The Word is worth a thousand pictures...

Andrew Clarke from St David's Presbyterian Church Toowoomba has been quietly pumping out some top quality pre-sermon advertising images. They're all good, and well designed for a more traditional style church. Here's one of my faves...

Ephesians Makeover

"Any quick thoughts on improving this," asks Alan Radloff?

It's a nice idea, and looks pretty good. But my first suggestion was to move the globe to the right, eliminating the untidy black area of 'trapped space' between the right edge of the text and the edge of the planet. There's one less alignment too - all the text follows straight down the left edge.  That helped. Now what about making the planet REALLY big by blowing it off the page?

Selling Forgiveness

There's been debate among the ministry team at MPC about whether this web-poster is an engaging and attractive way to advertise a teaching weekend on "Forgiveness." It's masculine, it's dark, and it's based on the movie poster from Clint Eastwood's moody movie "Unforgiven." Personally, I figured it had a lot of advantages over a design featuring lots of flowers and girly stuff... but the jury is still out. Comments welcome.

Mark Bookmark

Andrew Richardson has just produced a promotional bookmark for the Mark's gospel series he's running alongside the upcoming Church4kids program. "I'm quite pleased with the graphic and the colours," says Andrew - I agree. nice job.

No ordinary flyer...

Bryson Smith has been working on the design for a flyer promoting the Western Plains Christian Convention, which is running under the title "The Life Less Ordinary." He's come up with a beautiful design, though he says he couldn't find exactly the stock image he was looking for..."The grain works because of the region," says Bryson from the heart of rural Australia... "but the flower is still less blokey than I'd like. I'd love a crowd scene in which everyone is frowning and one person is smiling or something like it." Even so, it's a great job, and one that we hope draws a crowd...

Church4Kids

Back blogging after a long break - sorry about that. Here's the draft of a flyer I've been working on, which will be re-used around a number of churches in Brisbane in the next few months. The toughest challenge was finding the right kid-shot to liven it up. Ultimately, dreamstime.com came to the rescue once again... though they've recently both increased the cost of download credits, AND increased the number of credits per image. These kids cost 2 credits, or around $US4. Hope they do the job!

Easter Ideas

Luke Tattersall at Parramatta City Presbyterian Church is running with the Easter theme "Jesus - Fact or Fiction?" Free copies of the DVD of the same title from Life Ministries are being distributed, with invitations to easter services:
Good Friday—9:00am
Jesus: Fact or Fiction?
The Facts Behind the Death of Jesus

Easter Sunday—10:30am
Jesus: Fact or Fiction?
So What if Jesus Rose from the Dead?

Eatons Hill Up and Away

After our orange and green Freshchurch advertising blitz, our Eatons Hill Church Plant launched on Sunday. The results were outstanding - the core group of 41 adults was amazed to be joined by another 22 adult visitors who had come along because they'd seen the ad campaign. Orange and green was a definite theme...

MetroWest Mailout

Here's the front and back of a mailer that Brisbane's MetroWest church is sending out to the Taringa community via Aust. Post. There will be one mailout each month for the rest of the year. Copy by Michael Bennett. Art by Martin Howard.
Michael, the interim pastor is preaching a series on the Sermon on the Mount. This flyer highlights the passage about not worrying.
Tools: InDesign, iMac, cartoon from iStockphoto.com
Fonts, Helvetica (Light and Condensed Black) and Aroma.

Getting warmer...

Luke Tattersall has locked in the title and poster for his series playing off the "Inconvenient Truths" movie. Here's how it's looking...

Fresh New Church at Eatons Hill

Our church plant launches next Sunday morning - so thanks to Rob Hanson at Photograve Pty Ltd, we're going to have some great new signs and banners. We're hoping they'll catch the eye. The fence banner (above) will be 2 metres long. A series of direction signs will lead to the carpark (below)

Inconvenient Truths - A series

Luke Tattersall is planning a topical sermon series later in the year, which is going to pick up on Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth. He's planning to call the series one of the following:

* More Inconvenient Truths
* Other Inconvenient Truths
* An Inconvenient God


The series will look at what the Bible says about topics like:
o Heaven & Hell (Judgement)
o At Least you have your Health (The Health myth)
o In the Last Days… (Terrorism and the state of the World)
o Angels & Demons (Satan and the Spiritual Realm)
o The Illusion of Freedom (Sovereignty of God)


Luke was looking for suggestions for titles for two more talks, on Tolerance and Sin. My suggestions are:
o Totalitarian Tolerance (Pluralism)
o I Did it My Way (Sin)


Inspired by Luke's idea, Bryson Smith suggested a series poster based on the movie. It could look something like this...

Freshchurch Launch News

Just to keep connected with the real world, here's a quick update on the "Freshchurch" publicity campaign. Our team has letterbox dropped around 3000 flyers in the Eatons Hill area, and handed out free oranges at a local shopping centre. Here's some great coverage from the "Northwest News"... click the image for a larger view.

Three from PCPC

Luke Tattersall at Parramatta City Presbyterian Church has come up with three great postcard sized ads for upcoming church events. If only someone would invite me to the Wine Appreciation night...

Christmas - it's sooner than you think!

Judging by the barrage of Christmas event designs I've come across lately, Christmas is just around the corner. Matthias Media's Christmas card range - always excellent - will this year be carrying a link to the More To Christmas website, which offers a free download of Luke's gospel in pdf format. Great idea guys!
Meanwhile, Wade Iedema from Southern Cross Presbyterian Church in Lismore has come up with this neat postcard to advertise their upcoming Christmas event.















Sarah van Delden has been busy designing the flyer for ChristChurch... featuring their brand new logo.



















I'm feeling I've been left standing on the blocks with the design for our own "Christmas with the Stars" event. It's overly busy, and not quite working out the way I'd like. Any advice would be much appreciated.

More Freshness...

A draft poster for the Freshchurch launch campaign. Does the black background work for you? Does it need to follow the orange on white theme of the previous post?

Trying to do something Fresh...

With the launch of our fresh new church at Eatons Hill, we want to make a splash. How about a citrus theme to pick up on the idea of freshness? We've grabbed the www.freshchurch.net web domain name, and we're ready for business. Here's our (tentative) opening move... maybe we'll follow up with postcards, and handing out fresh oranges at the local shopping complex?

Love Your Neighbourhood Campaign

We're playing with the idea of a "Love your Neighbourhood" theme for 2007 ... encouraging our church family to be local initiators of events like "Meet Your Street" and "Do Your Block"; street parties, acts of service like mowing a neighbours lawn, welcome packs for new residents. It's still taking shape, but here's a possible logo. I based it on a photo of a picket fence from dreamstime.com - simplified in Corel Draw. There's still plenty of time to work on it between now and the launch next January.

Seven Deadly Sins - alternate design

Here's another version of the Seven Deadly Sins promotion designed for easy photocopying. It hasn't had much use compared to the colour version, but I think it's probably stronger and more memorable - because it's simpler.