No one likes cookie cutter design, but everyone loves cookies. Our step for today is about being efficient and working under time pressures in unique situations. This shouldn’t be your default action when asked to create graphics, but when someone is requiring you to bake a dozen cookies immediately, you’ll be prepared.
Today’s step is all about forming a habit, and organizing the fruits (or cookies…or cookie cutters…or…whatever) of that habit. The seventh way you can improve your church media right now is:
Keep an archive of your source files to reuse later.
Some of you may already be doing this, but what I see and hear a lot from the volunteers that are running most church media systems is that when they create a graphic, they save out a JPEG and close the source file without saving. After all, no one’s going to preach that same message again, and even if they do we already have the graphic, right? Wrong, Mr. Wrongenhousen.
Each and every time you create a sermon title graphic, announcement slide, any graphics at all for your media system, save two copies: your source file (the file with all the layers and pieces), and the copy (a flattened version such as a JPEG) you’ll import to your system. (Note: if you’re using a worship presentation package such as ProPresenter that allows you to import your source files directly, you won’t need to save a flattened copy.)
Within a short period of time you’ll collect a good pool of ready to go graphics that can serve as quickly editable templates when you don’t have the time to work up something from scratch (or for use by those who may not be graphically savvy). In my church I’m usually the one creating the graphics, but never actually run the system. There are times when our team receives a sermon title after service begins and I’m not available (more on that in another post). They’re not graphic designers, so what do they do? They can open an older source file and within just a few minutes have something ready to go. (Important: Make sure that once you make a change to a source file that you use “Save As” to create a new copy, rather than writing over the old one.)
In the image above, you’ll see how a source file can save time. Far left is the source. For the middle image I did a quick Google images search for “measuring tape,” pulled in the image, set the blending mode to color dodge, changed the text and font color and boom, done. For the next one I created a color fill layer above the original background, set the blending mode to multiply, changed the font and boom, done. Less than 5 minutes for two variations. What could that do for your team?
You’ll be amazed how this one little habit of saving and archiving those source files will shave precious time from your pre-service workflow and maybe even supply the catalyst for others on your team to dive into your graphics creation software, making them more engaged, effective, and valuable to your media ministry.
That’s it for today — short and sweet! Make sure to grab my RSS feed or follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
