For pretty much the entire time I was serving at Jaffray, one of the things I did was worship slides. It was the first thing I did in terms of serving and I did it all the way until I went off to university. Over that period of time, I was picking up on some design knowledge and that eventually made its way into how I designed slides.

For quite some time now, I’ve been observing how different churches and events do their worship slides. For the most part, slides are not very well designed. There are reasons for this. And this is why I decided to finally get cracking and write up a guide to designing slides.

Why are they bad?

For the most part, slides are designed by one of two groups of people: members of the A/V crew or the worship leaders themselves. There are reasons as to why both these groups tend to produce poor worship slides.

For worship leaders, it may be because slides aren’t really a priority. For the majority of them, it’ll be because playing around with PowerPoint isn’t their thing. Similarly, for A/V guys, design probably isn’t their thing, they’re more concerned about the equipment and the sound. While they may be more computer-y, they’re not necessarily artsy enough.

Why do they need to be better?

I anticipate that a lot of people are satisfied with their worship slides and will be wondering why I’m not content with the state of worship slides in general. The first reason is simple, that God doesn’t deserve any less than our very best. I’d be skeptical if you were sure that your slides were the best if you had no formal training in graphic design. Reading tons of Photoshop tutorials is no substitute for that. But as much as that reason is true, I really dislike pulling those types of answers. There are definitely more concrete reasons.

It’s true that as the A/V guy, your role is to be invisible. But the work that you do has just as much presence as the worship team up on stage. Just like the worship team, the job of A/V is to help create an environment where the congregation can worship without any distractions. When the congregation can’t read lyrics, that is distracting. When the congregation starts snickering at an ugly background, that is distracting. When the congregation is confused by lyrics that are split up illogically, that is distracting. Poorly designed worship slides will work against that goal.

What do you bloody know?

One of the interests I’ve developed during high school is design. Much of how I served at my church was through design, whether through web, print, or onscreen. So, no, I don’t have a degree or anything, but I have picked up a few books, so I’d imagine I’m a few steps ahead most. As for this area specifically, I’ve done it fairly constantly while I was serving at my church (about four years, to be exact), and I managed to get the opportunity to go wild and come up with the slides for TC 2006.

What’s on the menu?

I intend to make a series of posts, each addressing a different area of design for worship slides. These are things I think about when I whip them up, regardless of whether I’m at home with a week to go or in the sanctuary half an hour before service. These are:

1. Background and colour
2. Typography
3. Positioning