and created a couple of my own social media images. You can see a couple of different posts that people could post on their Facebook or Instagram to get interaction with their congregation online. So let's break down how we could make something like this. The first thing we need to do is create a new page for you. You already have a blank canvas for me. I'm going to click add a new page on the top right-hand corner. It will give me a brand new page. I'm going to delete everything so it's completely blank. So the first thing we have to do is add some text. Let's go to the Text button on the sidebar and scroll down until we find something that we like. I've already gone through a bunch of these to see what works best for the style I want. But feel free to use any of the templates for the texts that you'd like here. When you found a text template that you like, click on it and it'll populate on the canvas. The first thing we have to do now is take this text and replace it with a Bible verse. I've already gone ahead and found a Bible verse that I'd like to use. So I copied that and now to paste it, I'm going to double-click in this textbox, select all the text and press Control V or Command V on a Mac, on a Mac, and paste our Bible verse into the textbox. From here, we want to fix the formatting to make sure that it looks okay. Then we want to put the reference at the bottom. This verse is going to be Proverbs 17. 17. Now let's add a picture to the background. Let's go to photos. I find that when you are making Bible verse images, the easiest thing you can usually put in the background is something like a beautiful scenic view. If you take mountain into photos, still get a bunch of awesome photos that you can put it in the background. Let's find one that we like. This one looks good to me. Let's just drag that so that it fills up the entire screen. Again. Let's hold this top constraint. Drag it all the way up, drag the bottom constraint, drag it all the way down. Now it fills up the page. Problem is, it's kind of hard to see. Our texts is starting to get a little bit lost. So let's grab this and put our transparency at 30%. Now, I'm going to change this text so that instead of being centered, Let's put it on the left. And I'm gonna do the same thing by clicking on Proverbs. Click right here to get to our alignment with one and click it will left align it instead of centering it. Our texts is looking pretty good. The last thing I wanna do is maybe spread out this text a little bit in the top bar. If you click on this button called spacing, we can change the letter spacing just a little bit to spread out those letters. And from here, we can drag this top corner to make the text as big as we'd like it to be. Just like that. We have a social media post ready. As always, with all of the assets that come in this class, this page will be available as a template where you can take these posts that I've made and completely changed them to fit your social media for your church. But what if we wanted to make a couple of different changes to this graphic? For instance, what if we wanted to change the background color? If you click on the image right here in the top left-hand corner of this top bar. You can click on this background color button and select any color that you'd like. Or if you'd like to pick a custom one, you can click on this button and add any color. I'm going to add this color which is pulled straight from the picture. As you can see, it's in document colors. And now our image is a little bit more blue because the blue in the background, if you wanted to change the text instead of being black, we can make it white. You click on the text. And right up here we have the text color button. Click on that, and click White. We're gonna do the same thing for proverbs. Click here and click white. Now, our post is ready with any variation that we would like. So now we've completed our first Bible verse post to get our congregation to interact with us on Facebook or Instagram. 7. Lesson 6 - Event Promotion: For this post, I wanted to use a picture of coffee in the background, but I didn't find the picture that I really wanted in the photos tab of Canva. Here, I'm going to use another completely free resource called unsplash.com. The link is in the notes of the lesson. Once you're on Unsplash, you can type in whatever you want. Me. I'm going to type in coffee and try and find a picture that I think works better. Right here is a beautiful picture. It's simple. I can see text being on that white background and really easy to read. And I'm going to download it by clicking the Download button in the bottom right-hand corner. Back on Canva. I want to make sure that I can upload it so that we can use it in our design. I'm going to click on the Upload button in the sidebar and drag our download right into the uploads. That's going to upload. And once it's done, you can take your picture and drag it right on or click it to put your image in the Canvas. I'm going to fill up the entire page with our picture of the coffee, just like we've been doing before with the side and top and bottom constraints. And now we have to add some text. Click on the Text tab and scroll down until we can find a template that we think works. I'm gonna go ahead and pick this one. I'm going to bring this over to the side until the guides telling me that I'm in a good place for the margins. And using the bottom right-hand constraint, I'm going to scale the text up. Now I'm going to replace the words graphic design with coffee, social. I don't think we need this text up here, so I'm going to select all of it, press Delete. And right here I'm going to say the date of the event, May 3, 2020. And here we can put all of our information, let's say full gospel church. Just like that, we have all of our information set up. Now let's try and get a little bit more creative with how it looks. Let's select this text and go into the text color. We can see all the document colors that the Canva has picked straight from this picture. Let's use this brown as our title color so that the black stands out a little bit more. Now we have a clear separation between our title and our information. I'm going to scale this up a little bit. And just like that, we now have a social media post ready for Facebook, instagram, or however else you'd like to use it. Go ahead and download those images. And now you have your event advertisement ready for social media. When you're done, make sure you name your files that it's easier to find later on. As always, this template is available in the notes of this course in case you wanted to use the version that I made. So I think you're probably wondering, how can we spent all that time making the color palette and the beginning if we haven't even used it yet. In our next lesson, we're going to start using our branding assets to make things specific to our church. 8. Lesson 7 - Business Cards: Before we start designing a branded touch point, the first thing we wanna do is add our color palette to our brand kit on Canva. This makes it easy for us to quickly access all the colors in our color palette. Click on the brand kit on the sidebar of Canva, then go to coolers.co and make sure that you can find the color palette that you've saved to your account. When you click on a color, it'll copy the hex code. Then go over to Canvas. Click under brand colors, the new color button right here. Paste by pressing Control V, that color into the palette. Then go back and grab another color. Do the same thing on Canva until you've filled up three colors. If you want to have more than three colors, you'll have to upgrade Canva to the paid version. But I've found that using three colors for our designs is more than enough because you're most likely going to be using white and black anyway. Now we have all our colors set up in Canva. So the first thing we're going to be designing our business cards in Canva. Click on the Create a design button and type in business cards. Click on that button and you'll be brought to a canvas that is sized perfectly for your new business cards. Inside template, type in church business card. All of these templates are ready to be used for a church and already have imagery in case you don't have a logo. Let's click on one of these templates. I think that this one looks really nice. And click, apply both pages. Double-click on the text and put in the name of your church. Now some churches have a tagline, others don't. For the sake of this design, I'm going to be getting rid of this tagline. First, I'm going to click on this entire grouping, right-click and press ungroup. Then I'm going to click on this text and press Delete, deleting that texts completely. Now one thing that we want to do in all of our branded content is used the same font across all of our touch points. I'm going to be using the font and Montserrat and all of our designs. So double-click on the text, highlight all of it. Click on your text. And let's go to Montserrat. Because it's the title. I'm going to be using Montserrat extra bold. And if I think that's a little big, Let's go down until we can get it to fit on one line. We want to change the color and the imagery to more closely match the images and the colors that we're gonna be using on other touch points. First, let's go to uploads and let's grab this picture that we uploaded earlier. If you haven't added a picture to Canva, no problem. You can just delete the picture instead, which will leave this background. You can click on that and delete it. And now you're left with just a solid color. You can replace that color with one of the colors of your palate, whichever you think looks best. If we do want to use a picture, we still want to have a color in the background that represents our palette. I want to make sure that I'm not adding the color to the picture, but I'm adding it to the background. Let's drag this picture out of the way until we can see the background color. I'm going to click on the Background Color button and replace the color with one of the colors in our palette. Now, when I move the picture back, you can see that it's overlaying on top of the background color, but our text is still legible and our image is still able to be seen through the color. Now, let's work on getting information into the business card. Here, all of our text is formatted for us. We're just going to do is go ahead and change this text to Montserrat, just like we did before. Now again, if it's a little big, Click on the Font Size and bring it down to something that fits better. Change the information in the business card. And when you're done, changed the palate to match the palette of your church. One thing you might wanna do instead of using the red background on both the front and the back, is we're actually going to invert it. To do that, let's make our title text read and make the rest of our texts black. We're going to make our background color white instead of black. The red still shows up. It's still uses the palate, but now it looks very different from the back. Now the front still uses the fonts and the palate as the back, but it looks different enough to differentiate each side from the other. Just like that, our business cards are done. One really cool thing about Canvas is you can actually have your business card printed straight through them. But if you want to use your own service, you can download your cards and it will suggest how to have them printed in a PDF for you. Download that it will prepare the design. And just like that, you have your own set of branded business cards for your church. 9. Lesson 8 - Church Stationary: Now that we've made our first branded touchpoint, let's start making other supplementary touch points for our brand. Let's make some stationary. Click on Create a design and type in letterhead. When that's completely loaded up, let's go into the template search bar and type in church letterhead. I'm going to use this template right here. When I click on it, it'll automatically populate the Canvas. A couple of things that we're gonna do right off the bat is first, change all of these colors to reflect our church color palette. Second, I want to change the fonts to reflect Montserrat, which is the font that we're gonna be using for our church. If any of the texts doesn't look right and make sure that you reformat it using size and also using the constraints on the side to re-size your textboxes. Change all the texts in the letterhead to reflect your church and also make sure that you're deleting the placeholder text in the letterhead when you actually have it printed, we want to make sure that we can print anything we want on it and that we don't have to make every single letter that we ever send on Canvas telling you might want to do is to use your logo on your letterhead. If you wanna do that, let's actually delete the name right here. Go to our uploads, bring our logo right into the document. Let's scale it down and put it in the top right-hand corner. Now one thing that I will say is that if you're going to use a logo, especially one without the name on it, you're going to want to make sure that you're using the name of your church somewhere else in the document. I recommend putting the name of your church in the address textbox. It's easy to find and it makes the most sense for the placement of the letterhead, just like that, our letterhead is done. All you have to do now is print your letterhead through Canva or you can download it and send it to whatever printer you've worked with in the past. 10. Lesson 9 - Church Bulletin: We now have two different branding assets that point towards the brain that we're creating with our color palette and our typography and our imagery. The final branding asset that we want to make is going to be our church bulletin. This is something that you're gonna be using every week and needs to be updated constantly. To do that, we want to make sure that we're using a template that's easy to change out. Go to create a design and type in church program. Depending on what your needs are for your church bulletin, you might end up choosing a different template than what I'm going to be using here. However, I want to make something that I know can be used in black and white and that's easy to print. So I'm gonna click this template right here. And I'm going to actually only click the second one that will populate my Canvas. So there's a couple of things here that I want to do. The first is I want to change the background color instead of being this cream. I just want to make it white. The other thing is that I want to change this main texts. To be Montserrat. We know that's too big. Let's change that to 25. Now our formatting is looking a little weird. So let's ungroup this. Let's change both of these and I'm selecting them both by holding shift as I click on both textboxes, go here and go regular Montserrat. Let's change this to 12 point. Let's get rid of the italics. Now. The formatting looks a little strange. I'm going to bring this one up so that they're all about equidistant from each other. Maybe this one can come down a little bit. But for the most part they're relatively even. I'm going to click on all three and press Control G or Command G on a Mac to group this entire header. Now we can make this slightly bigger. I'm going to hold Alt or Option on a Mac, drag out from the corner and make that title a little bit bigger. Now we can bring this line up if we'd like, by just using the arrow keys. Now it's time to start changing out all of our information. Now we want to change the styling in the actual program to reflect our brand. I'm going to go through and change all the fonts to Montserrat, semi bold for the titling, and then irregular Montserrat for the body text. And don't worry, if the formatting starts to look a little weird, we're going to change that with font sizes to make sure that it works. Alright. So let's take a look what needs to happen from here. We know that we need to make all of these texts small enough to fit on one line. So let's try ten for our font size. That doesn't work. Then we might need to go to nine. And if we feel like that's too small, we want instead is to make sure that our line spacing or a line height is much closer together so that it doesn't take up as much room on the canvas. Let's stick with that. And so I'm going to make all of our texts 10-point from here, or program or bolus is completely set up and all that's left is to change out the information. So what if there's more information that you need on this page, but you're out of room. One thing you can do is duplicate the bulletin by clicking on a copy page button on the top right-hand corner. Now you have two pages worth space that you can change all the information and still print out both pages to use every Sunday. Now what are a couple of different ways that we can add our branding to the church bulletin without making it too messy. Well, if we want to keep it black and white, one thing that we can do is add our logo in the background. I'm going to click on this picture in the background and click Delete to get rid of it. In our uploads have, I'm going to bring our logo into this canvas by pressing on the logo. From here, I can tell already this is way too dark and it makes it way too hard to read the text. Let's go over to our transparency and drop this to about 20%. I would say that we can probably go down even a little bit more, maybe 215. And this number is going to change based on your logo. If you want to add a little bit of color, one way you can do that is by clicking the top title, go into the text color and adding whatever color you choose from your palette. Now, we have a church bulletin. It's easy to access, easy to edit, and also reflects the branding of our church. As always, you can print straight from Canva or you can download it and print in-house at the church to save money. This project is available as a template on Canva. All you have to do is click the link in the notes of this lesson to access that template. 11. Lesson 10 - Monthly Calendars: Now that we've made these branded touch points, it's time to make some touch points for the congregation of our church. The first thing we're going to make it a monthly calendar. Calendars are practical. They need to be updated often. They're very important for your congregation to understand what's going on at your church. Click Create a design and type in calendar. Here's a look at the calendar that we're going to end up with by the end of this project. To show you how I made that, I'll be starting from scratch as well. In our templates, Let's type in Calendar. We're going to use this template to make our calendar. Now there's a couple of things to know right now. One, this calendar is not using our palette to. This calendar only has four weeks in it. What about times where we need more than that? And three, this calendar doesn't have any birthdays. I've seen a lot of churches want to include birthdays of the congregation in it. The good news is that the template that's included in this class has variations that include six-weeks and birthdays. So now we're starting off with this template. The first thing I wanna do is change out some of these colors. Let's change this background color, something a little bit lighter, if not just white. I'm going to use this cream that's included in my document colors. The second thing I wanna do is change the colors of these shapes to reflect our color palette. Now to make sure that these shapes are not getting in the way, Let's select all of them at once by holding shift as we click through each individual shape, once we have everything selected, go to this lock button on the top and click that. Now, these shapes are no longer selectable, so they won't get in the way if we're trying to select these shapes or anything else on the page from here, let's change at all the fonts to make sure that they match Montserrat, the font that we're using for our brand. Finally, let's change the colors of the text to also match our palette. Now we're left with these lines, which I'm also going to change to black just for simplicity's sake. One problem with the way that our calendar is set up right now is that most months have more than four weeks in them. So we need to make more room to include more weeks. I'm going to get rid of this quote. Get rid of this line up here. Select all of this and bring it up. Okay, Well that's great. Now we have more room. Let's see. If we select this box at the bottom, press Control D. And just like we did before, or Command D on a Mac, we want to bring it down holding shift as we drag it down so that it matches about where the other boxes are from, the line above. Then we need to take these lines and scale them up until they reach that next bar. As you can see, this line is not quite far enough away from the other boxes, which is why this box looks so much smaller than the one above it. Let's bring that down a little bit and see and do the same thing. Now we're a lot closer to making this calendar look like a normal calendar. If we need another month, the only thing we'll have to do still is make this whole calendar a little bit smaller. If we select the entire calendar, hold Alt and then drag from the corner to bring it in. It will make the calendar smaller, which we can then bring up. And then make one final line. Same thing by dragging this down. Making it about the same distance from all the other ones we can go through and bring all of these lines down until our calendar is completed. Now we have a calendar with six weeks in it. If we want to start filling it up, we need to add some text. Let's click on, add a little bit of body text and put in the first day of the month one. Obviously the actual layout of the month will change depending on the month and the year. So go ahead and put that wherever it actually needs to be. I'm going to end up making this text a little bit bolder because I feel like it's hard to read. So let's make it 12 point semi bold. And that looks a lot better to me. To add more numbers. Let's duplicate it and also make sure that it's completely lined by holding Alt and shift as we drag the number into the next day, we're going to keep doing this all the way until we've completed every day of the week. Rinse and repeat these steps until you've filled up every single day of that month. One shortcut that you can use. So you can grab every number within a single row and duplicate the entire row as you bring it down to the next. Fill out all the numbers to complete your calendar. If it's too hard to edit the text, you can zoom in by clicking on the percentage button at the bottom and zooming in to a higher number. You can move around by using these controls at the side and the bottom to see every single number in your Canvas. If you've finished making your calendar and you realize that there are spaces that you made that you no longer need. You can delete all of the numbers and either scale the lines down to match the amount of rows that you actually need, or you can delete those lines altogether and make new lines. To make new lines, Let's go into the Elements tab, type in line, gravel, line, use the rotation button right here while holding Shift click and drag until you have made it 90 degrees. And now we're going to find the top. So we can start to scale this down. Scale that down until thickness is about what you want on your calendar. I would say that's about what we're looking for. Using the top constraint. Bring it all the way to the top. Change the color to black. If it seems like maybe it's still too thick. Bring that down, bring the constraint up, and then take a look to see how that looks against the rest of the calendar. If that looks good, hold Alt and Shift to drag and copy the line across the entire calendar. Now our calendar is set up, but nothing is inside. So let's add some text of events that might be going on at the church. In the text tab, click Add a little bit of body text, put in the name of an event that may be happening. The coffee social that we talked about earlier, put that on the required date, making sure that your font is legible. Let's make this 14 point and make it semi bold if you want. And you can even use a different color to signify that there is an event. Keep going through adding events until your calendar is full of whatever is going on at your church. Once you have all the information inside your calendar, your calendar is complete. All you have to do from here is duplicate the calendar each month that you want to make a new one and change the information and the date. I know that this one was a lot trickier than any of the other things that we made. So if you had trouble with this, It's okay. Re-watch the video, take it slow. And of course you can just use the project file that I have available as a template that is in the notes right now. 12. Lesson 11 - Connection Cards: The next thing that we're gonna be making is a Connection Card. When people come to your church, you want to make sure that you have an easy way to collect their information and also give them a touchpoint that let them know a little bit about you. So let's create a new design. We're actually going to use custom dimensions. First, making sure that we are set up in inches. Let's make this 6.25 by 4.25. This is going to be roughly a postcard size, and this can change depending on where you want to get it printed through. This is the finished product of what this connection cards should look like by the end. So let's start with a new document to see how we got there. First things first, let's add a background color to this page. Click on the blank page, click on Background Color and add whatever color from your palette you think works best. Now let's go to text. Let's add a heading. First, making sure that it's set up to Montserrat. Change your heading to say Connect and let's place on the top left-hand corner. I'm also going to make another line that says with us, so it reads connect with us. Now this doesn't really look right. There's a couple of things wrong here. First, let's change the text color to white. Second thing we're gonna do is make all of these caps. Let's adjust the constraint of the text box until it feels like it should be set up correctly. We can change the alignment so that it's left aligned. Lastly, let's change, connect with us to be a little bit smaller. I like the focus being on the word connect rather than with us. By making it smaller, it feels a little bit better, feels like it's a little bit more designed. Now, you have a ton of space here to say whatever we'd like. I have a little bit written out already because I know what I wanted to say in this card. I'm going to copy and paste this and bring it right here. Now, let's start making the form. Add some text and change the text to say name or any other field that you would have a form, say. Change the font to reflect your brand and set it up to be left aligned. Now, go to elements and type in rectangle. Click the first rectangle that you see and it will be added to the canvas. Now we want to format this so that it works as a fillable field. Make sure that it lines up roughly to about where your text ends. And bring it all the way to the other side. Change the color to be white so that you can write in it. Now, we can duplicate this, Bring it down, and change all of these fields to wherever they need to be. I'm going to skip ahead to work to the end as I've already created all of my fields. If you want to add other things like a checkbox, instead of getting a rectangle, you can look up circle. When you bring that in. You scale it down to where it needs to be, changed the color, and add it to whatever part of the form you want it to be at. It's finally, I want to add a little bit of flair to this design. So the way I did that was by adding this little welcome texts in the background. To do that, let's go back to our text. Add a heading, say the word, welcome, make it capitalized, make it white. Then finally, let's rotate it. Now that's huge, right? It's a little bit too big. So let's drop this down to maybe 56. Let's try 48. Then we can bring this text over to the side and drop the transparency to be about 15. If you feel like you've gotten the text to a place where it looks pretty good. Then you're all set. Keep in mind that when you're printing things, some of the margins tend to get cut off. So it's always safer to bring things inside to the closer part of the forms that never gets cut off during printing. And just like that, we have a Connection Card that any new guests can fill out when they visit your church for the first time. We want to make sure that people are getting plugged in without having to work too hard to find out how this is one of the best ways to get new congruence connected to your church and then meet other people in your congregation. 13. Lesson 12 - First Time Guest Mailer: So a guest has come to your church and they filled out your Connection Card. Something that's really important is that you can follow up with them. Some people like to do with a phone call, but something that always helps is to be able to mail them something, to go straight to their door just to say, we loved seeing you. Thanks for coming to visit our church. So let's make a first-time guest mailer go to create a new design type in postcard. Once we're here, we can use any template that we want. I used one called green and white photo that I really seem to like. Click on our template and click apply to both pages to put our template on our Canvas to give you an idea of what we want it to look like. By the end here is the finished product, the very simple postcard with very little texts that really just says, Thanks for coming in on the other page, gives them all the service times that we have each week. So how do we get there? First, we're going to change this text to thanks for coming. Let's make that a lot smaller. We don't need it that big. And now we can drop that down, go to our texts and add a heading. Put the word guest, capitalize it, make it white, and let's make it 45 point. Bring that up. And let's duplicate the text by pressing Control D or by clicking and dragging while holding Alt and say first enter time. Now let's make this about half the size. Unless adjust the line height by clicking on this button, the spacing button up top. Drop that down until it fits about the same height as the word guest. Now, let's group these two images by selecting them both while holding Shift and clicking. I'm pressing Control G. Now that they're grouped, let's move them until we get this smart guide right here on the page to show up to let us know that we are centered. Now we have our texts setup on our postcard and we're centered. Now let's click on the white portion of the background. Let's click on a color. Then we can get rid of this picture at our picture instead, we move any of the frames there as well. By holding shift, we can get our picture to fit the canvas perfectly. And just like we've been doing 1 million times, Let's drop this transparency until it's at a place where it's easy to read. Now that we're here, we can scale this text up a little bit and start working on the back. The back of the postcard can have anything you want. Like I did before. I used to stay connected tab instead of a thank you message and to have all of the different service times, you can use whatever information you want on there. One recommendation I do have though, is that you include your contact information at the bottom of the tab. This is a great way for people to find your website, your phone number, or any other way that they might need to contact you if they want to learn more about your church. One less thing you have to do is change out the colors on the back to reflect your palette. Once you've done that, you are completed with your card and all that's left is to send it off to print. Just as I said before, you can print it through Canvas or you can always download it and use the printer of your choice. 14. Lesson 13 - Ministry Cards: To build a strong community at the church, it's important that every congregant understand how they can get involved. What we have here is a ministry card. The point of this card is to be able to showcase some of the ministries that your church offers where people can get connected. That may be three services during the week, that may be volunteer opportunities. It could be anything that you want to showcase in a way for congruence to understand how to get involved. To use this template. Check the notes of this lesson, and click the link to access this specific template that I've created. I'm gonna go through how you can edit this template to work for your church. First things first, make sure that you change the colors of this template to match whatever your church's branding our. Next, make sure that your double-clicking this text and changing the church name to reflect your church. If you have a picture that you'd like to use in the background, go to your uploads and make sure that you're dragging that image straight into the postcard. If you want to change the positioning of it, maybe you want to use a specific part of the picture. You can double-click and drag until you have the pictures set up the way you'd like to have it. Moving on to the next page, change the colors just like we did before. Double-click any of the texts to edit in the way that you need it. At the end, make sure that you're changing your contact information to reflect your church, as well as the time slots of the things you're trying to promote. If you don't need any of this information, makes sure to just highlight it and delete it. It's that easy. With just a few small changes to this template. You can have a completely custom ministry card that gives your congregant a very easy way to get involved at your church. If you want to get these cards printed, you can always do it through Canvas or you can have them downloaded and sent to your printer that you've worked with up to this point. 15. Lesson 14 - Sermon Point Template: Alright, and we are now on the final touch point of this class. We are going to be designing a sermon point presentation. So this is going to be essentially a PowerPoint or Keynote or Pro Presenter slides that you can use. One you are preaching your sermon that are clean and clear and are easy to change whenever you have a new sermon. So if you use the link at the bottom of the note in this lesson, you'll find a template on Canvas. Click that link, and you will find yourself on this same page. Here we have three main pages. We have a title, we have our main point, and we have our bible verse. So let's go through this page by page. On this front page, you can change the title to be whatever you want. Maybe this is a sermon about prayer. You can say something about prayer. You can put the date of the sermon. And of course you can put the name of your church at the bottom. Moving on to the next page, we have our main point and then the text for the actual point followed by the sermon title. All of this text can be left as it is, or it can be changed to your own branding if you would prefer. Overall, I would say that it's probably more important to just focus on clarity because sermon series sermon titles change. So constantly, having it specific to your branding is not really expected by congregates, and so it's less of a priority, whereas you can just use this template as it is for the sake of its clarity. On the final page, we have our Bible verse. Here. You can change the reference to be whatever it is that you need and then put the actual text of the verse there. The text needs to be larger. You can change the constraints of the text-box by holding Alt or Control on a Mac and bringing these constraint out or in until it looks right. Finally, you can change the sermon title at the bottom to match your sermon. Let's say you have a three-point sermon with three different Bible verses and the structure is generally title, main point verse, main point versus main point verse. What we're going to do is set that up by duplicating these pages. First, press the copy page button twice on your main point, and then twice on your Bible verse. But now the format is not correct. It should be point verse, verse, verse, so on. So what we're going to do is move these pages up and down. Let's take this first Bible verse Page. And using the arrows on the top right-hand corner of the page, Press move up and press it one more time until we have the main point, followed by the verse, followed by a main point. Now, we have to get a Bible verse in-between these two main points. So let's go here. Press move up. And just like that, we have our final structure. If you wanted to add another page at the bottom for action steps are for final thoughts. All you have to do, duplicate a main point slide, Bring it down and change out main point to final thought or action step or anything that you would like it to be and change out your text. And just like that, you have a completely ready to use an easily editable template for all of your sermon notes. Now, in order to put these into your presentation, there's a couple of different ways you can use it. If you're using something like a pro presenter or Keynote or PowerPoint in your church already, what you'll wanna do is download these images as jpegs. From there. You can input them into whatever presentation software that you're using so that you can use it without breaking your personal workflow at your church. If you don't have any sort of presentation, you can always use this on Canvas as a presentation software. So there's plenty of different options you just have to find what works for you, what works for your church and for your staff. Just like that, we have finished all of the touchpoints that we are designing in this class. Thank you guys so much for sticking with me. I know we have gone through gone through a ton of different stuff. So thank you for your patience. In this next lesson, we're just going to go through some next steps and how you guys can utilize this stuff moving forward. Thank you so much. 16. Lesson 15 - Next Steps: And with that, you now have 11 unique designs that you can use to benefit your staff and your congregation. These assets are equipping you to reach people through various outlets, online and in-person as someone who has worked doing media at a church before, I can tell you that there is always more to be done. But these design assets are a huge head-start. Getting touch points in anyone who comes in contact with your church in time as your media budget expands, some of your next steps may include hiring a freelancer to design a full branding package or print collateral, or even on how to use video in your services and in your online presence. Thank you so much for officially completing this class. If you have any questions at all or you want to get in contact with me, feel free to shoot me a message on Thanksgiving or send me an email at Nick at NJ de pasquale.com. If you enjoyed this class and would like to learn more about how to produce high-quality content on a budget. Let me know what other classes you would like to see in the future. Thank you guys.