Design
Have graphics like Mars Hill
One of the reasons why Mars Hill’s stuff looks so attractive and unified is the great imagery they make for all their sermon series’. They have some fantastic designers over there who make great graphics. But you know it’s not all beyond your reach. Many of them are quite simple, take these for example:
There’s not much to them, just a few things you need:
1. A sermon series to preach on with a cool name
2. A nice texture to use as a background
3. A good font
So lets give it a go!
I think I’ll preach through Revelation. And I’ll call the series ‘What are you waiting for?’ (inspired my Mark Dever).
Now I need a background. Remember, this might have to work as the background to presentation slides so go either dark or light, not a bit of both.
Here’s a free image of a rusty bit of metal I found on TextureKing. I figure rust captures something of the passing-away nature of this world.
There are loads of places where you can get good, free textures and images like this one. Here’s a few:
BgPatterns, Stripe Generator, Lost and Taken, Wood textures, BitBox textures, paper textures, Texture King, Grunge Textures, Squidfingers, Colour Lovers, Urban Dirty, Free 3Ds Textures, 400+ High Quality Patterns, 99 Free Canvas, Paper, Paint and Metal Textures, 36 Cool Free Textures!
Now we find a font that works. The place to do that is dafont.com. You enter your text and it shows you a preview in thousands of different fonts. Most of them are free to download and install as well. The examples above are all standard Helvetica, so we’ll run with that.
All that remains is to put the two together with a touch of transparency on the background colour:
You could do something like this for the powerpoint slide:
It’s not quite up to Mars Hill standard, but it would do the job and it took me about 20 mins.
The trick is then to use your new artwork consistently and everywhere. On the website, on the sermon powerpoint slides, on the hand outs. Why not have a go for your next sermon series at your church?
Tags: Discussion
9 comments for “Have graphics like Mars Hill”
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This is great, I didn’t realise how easy it could be. I can see to how this would be more effective the consistently and often you use it too.
I like your engrish
What program do you use to change stuff round
I really like how you’ve made something classy look doable for everyone with minimal effort
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not, but if you’re interested you may want to check out this post: http://www.theresurgence.com/Peasant_Princess1
Hey Mike, thanks for commenting.
lol – I wasn’t being sarcastic, but I see how it could seem that way. Clearly the peasant princess stuff is all absolutely amazing and in a league of its own.
Hey Ben, I’m one of the designers at Mars Hill. Glad you like the work we’ve been doing. You’ve really demonstrated the simplicity of successful design.
One of our overarching goals for anything designed at Mars Hill is that it has to be visually balanced. Even though it may appear complex, as a whole it’s still really simple–with a single focus.
From that simple foundation you can begin to add the “bells a whistles”.
Many churches want to cram everything into the visuals and end up killing them.
Thanks for the simple advice!
What program do you use to make your creations (or Graphics) in Picture format?