Have you heard of Prezi yet? If not, you need to go check it out and see if it could be beneficial to any presentations you give. Unlike cues or slides, Prezi utilizes a “canvas” concept where you zoom in on various aspects of your presentation. It’s quite unique.
The free account from Prezi is a little limited, but still offers you a great deal of flexibility as well as allows you to add pizazz to your presentations. While the free account allows only online presentation development, you still get offline presentation capabilities. This means you can download your custom presentation and present it without a web connection.
Several years ago, I realized that my design skills just weren’t cutting it. In a nutshell, the stuff I produced as newsletters and promotional material was junk. I decided to learn from others who know what they are doing (a generally good rule of thumb in any circumstances!). I’m no pro, but most of my stuff looks decent. One of the tools I use to inspire myself and get free fonts and logos is dzineblog. It is a great tool that I peruse on a weekly basis.
And if you want to read some great articles on the basics of design, check out Kenny Conley’s series on the topic. Just go to his site and search for design, there are about 8 posts on the series.
With Wordle, you can create really cool word clouds for your ministry like the one above. Since it is a Java Applet, getting it to be an image file (.jpg or .gif) is a bit difficult, but here’s what I did.
Create the Wordle
Print it as a PDF
Open the PDF and use the snapshot tool to copy the area you want to use
Paste the copied area into Publisher or graphics editing program
Save the copied picture as a .jpg or .gif using, right click–>Save As Picture
Muddy River Media is a nice little site for countdowns, looping effects, a few videos, and some sermon theme packages. It’s definitely not a gold mine, but the work they have done is quality and it is a well designed site. I hope that others will catch onto what they are doing and support Mark Fogarty’s work. Something like this has great potential in the market of highly priced media material.
I wanted to interrupt our little series to tell you about a free webinar on church websites. I found this over at Church Communications Pro.
I have seen some really shotty children’s ministry web pages so this webinar is certain to help some of you out. You do have to sign up for it ahead of time. Here’s a quote from their blog entry:
Join WebDesign.com co-founders Cory Miller and James Dalman for a special webinar titled 4 Keys to Effective Church Websites on Thursday, Oct. 1 at 11 a.m. Learn the essentials of highly effective church websites with two experienced church marketing professionals.
Today’s resource: The Gimp. The Gimp is an open source graphics editor.
When you download it, you can be sure you will be overwhelmed. However, I found a nifty tool within The Gimp that allows you to create stunning logos. When you open the program, simply click the “xtns” menu and scroll down to “logos.” From this point you can work through a small “wizard” that will help you create professional looking logos.
I have found that branding particular worship experiences, children’s sermon series, and events is a way to build extra excitement for your ministry. The Gimp is one tool to help you do that. Here are some very quick examples I came up with. You can do a great deal more with them after the initial “wizard.”
Open Church Resources is a budding blog with logos, motion backgrounds, videos, sermons, graphics, and invite cards. You can probably find a few handy things on their site.
I found a very nice child dedication video here. (scroll to the bottom).
Last Wednesday, Free CM Stuff gave away one free ministry logo design courtesy of Chris Sykes. You can find that post, as well as more about Chris here. The logo above is from Pastor Andy Robinson, who by the looks of the logo, is in desperate need of a redesign. That logo was either hand drawn in the 70’s or copied out of a clip art book found behind a cart in the resource room! Andy, you desperately need a new logo and Chris can get you rolling. Congrats.
For those of you out there who would like a few resources for creating your own logo, here are some sites that I would tell you to check out (I have not personally used any of these so they do not come with my specific recommendation):
Free CM Stuff highlights top notch no cost resources for Children's Ministry leaders and offers a site for CM leaders to share resources they have developed themselves.
