- Today on Pro Church Daily,
we're sharing seven free graphic
design resources for churches.
- Well hey there and
welcome to Pro Church Daily,
the show where in 10 minutes or less,
you'll get your daily
dose of tips and tactics
to help your church share
the message of Jesus
while we navigate the
biggest communication
shift that we've seen
in the last 500 years.
I'm your host Alex Mills joined as always
by the hype man, it's Brady Shearer.
Today, we're talking about seven free
graphic design tools for churches.
- If you wanna create graphics quickly,
easily, and affordably, so affordably
you won't have to spend a dime,
this episode of Pro
Church Daily is for you.
We've got seven free graphic design tools
that we use, have used, and recommend
so let's dive right in.
The very first tool, canva.com.
Canva is an online graphics creation
and editing interface
that is 100% free to use.
Now like most products,
they have an actual paid version as well.
It's called Canva for
work, it's $10 a month.
What's amazing about Canva for work
is that it's also free if you are a
non-profit, churches included.
You can apply for that and you
can get it absolutely free as well.
What's great about Canva,
especially with the
Canva for work edition,
is that you can upload your brand colors
and you can basically create this
brand style guide within the interface.
If you have multiple different people
that are using the platform,
they can log-in and choose from
pre-selected colors
that fit with the brand,
logos are already uploaded,
and that way you can
keep visual consistency
across the board as much as possible
even when you are using the platform
with different people in the church.
Maybe people that aren't even that skilled
already with graphic design,
Canva is perfect for that.
It's really a graphic
creation and editing interface
for those that aren't
skilled with graphic design,
whereas Photoshop might be
more for an advanced user,
Sketch definitely for a more pro user.
Canva, anyone can use.
- It's pretty ridiculous
how powerful this tool is
and how intuitive it is.
Like you said,
for someone who maybe doesn't
even know where to begin.
For making graphics
for social media posts,
for Instagram, for Facebook.
Your church, if you're not using it,
you need to be using it.
It's great.
- The second tool on our list,
very similar to Canva, is Adobe Spark.
Adobe Spark is essentially
Adobe's spin on Canva.
They have a mobile app as does Canva,
they have a tablet version and they
also have an online version.
Very similar to Canva in
that you can create graphics,
especially for social.
Digital delivery, quickly, easily
without too much existing skill.
- I haven't had a chance
to get my hands on this,
but I've looked at it a little bit.
Being part of the Adobe suite,
you can rest assured that this is
gonna be a really great product for you
and like you said, perfect for churches.
- The third tool on the list is Dribbble.
I used this tool just this week to
get graphic design inspiration.
We had a meeting with our
product team the other day.
Basically the action step
they left me with was,
Brady we need to start creating
a mood board for this new project.
We need inspiration.
What type of resources are inspiring you
and what should influence the direction
of this creative project?
We need to know what you're thinking.
Get it outside of the abstract
that's in your head like,
here's what I'm thinking,
oh it's hard to explain it.
Give us some examples of what you like
and we can kind of mix that altogether,
create a mood board, and then use that to
drive our decisions when we get
into the design phase of this project.
I went to Dribbble with three
B's, d-r-i-b-b-b-l-e.com
and I started searching for designers
that I already know and love,
other examples of designers that
have done creative projects
like this one before,
and I basically just
started copying the links
and pasting them into our Trello card
where we had this mood board that
was kind of growing as I added resources.
This is where I go again and
again to get inspiration.
The best designers in
the world gather here.
It's completely free to see the
portfolio and see what others are up to.
It's great for getting
inspiration when you feel stuck
or when you need to kind of communicate
these very difficult
ideas to put into words.
Really the best way to communicate them
is through other visuals.
This is my go-to resource.
Number four, The Noun Project.
A curious name.
The Noun Project is an amazing free
resource for iconography.
For instance, if you were creating
a social media post that was promoting
your Twitter account and maybe you
wanted to post it on Instagram
because you wanted to cross
promote your platforms,
a great way to grow.
Post on your Instagram account,
a link to your Twitter
handle say follow us,
something like that.
You can go to The Noun Project and
you can search Twitter and you can
download a Twitter icon
directly from there
and then you can put that into your post.
Of course it's not just logos.
They have every type of icon
that you could possibly want.
Let's say you wanted a church icon
and you found one with
a cool steeple outline,
you download that and you use that.
Iconography is a great way to elevate
your graphic design
skill and polish really
with custom illustrations,
but they're not custom 'cause you
downloaded them for free
on The Noun Project.
- Yeah, and they're fun.
You can use them as buttons
on your website too.
You can use an icon, assign a link to it.
Instead of using text has a
hyperlink that says click here,
all of a sudden you've got an icon.
You can take an action there and it's fun.
- Perfect.
Number five, coolors.com.
- I love this one.
- Basically the word colors
with two O's with the first O,
so c-o-o-l-o-r-s.co?
I think it's .co.
- I think it might be .io?
- .io?
- Maybe.
- I think you're wrong.
- Okay.
- I don't think it's .com.
Coolors, c-o-o-l-o-r-s in Google
and that will direct
you to the correct URL.
I just looked right at you and I said,
I think you're wrong.
- I probably am.
- Stone cold.
What's amazing about Coolors...
- Not the name.
- There's no way that's
how it's pronounced either.
We're surely butchering it.
Maybe it's colors but it
just is stylized differently,
but I like Coolors with that emphasis,
is that it's a free tool to
generate beautiful color palettes.
- I love this so much.
- I'm just such a color theory nerd.
What's amazing about this
is you can take a hex code,
a six digit color code,
#ffffff, which would be?
- White.
- 000000, which would be?
- Black.
- There you go.
Every single unique color
has it's own six digit code.
What you can do is you can go into Coolors
and put in this six digit
hex code, click generate,
and it will create an entire color palette
based on your original color.
If you wanna go completely freestyle,
you can just generate without
a pre-existing color code
and it will generate color palettes
for you on the fly that are stunning.
- This was helpful for our church
when we were doing a bit of a re-brand,
designing a new church website.
We had one strong brand color.
It's kind of this teal color,
but I knew I needed some secondary colors
to fill out our palette.
I went to Coolors, I put in our hex code
for our strong brand color.
It gave me a color palette,
it generated this color palette
that I fell in love with immediately,
put that right into our style guide,
and now we have secondary colors
and some text colors that I would
have never know could have
gone with this teal color,
but Coolors did it for
me and did it for free.
- Free graphic design tool number six,
everyone's favorite, Unsplash.
Unsplash is the absolute best
free resource that I know about
when it comes to free stock photography.
Now, it goes without saying,
don't go to Unsplash and then find
a picture of someone's face and
then plaster it on your website but,
if you wanna find a beautiful
photo of a goat standing in
a green field, go for it,
or a beautiful photo
of an urban landscape,
kind of cityscape sort
of look, go for that.
What's amazing about Unsplash is that
even though there are tens
of thousands of photos
and now they have a search feature
which makes finding the
perfect photo amazing,
they do have a certain level of quality
that you must reach to get
your photo on that site.
A lot of the times these free sites where
anyone could submit a
photo are not that helpful
because most of the photos are trash,
whereas Unsplash, #canadians
who put the site together,
make sure that if you're gonna get
your photo posted on the site,
it's gonna have to measure up
to a certain level of quality.
You know that any photo
you find on this site
will not only be free
but high quality as well.
- We've talked about it before.
Google images is not a
free stock photos site.
You can't search what you're
looking for on Google images,
right click, save as, and use that photo.
- Don't be a thief.
- But as a church who maybe can't afford
to hire a photographer
or buy stock photos,
you say okay if I can't use Google images,
where can I get these photos?
Unsplash is the place.
Like you said, their standard,
their quality standard is
very high and it's all free.
The photos are really
good and really usable.
- Final graphic design tool
that is free, Instagram stories.
The Instagram stories interface
has so many features within it now that
I often find myself going
in there to edit a photo
that I then post elsewhere,
Facebook, Twitter.
It's just easier to jump into
the 'Gram stories' interface.
I made a list of all the things that
you can do with the photo editor
within this stories' interface.
You can add text, you can add gifs,
you can make a poll, you can add graphics,
you can add the temperature,
you can add the time,
the location, you can
shoot a normal photo,
a boomerang photo, a focus photo which now
allows you to blur out the
background even without
portrait mode.
- That's crazy, it's crazy.
- That's brand new.
They're always adding new stuff.
You can do a super zoom
video, a rewind video,
a hands-free video, a stop-motion video.
A lot of those are video/gif capabilities,
but the number of pure photo and
image editing that the
Instagram stories' interface
will allow you to use is one of the
reasons I go to it again and again.
There you have it,
seven free graphic design tools
that your church can leverage and use.
Icons, photos, and everything in between.
That'll do it for today's
episode of Pro Church Daily.
We'll see you next time.
Thanks for watching today's
episode of Pro Church Daily.
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(laughter)
