5 Ways To Ruin A Great Design.



As an active, contributing member of the Church Marketing Lab on Flickr, I’ve seen my fair share of bad design pieces.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say that everything in the Lab is bad; that would be an unfair assessment.  But, there are times that I find a design piece that could_have_potential and it’s so often ruined by bad design practices.  I’ve also been involved in Graphic Design forums all over the internet and have seen some pretty bad designs outside of church marketing…

Heck, I can look back at my own work from years ago and find things that I did to completely ruin what could’ve been a decent graphic design.  So here are the 5 things that will, almost always, ruin what could be a perfectly good design, in my humble opinion:

1. Stretching the type.

• Seriously… this is basic - don’t do it.  If you’re ever tempted to hit CTRL-T, grab the corner of your bounding box, and stretch that bad-boy without holding the shift key… you need to let go of the mouse and walk away.  Don’t stretch your type!

2. Abusing the ‘Blending Options’.

• The key word to this one is… ABUSING. Blending Options can be your friend; but, more often than not, they’ll turn out to be your worst enemy.  Next time you open up your Layer Styles window and feel the need to check more than 1, or 2 boxes… you could be in some deep trouble, call for help - get out while you can!  SeanP knows all about this one.  : )

3. The ‘Drop Shadow’.

• Even though this could probably fall under ‘Abusing the Blending Options’; it’s serious enough to deserve its own place on this list.  The Drop Shadow option in Photoshop has made amateurs world wide feel like they can keep up with the big boys.  Trust me, adding a Drop Shadow will not make your bad design look any better… quite the opposite my friends.  Do yourself a favor and learn how to create your own shadows.  : )

4. Poor Understanding of Resolution.

• Getting a grip on the basics of resolution will change your world.  I can’t begin to tell you how important this is!  If you’re working on a design for print and you download the web resolution stock image, you’re design is destined for failure.  Nothing worse than a high-resolution design piece sporting low-resolution images…  Get back to the basics and get a grip on resolution.

5. Papyrus Syndrome.

• If you remember anything_at_all, remember this one. If you have a copy of Papyrus on your computer, kill it - now.  This is, quite possibly, the most overused typeface in all of history and especially in church marketing.  But, Papyrus is not alone - Papyrus has friends.  He brought along Bleeding Cowboys, Scriptina, and Comic Sans.  Here’s my advice… don’t choose to use a typeface because everyone else is, or because it’s trendy - choose your typeface based on the feel and flow of your design.  And… kill Papyrus.

Consider Yourself Hooked Up.



Thanks to everyone who read and enjoyed my Evolution Of The Bulletin series. For those of you who have asked, I’m making the InDesign source files available to you… right here - right now. One of our values here at CCV is resourcing other churches… and that’s one of the reasons I love working for this church! We’re all in this together; we’re all here for a common goal - advancing the Kingdom of Christ. If these bulletin source files will help you in accomplishing that mission at your church, please indulge yourself and download them today. Consider yourselves hooked up!

These are Adobe InDesign CS4 files for each phase of the bulletin that I talked about in the 3 part series.  There is also an INX (Adobe Interchange) version of each file.  The links are not included because of the file size, but you should at least be able to open the files and get a gander at the layout.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE BULLETIN SOURCE FILES.

Evolution of The Bulletin - Part 3.



The next phase in the evolution of the bulletin at CCV included a completely new shape and size that would allow us to save some money by freeing up space to print some various items for free.  My boss, Jon Edmiston, explains this process in detail on his blog.  If you have time, go take a look.  Along with the desire to save money, we also wanted to switch up the shape and size of the bulletin just to mix things up and try something different.  It was time for a change.  Here is an example of the shape and size of the next phase:

And the inside:

The size of this bulletin is 8″ x 16″ and folds down 3 ways to 8″(h) x 7″(w)  and the panel on the right side is 4″ with a perforation for people to tear off.  This size did free up and extra 3″ of paper space on our gang run sheet; however, we were still looking for ways to save money and still maintain a quality product.

The next, and current, phase of the bulletin was an even more dramatic shift in shape and size.  As mentioned in my first post, our comitment to having message notes in every bulletin helps to dictate the size and shape of the bulletin.  Keeping that in mind, we decided to try something totally different.  We moved to a landscape format instead of our traditional portrait oriented format.  The images below will help to explain that further:

And the inside:

The size of this bulletin is 6.5″ (h) x 16″ (w) and folds in directly in half for a final size of 6.5″ x 8″.  This shape allows us to insert our message notes into the horizontal fold, and also saved us a GREAT deal of money.  Let me try to explain how we cut our costs dramatically by going to this shape.  I should also mention, that during this evolution process, we decided to move to printing 2 weeks worth of bulletins at a time - this was the first step in cutting cost.  The next step occurred when our local printer came to us and said that if we can get the height of our bulletin down to 6.5″ he would be able to lay up double the amount of bulletins on each sheet that comes off the press.  The press sheet is 20″ x 26″ — we used to lay up 2 of the outside of our bulletins on the front, and 2 of the insides on the back of the sheet.   Now we’ve doubled that by decreasing our size and laying out a front and back on both sides of the press sheet.  Below is the example of how our printer now sets up the press to print our bulletins:

As you can see, we are completely maximizing the amount of printing space on our press sheets.  The red section at the top is used for printing free notepads, and communication cards - because we’re already paying for the full sheet, our printer doesn’t charge us anything extra to print there. He does charge us a very minimal cost to cut them down, somewhere in the 10-15$ range.

The key to our cost savings was MAXIMIZING space on with our local printer.  The current size and shape of the bulletin has dropped the nearly 35% below what we were paying over the last couple of years for what would I would consider phase 1 of our bulletin.  I won’t divulge too much more information, but we print approximately 7,000 bulletins per week… and we are doing the best we can to keep our cost as low as possible.

Lastly, if you are interested in the source files for any of the bulletin sizes or shapes that I’ve talked about here; send me an email and I’ll hook you up.  The only catch is, you have to tell 5 friends about my blog. (/Shameless Plug)

Evolution of the Bulletin - Part 1.



Over the next couple of days, I’ll share with you how our church bulletin has evolved over the past couple of years.  When I came on staff here at CCV, over 2 years ago, one of my primary tasks was to design and layout the weekly bulletin.  Joanna, the amazing and talented designer who preceded me, had brought the bulletin to a place of extremely high quality, and it was my job to maintain that standard of excellence and quality.

Here’s what one of my first bulletin layouts looked like shortly after I came on staff here in 2006:

And the inside:

A few months and many bulletin designs later, we were able to get a deal from our local printer to add full color printing to the inside of our bulletins without an increase in cost.  Of course, we jumped on that opportunity. Over the next several months, the artwork that used to be designed only for the cover, made its way into a theme that eventually became the backdrop for the inside of our bulletin layouts.  This was the first step in taking the bulletin to the “next level” at CCV.

Here is an example of a bulletin layout shortly after we decided to go full color on the inside layout in 2007:

And the inside:

This was a great step for us in the continual process of evolving our bulletin.  As you can see, this was really only a small part of the transition.  The content still existed on white-based backdrops.  We wanted to make the transition gradual so as to not cause too much of an uproar amongst our people.  I can just hear it now “Why are the words so hard to read? Why is that font so small? It must cost a fortune for you to print these in full color.”  Etc. Etc.  Looking back, I’m so glad we never rushed this evolution process… we were patient, and because of that - we never really heard any backlash when things were changing.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series, I’ll be sharing the expansive evolution that took us to 3 different sizes and shapes and a cost decrease by as much as 30% per year!!