Effective Church Communications

The Effective Church Communication ministry from Yvon Prehn provides inspiration, training, and resources to help your church create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. It focuses on Bible-based and timeless principles and strategies that work no matter what digital or print channel you use to create your communications. The site has links to many free TEMPLATES and other resources, plus links to free TRAINING VIDEOS, and a RESOURCE LIBRARY for church communicators. 

The Effective Church Communication ministry from Yvon Prehn provides inspiration, training, and resources to help your church create communications that fully fulfill the Great Commission. It focuses on Bible-based and timeless principles and strategies that work no matter what digital or print channel you use to create your communications. The site has links to many free TEMPLATES and other resources, plus links to free TRAINING VIDEOS, and a RESOURCE LIBRARY for church communicators.

Graphics: lines, screens, clipart overview

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PDF of some Graphic Design Basics: lines, screens, clipart
PDF of some Graphic Design Basics: lines, screens, clipart

This PDF is the chapter from my first book on desktop publishing that gives you some ideas on how you can use the most basic elements of graphic design to help tell your story.

You may never have thought about how a line can actually tell a story, but it can and one of the sections here shows you how. Screens and reverses are graphic design tools that look great in high end printing, but in lower resolution materials you print in the church office they don't always come out looking as good as you want—this chapter will help you understand why.

It also has some tips on matching the style of your clip art to the style of the type in your communication piece.

Though we can do so much with some of the high-quality images we download from the web, you'll use them most effectively if you understand some of the basics taught in this PDF.

To download it, click here or on the image.

note: this PDF is from Yvon Prehn's archives and is the only format of this article available presently. Not the greatest quality to be sure, but shared with the belief that the content is useful.

Captions define what we see, never publish a photo without them

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Captions define what we see, never publish a photo without them
Captions define what we see, never publish a photo without them

We've all heard the saying: "A picture is worth a thousand words."

That is one of the dumbest statements ever because without a complete and clear caption, the question is, "which thousand?" No picture is self-explanatory. We have to tell people what to see in a photograph.

This PDF illustrates how a variety of captions can give completely different meanings to a picture.

Keep the lessons here in mind not only when you create print communications, but when you create PowerPoint and web pieces where you use a lot of images. You can never be sure that your images will mean the same thing to your audience as they do to you.

Sometimes (especially on websites with lots of little pictures) the images don't add clarity, but sometimes distraction and confusion. The addition of unnecessary little images to websites reminds me of the early days of desktop publishing when people were so excited to be able to use clipart that they often added lots of little clipart images to every church publication whether they were needed or not.

So many of the websites and blogs where people seem compelled to add an image (and many templates come with "thumbnail placeholders") results in many images that have little to do with the content of the text and sometimes result in a "what does that have to do with anything?" distraction for the reader. Your readers are not little children to have to be entertained by pictures if you have content worth reading.

Click here or on the image to download the PDF.

note: this PDF is from Yvon Prehn's archives and is the only format of this article available presently. Not the greatest quality to be sure, but shared with the belief that the content is useful.