I’ve recently discovered a few new sites I thought I’d share – designspiration.net and pinterest.com. They are both collaborative sites where people post their work and/or tag others’ work as inspiration. You have the option to join each site for free and participate by posting your own work or things you discover online, or simply browsing the content without joining. More details on each site after the jump.
The first step to a solid design is the idea or sketch phase. This may take on many shapes or forms depending on your personality and/or the project. I often like to peruse design blogs or sites that feature well designed projects.
Here are just a few great design inspiration sites:
A few months ago we posted about Mail Chimp as a source for e-mail marketing so we thought you’d appreciate this update. They just doubled their free plan! So now you can send 12,000 emails per month to a list of 2,000 subscribers completely free. That is quite a deal. You can still track how many emails were opened. From a design perspective they have added some neat, clean, modern templates that I would be proud to send out to my church. Check it out!
When you’ve finished designing a print piece, the final step is of course printing. There are lots of online printing resources that have great prices with impressive quality. Years ago when online printing started out the quality didn’t live up to your local printer, but nowadays that’s not the case. Many sites offer not only the standard 4×6 postcard but a variety of sizes along with brochures, door hangers and posters. Many of them also offer different coatings to meet your needs along with additions such as rounded corners.
A nice font can elevate your design to professional quality, and there is no better way to find what you need than by searching through the database of fonts at www.dafont.com or www.abstractfont.com. There are tons of fun and creative fonts to look through. You can even type in a phrase to see what your wording would look like in each font before downloading. The best thing is, most of them are free!
I don’t know about you, but for myself, getting started on a project is one of the hardest steps in the design process. It’s so easy to sit down in front of your computer with Adobe Illustrator open, staring at a blank white screen…waiting for inspiration to hit. One thing that helps me is to look for inspiration in an interesting color palette. A great site to start with is Adobe’s Kuler.
After finishing up school, I felt that I had more creative potential than I could express with my current knowledge of software, specifically within the Adobe Creative Suite. One great resource for me and other creative minded people, is the company Creative Techs. They are a Seattle based IT group, and a few years ago they started teaching classes and sending out tips for Creative professionals.
In the past I have had the opportunity to serve in my home church by providing graphics for outreach events. It is awesome to see how something so seemingly insignificant as a nice graphic impacts others. For example, last year we offered an outdoor drive-in movie as a outreach community event. I began by creating a “look” for the event as a means of branding the event. I won’t go off on a rabbit trail about the importance of branding until a later time, but just know that a consistent look throughout (or brand) throughout is VERY important in promoting any event, in this case an outreach community event.
I was excited to read Leslie’s post (below) where CreativeMYK is linked as a resource for free design stuff, so I decided to talk a little more in depth about Sermon Series Artwork.
1. Meet with the Pastor to understand the message he is trying to portray to the congregation through these sermons.
If you’re a “Creative” working or volunteering in a church environment you’re well aware that graphics usually have to be done on a budget. And by a budget in ministry we usually mean free, let’s face it. When I first started helping my church by designing sermon series graphics there were a few sites I came across that were really helpful for cheap, but still good looking resources.
