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March 29, 2017 By Ryan Nelson   |   2 Comments

How to Add Custom Fonts in Proclaim

Proclaim comes loaded with more than 100 fonts for you to choose from. And a professional designer has already selected the ideal font for each background. But if you find a font you like somewhere else and we don’t have it, you can now upload custom fonts to Proclaim.

Say, for example, your church brand has a particular font you use on all official church signage and media.

Save your custom font to a computer as a .ttf or .otf file. Then in Proclaim, open the settings menu and select “fonts.” Choose “Import…” and select your font. Proclaim will ask you to confirm that you have the rights to use the font, and then you can add it.

Everyone in your presentation group can access the custom fonts you upload to Proclaim.

Most of Proclaim’s fonts work in Spanish, and some work in Greek and Hebrew, but for other languages, custom fonts save the day. There are lots of free fonts available online that come with complete character sets for foreign languages.

When the font you’ve selected doesn’t have the characters you need, Proclaim tries to find them in other fonts, which means it may take a while to render the character. If Proclaim’s 100+ other fonts don’t include those characters, Proclaim looks through your Windows or Mac fonts. If Proclaim still can’t find the character, it won’t render—and that means it’s time for a custom font.

Does your church use custom fonts? Tell us what you use in the comments!

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With Proclaim, you don’t have to fiddle with fonts to find one that looks good on your background. Every slide and motion in Proclaim comes preloaded with a font that was hand chosen by one of our professional designers. Get more than 100 fonts for your church presentations when you start a 30-day free trial of Proclaim.

Download Proclaim and start your free trial.

Filed Under: Presentation Software Tagged With: church presentation software, custom fonts, faithlife proclaim, foreign languages, proclaim blog, special characters

March 24, 2017 By Ryan Nelson   |   3 Comments

The 5 Main Ways People Find Your Church

church visitors

Every person has a unique journey to your doorstep. A story that led them to your church.

Maybe they just moved into town after years of being highly involved in a church that’s now miles away—and you’re conveniently located near their new apartment. Maybe a friend has been inviting them for months and they finally gave in. Maybe your latest community service project impacted them personally, and they decided to come check you out. Maybe your last sermon directly addressed something they’re going through—and your church shared it on social media.

Whatever their story is, they discovered you and decided to show up.

You can’t control how people find your church, and you can’t force them to come back. But every time a new person discovers your church, you have the opportunity to become part of their story—and you give them the opportunity to become part of a much bigger story.

Read more…

Filed Under: Ministry Resources Tagged With: church visitors

March 3, 2017 By Ryan Nelson   |   2 Comments

How Proclaim’s Designers Create Church Media

Proclaim’s team of designers constantly produces fresh sermon backgrounds, announcement slides, motions, and more.

You may have noticed that with the exception of mini-movies and Bible animations, we produce media “sets,” not standalone pieces. It’s hard enough to find one piece of media that fits your church’s message and brand—pastors and church staff shouldn’t have to Frankenstein a presentation together from a bunch of disconnected pieces. “Sets tie the whole topic together, instead of being all over the place,” says Liliya Vetkov, Proclaim’s Pro Media designer. “The sermon, announcements, worship backgrounds, they all have the same tone.”

With every new set, the hope is to give churches the freedom to decide how they use the art. Pro Media often comes with background text, but with the release of Proclaim 2.0, even that text can be edited—they’re just suggestions.

church-media-love

Built-in suggestions are part of what makes Pro Media unique. Designers like Liliya choose the best font size and text color for each background, so you don’t have to fiddle with it. The font of each set has already been carefully thought out by a professional designer.

“When you look at really thick, bold, font, it can feel like the text is yelling at you. When you’re looking at harsh brushstroke fonts, it looks grungy,” Liliya says. “A serif font, on the other hand, feels more elegant and classic.”

A professional designer can look at every font and find appropriate situations to use it, but the average church staff or volunteer may not be able to pinpoint why a font feels off-putting, or where it would fit.

Our designers can do all that work one time, and save thousands of churches from hunting around for the right fonts and colors. That being said, you can always decide to change things if you find a font you prefer.

“At the end of the day all of our designs are to help the pastor and the worship leader,” Liliya says. “We want to make creating presentations easier for them. We know that they have their own job to do, and they don’t want to spend hours looking for good design when they could be working on a sermon or practicing.” We believe good design is certainly important, but church staff are often already stretched so thin, and their roles often already require expertise in a wide variety of skills and fields.

For Liliya, it helps her to think of what her pastor needs. “A lot of times with Pro Media I start out with a blank page and I ask how would my pastor use these slides? What would he want to use?”

church-media-storm

As she pictures the message that might accompany her work, it breathes new life into her designs. “I think about how a topic can be interpreted visually,” she says. “I want to get at the idea behind hope, not just write ‘hope’ on a pretty background.”

As with any creative process, inspiration for church media design isn’t always automatic. Sometimes it takes a conversation to get ideas flowing.

“If I get stuck, I send my work out to the design team and reach out for ideas,” Liliya says. “I don’t want to get stuck in my own thoughts and my own ideas. A lot of times I talk to a pastor or another designer.”

For Liliya, that conversation often takes the form of prayer.

“There are moments where I get stuck and I don’t know how to interpret a message or an idea, and that’s where you have to use your resources,” she says. “And then there’s a lot of prayer. Before I start on any set, I pray about it. I pray that whatever I design, that somewhere, a pastor will use it. I may not be a pastor, but maybe a pastor can use my artwork to communicate something life-changing.”

Church media designers like Liliya are motivated by the knowledge that they’re spreading the gospel through design.

“I love seeing my work in use. I love seeing what kinds of messages go with the media I produce,” Liliya says.

psalm-23-art

As she studies a concept, the spiritual aspect of her creation process allows her to grow personally through her work.

“It’s not just art, it’s sort of my Bible study. When you fixate on your own ideas, that’s where you get stuck. You have to dig deep into the Word. When you explore something like a sermon title you start to see how the Bible talks about a topic.”

Her biggest challenge is continuing to push the envelope on a daily basis. The Bible is a limitless pool of inspiration—the church has been creating art inspired by the gospel for centuries. It’s important to Liliya that she continues producing useful, unique artwork.

“I think churches should have beautiful and meaningful designs, and when you create media over and over again, you start to burn out a little bit,” she says. “I don’t want to get stuck in a rut of creating something unoriginal.”

When Liliya feels her inspiration waning, that’s when she turns to her team and her creator for some fresh perspective. As a result, her art continues to reflect thoughtful approaches to each concept and careful attention to Scripture.

Thankfully, no piece of Pro Media is produced in a bubble. Every slide and every video is vetted through our team of designers, so only the best designs make their way into Proclaim.

church-media-god-father

You get 30 days of Pro Media with a free trial of Proclaim. More than half of all Proclaim subscribers love their free trial of Pro Media so much that they keep it with a Proclaim Pro subscription.

Start a free 30-day trial of Proclaim to enjoy art from designers like Liliya. Or, add Pro Media to your Proclaim subscription.

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Want to learn how to share the gospel through design? Get free design tips from professional designers like Liliya. I sat down with Micah, Shiloh, Christine, and Eleazar from Faithlife to talk about the intersections between the gospel and design. You can find out what I learned in the free ebook, Called to Create.

church-design-handbook

Sign up to get your free copy of Called to Create.

Filed Under: Church Technology, Presentation Software Tagged With: church design, church graphics, church media, pro media, proclaim blog, worship backgrounds

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