ImageChef.com Poetry Blender

Check out Image Chef to get photo frames, moving bumpers (like above), and word mosaics. You can email them or embed them in your site.

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.

Recently, I commented on a site called Stock Exchange, but that site is more for folks who need some good backgrounds or images to make their own promotional material. I’d like to take a moment to tell you about another site which has a host of pre-made graphics and images that you can use for your ministry. It is called CreativeMYK. It hosts a huge bank of free Christian themed photos and professionally done graphics. You can check out their gallery here.

When you view their gallery, you see the most recent graphics first. They have a good search engine that allows you to search by file type or keyword. Although the file types vary (.ai, .psd, .eps), there are 22 pages full of jpeg images. Those of you not having access to a $600 piece of software like Adobe Illustrator will find this useful! However, you can open most .eps files in a program called The Gimp. There is also a trick to opening .ai files in The Gimp, that only works part of the time. Anyway, check out the gallery and see if there would be a graphic that would help bring some personality to your next Children’s Worship series.

Are your promotional materials still stuck in the early 90′s when italicized Arial font was creative and innovative? Many churches are and that simply communicates to the world that we are behind the times. That’s why I would recommend to you 1001 Free Fonts. They deliver on the promise that is contained in their name. You can go to the site, not be bogged down with ads or external links, and download a ton of great fonts for your publications!

Near the top of the page, you will see categories that are easy to manage. However, the base of fonts that they have is so large, it can seem difficult to navigate through all of the choices. That is a drawback. I have to say that early on in my ministry, when I didn’t know as many people and didn’t have as much to do, I spent almost a whole day, loading fonts from this site onto my computer. The cool thing is that you can just put those on a CD or the shared drive at your church and let everyone have access to them.

Part of what the owner of this site will do, however, is allow you to download 10,000 (yes…10 THOUSAND) fonts for $19.95. The link to this is on the site. Perhaps you don’t want to buy them and you don’t have the time to download all of those in one day. Well, get someone else to do it! Even if that is still not an attractive option for you, this site still offers a great way to download free fonts for that special project or promotional material you’ve been dreaming up!