Would you put ketchup on your steak? Remember those ads? That’s what I always think about when I see a church use a nice looking presentation background with a horrible white colored font that is outlined in black and has a drop shadow beneath it. Actually, it’s worse than ketchup on steak. The black outline was like putting ketchup on steak. The drop shadow is like dumping a pound of salt on top of the ketchup!
Strong visuals play an important role in communicating how you feel about what you are serving. Before the food ever arrives at the table, a clear message has been communicated. The quality of the food is definitely a high priority, but poor service, bad environment, or the wrong toppings are all factors that can leave a bad taste in someone’s mouth. Do you leave church wanting to tell friends about how good the experience is? Or do you give your friends a list of disclaimers, hoping they endure the bad parts and make it to the good parts? It’s time to take your visual presentation to the next level so that your message comes through loud and clear.
I’ve put together several scenarios that show a variety of slides and choices that anyone can borrow from when putting together a worship presentation. Notice the choice of fonts, color, and placement of text. Hopefully these samples will inspire you to make choices that match the style of background. By the way, all the fonts I chose below are system fonts that are easy to obtain if you don’t already own them. I stuck with these fonts because I believe that it’s not what you are doing, it’s how you are doing it. Who would’ve thought that Times New Roman could look so cool? You don’t have to invest a lot of resources to build an elaborate font library to assemble a high-quality visual presentation.
Things to Consider:
Choosing a background—There are many things to consider when choosing a background, some more obvious than others. If it’s the middle of summer, you may not want to choose a background full of falling snow (unless you are celebrating Christmas in July and have a reason for a snowy background during that time of year). You may want to consider the mood of the worship song. Is it fast? Maybe a brighter, more animated loop will help set the tone. If it’s a slow contemplative worship song, a more subtle animation with toned down colors might fit better.
Font selection—A more contemporary background might not work well with a serif font. In the same way, a sans serif font may not work with a vintage looking background. The choice is not always obvious. Think of it this way and it may help:
Modern/Contemporary = a sans serif font (see below images 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 9)
Classy/Traditional = a serif font (see below images 2, 3, and 7)
Don’t confuse “traditional” with old hymns at the early service for senior adults—that is not what I’m referring to here. You’ll see some very cool, traditional serif fonts used in the examples. They’re perfect for modern worship songs!
Font effects—I slammed the white text with a black outline and a drop shadow at the beginning of this article for a reason. We choose backgrounds because we want more than just white text on a black background, right? Right. So when we choose our background, we hope that background will attract the viewer’s eye to the words. Therefore, if your background requires the words to have an outline and a drop shadow to be readable, it is no longer attracting the viewer’s eye to the words. It is making the words too hard to read. At that point you have two options: First, you can choose a color and text placement that does not require all of those effects in order to be readable. (Sometimes that may require less text if the slide has more artwork on it.) The other option is to stop using that background. Some backgrounds are better used on additional screens that don’t feature text, or for setting the tone before the service or between songs.
The truth is that our visual backgrounds are not the message any more than steak sauce is the main course at a restaurant. While there are occasions when a meal is so delicious that you don’t care about the environment or the fact that the condiments have been sitting all day in the sun (think Geno’s Steaks in Philadelphia), that is an exception to the rule. As the Church, we are serving up the best message in town. How are you preparing it?
Barton Damer is a Creative Producer at Igniter Media (www.ignitermedia.com). Barton maintains a personal blog at www.alreadybeenchewed.net.