Youth Ministry Geek » Design

Best of 2011

Jon — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 10:00:55 +0000

2011 was a whirlwind year for me. While serving in our student ministry, I also spent half of the year revamping all of our discipleship courses, and the other half of the year directing our elementary ministry. We built a website to host all of our discipleship course registration and blog content, directed the largest children’s Christmas production our church has ever hosted, and are in the middle of planning a county wide student conference. At the same time I am pursuing an MDiv in Apologetics. I have relied heavily on technology this year but have also found some other non-techie favorites. Here they are in all of their glory:

Adobe Indesign CS5

Having done all of my publications in Microsoft Publisher over the years the switch to InDesign was fabulous! In an effort to keep users from messing up, Publisher limits the ability to manipulate the document however you want. While this is not a problem most of the time, there are moments when it becomes quite bothersome. Publisher often gives me grief when I have images layered one on top of the other. InDesign has been a breath of fresh air. The program offers so much control over the document. The learning curve is steep at first but you catch on. I highly recommend this software if you want to step up the quality of your publications

Color Scheme Designer (colorschemedesigner.com)

Creating a professional looking publication means you don’t need to guess about your color scheme. While most of us can “eye-ball” a good color, this web app takes all of the guess work out. Plus, the app allows you to choose between monochromatic, complementary, analogous, split complementary and every other scheme you can imagine! I found this one late in the year but it has quickly become a go-to app.Samsung PX2370 LED Monitor:

I purchased this monitor at the beginning of the year and I have enjoyed every minute in front of it (well, maybe not every minute). The LED backlighting and 5,000,000:1 contrast ratio makes for a crisp display. Once again, if you want a top notch publication you need to create it on a display you can trust.

Screencast-O-Matic

When we built our discipleship website for our church members to register an account on we created a screen cast video to walk them through the registration (basically a video that captures everything happening on your computer screen). The software we used cost a pretty penny. Well, just the other week I found Screencast-O-Matic! It has 95% of the features as the expensive program but only costs $12 a year to use. I am amazed at what we are doing with web apps now, and this one is one of the most impressive I have seen yet!

Ethics for a Brave New World:

I took an ethics course this semester and this was one of our main texts. The title plays off of the famous work by Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. It’s a massive work (close to 1000 pages), but boy does it cover a load of pertinent topics. The Feinberg’s set out to give evangelical views on issues ranging from abortion to just war theory. If you want to give yourself a kick in the pants, pick up a copy and begin working your way through it.

Well, it’s Christmas eve when I am writing this and I am wicked tired and ready for Santa to get here! Hope 2012 treat you all well, and I hope all your techie dreams come true.

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Free Fonts to Kick Off the Fall

Chris — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 04:00:16 +0000

With back to school in full swing or coming very soon, you may be working on flyers or calendars for your fall season. I saw these two collections of free fonts come across my twitter feed this week, and thought i would pass them along. Enjoy!

Fresh Collection Of High Quality Free Fonts for Professional Designs

180 Free Fonts Great for Ministry

admin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:30:38 +0000

I was working on a project recently and decided I really needed to find some new fonts for it. I came across a few collections that I thought would be fun to share:

1. 40 Free Comic and Cartoon Fonts: These have youth ministry written all over them. Lots of fun ones to play with.

One of my favorites:

2. 40 Free Hand Drawn Fonts: I’m a big fan of the hand drawn look. I’ve seen some of these before, but there were some great new ones also.

I love this look:

3. 100 Abstract and Grunge Fonts: I really like a lot of these, very current and a lot of fun for ministry.

Check these out:

Maybe these will be just what you need for your next project. Enjoy!

Sign and Image Generators

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:30:57 +0000

I saw this post over on Mashable, 13 Fantastic and Fun Image Generators, and quickly thought of many youth ministry applications. The post lists a number of different online sign and image generators. You put in your message, photo, and depending on the site you get a sign back. Here were some of my favorites (with some youth ministry appropriate samples I created):

Warning Labels and Signs

Advising people to the dangers of the situation has never been so easy. Simply pick a label style, a warning icon, and enter your desired text into a simple web form and voila, you’ve got a standup warning label.

For a vertical sign-style warning image, check out the companion site Warning Sign Generator.

De-Motivational Posters

Annoyed by those superficial and unflaggingly insipid motivational posters we’re subjected to in dentists’ and corporate offices everywhere? Why not take a stance against mass-produced pseudo-solutions to important problems?

With the Demotivators tool you can easily generate a realistic illustration of the trials and tribulations of Real Life. Just choose an image from your desktop to create a motivational parody from, customize your image settings, add a title and de-motivational text and you too can contribute to the better psychological health of us all.

Movie Posters

Another project from Big Huge Labs, the movie poster tool is a web form that helps you design a film-style poster from your own images. Choose an alignment for the photo, a poster style, text and accent colors, title fonts and colors, and enter your own custom text for the film title, taglines, credits and MPAA rating.

They also have them for X-box achievements, magazine covers, street signs, 13 different ones in all. Just think of the fun for signs around the youth room, promotional fliers and posters, visuals in your message slides or just for fun. It seems like this is one set of sites that every youth worker should remember.

Check-out the entire list HERE.

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Squarespace: Next Generation Web Design

admin — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 04:57:17 +0000

Earlier I posted about what was at the time my favorite site creation tool for ministry. And that remained my favorite until I tried Squarespace. It is quite simply the next generation in web design and management tools. The highlight of the platform for me is the interface. Instead of having to navigate away from a page to edit, post, or change the color of the menubar items, every action brings up a simply HUD (heads up display) that hovers over, just translucent enough to be pretty, and allows you to edit instantly.

By instantly I mean just that. If you are editing the background color, they change immediately without having to click update and return to the page. Want a column wider? Move a slider and BAM! Done! This site is so amazing it makes the little Emeril inside me come out.

I have been waiting for a while to develop a site where a group youth pastors from my denomination could post resources available for download for free, and within a couple hours of my free trial umyouthpastor.com was born. Depending on the level of service you purchase (ranging from $8 to $50 per month) you can go from a basic site with one editor to a full ecommerce mogul. There’s incredible server scaling in case you get dugg, social network intergration, and the list goes on an on.

There is far too much to detail it all here, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention their incredible support. There have been many 1am support tickets filed by yours truly that have been answered before 1:30, and that is above and beyond. Like I said, amazing. Check it out: www.squarespace.com. If you want to see what a non-programmer can accomplish in a couple of hours with the tool, and with content from a bunch of talented youth pastors, check out umyouthpastor.com and tell me how it could be better!

Amazon Mobile: The Next Generation of Shopping

Prezi: Amazing Flying Presentations

admin — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 05:39:01 +0000

I am amazed. I have just spent the past several minutes toying around with what could be one of the most interesting tools I have ever found. It’s called Prezi. Saying that Prezi is about making presentations is like saying that Porche is about making combustion engines. It takes the idea of delivering screen-based presentations to an alternate, non-boring dimension where the creation of the presentation can actually be part of the creative process.

Basically, you take your content (everything from CAD drawings to video) rotate, scale, and place it, and then draw a path from one to another that automatically rotates and zooms the camera to fill the screen with whatever is being shown. Their site probably describes it best when they say, “Create a map of your ideas, images, videos, then show overview, zoom to details, amaze, convince, take the day. And it is very simple to use. ”

Simple is a gross understatement. They have developed an intuitive interface that allowed me to create this simple demo of an announcement presentation without ever reading or looking at a second of tutorial. Although it is a web app, your presentations are available to download so that you can still show them when you are in the middle of nowhere at a camp who still has dial-up internet access.

The best part? It’s FREE! There are premium versions that you can pay for that remove the Prezi logo, give you more storage and an offline editor, but free is good enough for me.

While I think this may be distractingly cool for talk notes, I plan on using it to attract attention to our announcements and maybe a song or two if we get ambitious.

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Flippingtypical.com – Display Your Fonts

admin — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:00:43 +0000

Have you ever needed a quick way to see what all the fonts on your computer look like? And even better see what a specific phrase would look like in every font? Enter Flippingtypical.com, it’s a website that looks at your fonts and gives a sample of each, you can also type in a phrase at the top to see it in each font. When you click a specific font you get to see it large at the top of the page. I did a little vanity check and here’s what my name looks like in my fonts:

This is a great tool to help isolate fonts for designs you’re working on. I can see it being a huge time saver.

Make Your Handwriting a Font

Photoshop Alternatives

admin — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:15:31 +0000

I got an question submitted to the site the other day from Haley about Photoshop alternatives and thought there may be others with similar questions. (Haley, I tried to write you back, but your email kept bouncing, hopefully this will help you out.)

Photoshop is a really powerful program, but it comes with a price tag (Amazon lists Adobe Photoshop CS4 at $641.99), but the good news is there are a lot of cheap (or free) alternatives that may work for you.

One option is just to go with Photoshop Elements (PC or Mac) at only $74.99 is considerably cheaper, but can still give you most of the functions that those of us who don’t make a live as graphic designers need. It’s heavy in photo editing features, but still gives some of the advanced images tools as well.

Another option that is closer to full blown Photoshop is called GIMP. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and is an Open Source project so the cost to you is nothing. Remember you get what you pay for, and it’s definitely not as polished as Photoshop, but is incredible full featured for a free program. You can find the PC version HERE. And Mac you can get the basic version HERE, but if you want a version that doesn’t require X11, I would check out SeeShore (If you don’t know what X11 is, stick with SeeShore).

There are some other cheap or free options depending what platform you’re on:

PC: Paint.NET (Free) or ArtWeaver (Free)
MAC: Pixelmator ($59) or Acorn ($49)
Online: Picnik

I know I’m only scratching the surface here. What other options have you’ve found that might help Haley out?

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Make Your Handwriting a Font

Chris — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 04:03:51 +0000

Are you always on the look out for new fonts? Have you always wanted a font that looked just like your handwriting? I must admit that I have. I’ve seen services in the past that will make them for you, but they’ve always been a little more than I wanted to spend. Sure it’d be fun, but I didn’t need to spent $5 on it.

Well I just stumbled upon YourFonts.com, and they will generate a font of your handwriting for you to download. The best part is it’s free, they don’t even ask for an email address.

Here’s how it works:

Download their template pdf.
Fill it in with your writing
Scan it and upload it on their site.
Wait a few minutes and they generate the font and give you a download link.
Install and use.

Here’s a sample of the one I created:

Looks just as sloppy as my real handwriting. If you’ve always wanted that personal, handwritten touch, but were too lazy to actually write this is just what you need.

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