Collide Magazine

Church Design Pet Peeves

COLLIDE Staff - Originally posted Monday, October 6, 2008 -

We’ve all encountered bad church design, whether in the form of a flyer featuring eight wacky fonts, a website with disorienting navigation, or a myriad of other design offenses. Odds are, these things bug you. We asked a few experts and some of our friendly readers to let us know about their biggest design pet peeves in areas like print, web, and worship space design. If you find yourself guilty of any of the following, don’t beat yourself up, just go forth and design-sin no more.

Brad Abare
Founder of Church Marketing Sucks and Center for Church Communication
Attention graphic designers: If you haven't kicked the habit already, stop giving two to three design comps (or more) when you present key art ideas to your client or boss. Not only does it suggest you lack confidence in your ability to accomplish the goals set out by the project initially, it also says you're not convinced enough to present one strong idea. Stop already. When the boss or client receives multiple design comps, it puts them in the expert seat. It says that they know how best to communicate and that you don't, so you're going to keep mocking up ideas until you get it right. Stop already. Do your homework. Research. Survey. The process with your client or boss should be heavy on the front end—understanding the goals of the communication piece and what they're seeing. If you present your one and only idea and it doesn't knock it out of the park, it means there was a breakdown in understanding the expectations of the project in the first place. The more you're the expert, the more you'll be trusted to continue delivering over and over again. The more you present multiple comps, the more you'll be seen as the Photoshop wonder-kid.

Bryan Clark
Senior Graphic Designer at LifeChurch.tv
Aside from some of the more obvious designer pet peeves (such as substituting a cross for a "t," using the Papyrus font, or piling on the bevels, glows, and shadows), I think the biggest mistake a lot of churches make is to try to be something in their design that doesn't epitomize their ministry. Trying to be relevant is honorable, but trying to look "MTV" when your style is more "PBS" is almost always transparent. I think churches should own the style of ministry God has given them because someone out there will relate.

Nathan Smith
Founder of the Godbit Project and Front-End Viewzeloper at Viewzi
When using a menu system on the web, you are making an unwritten statement to the user: "The links in this section are for navigating to different parts of this website," period. When you have a navigation system that breaks these rules, you compromise the trustworthiness of your own website, or at the very least call into question the logic of your layout. A common occurrence is the "Contact" link that does not take you to a page, as all the other links do, but instead launches your default email application. While having a mailto:name@example.com link is occasionally helpful, it surely does not belong as part of the navigation system. As a general rule of thumb, if you are going to place an auto-launching email link in your page, it's best to do so using something that looks like an email address.

Barton Damer
Creative Director at RT Productions
These days churches make the huge mistake of believing that graphic art is strictly for marketing purposes. If you hired a print designer (and they are good), pull their artistic eye into every aspect of the main services instead of minimizing them to the direct mail postcard and bulletin, which both end up in the trash can. While these marketing ideas have their place, a disconnect happens when you fail to communicate that great design in the program elements. The graphic artist can take his or her designer’s eye and improve the program elements of screen imagery, stage symmetry, and colors that are chosen by the lighting designer, but they can especially improve the sermon notes (usually the most neglected part of the entire program).

So often the marketing materials take priority, and then the in-person experience is put together by a different team or individual. Usually a non-designer chooses a random presentation of backgrounds and fonts. Then, if a non-designer mixes in lighting colors, welcome to a visual disaster that has communicated far more than you ever intended. Utilize your designer as a key element in the way services are planned.

Michael Buckingham
Holy Cow Creative and Center for Church Communication
We’ve all sat through the curse of the $150 million Hollywood production: big explosions, stunning effects, beautiful sequences, and no story. But it doesn’t take $150 million and you don’t have to be in Hollywood to fall flat. It’s a classic design mistake I see in churches of all shapes and size: They focus on the beauty of design and forget the power that design holds to communicate. The goal of your next postcard, brochure, or screen graphic should not be to look great or awe people with your killer Photoshop/After Effects/Illustrator skills. Your number one goal in design is to tell a story. Overcoming this mistake begins by first understanding what you are trying to communicate; find the personality of the message and translate that into a concept. Let the concept fuel the creativity of design.

Kent Shaffer
Owner of Bombay Creative and ChurchRelevance.com
One of the biggest mistakes I see church creatives make is creative starvation. What I mean by that is too many marketers, designers, and videographers starve their creative juices by using mediocre designs (or sometimes nothing at all) for inspiration. Although people do have their own personal creativity, it is undeniable that surrounding yourself by greatness will strengthen your abilities. In a sense, your creativity is a product of the creative inspiration you feed yourself. Studying mediocre designs (or, again, nothing at all) will likely give you creative malnutrition. But feasting on the best designs, the best ad campaigns, and the best videos will make you a stronger creative.

Gabe Taviano
Co-host of God’s Mac podcast
Church designs too often contain only material that is being shared from the staff or administration, including staff bios or blogs, the latest sermon information, and coming events. Those are great and necessary additions, but why not include written, audio, or video testimonies from the church body? Jesus taught using stories, and I believe we're missing out on letting God use our life stories to impact the life of another.

Corey Jamison
Designer at Jamison Advertising and Co-Founder of Ministry Growers
The word "relevant." Does that word have to be used on every postcard? Listen, the magazine is good, the word itself is good, but does anyone outside the church world care? How about instead of trying to show how relevant we are by throwing the word around like candy, we just become relevant. Oh, I almost forgot, it is even worse in a grunge font.

Stevan Sheets
Assistant Pastor of Student Ministries at Our Savior’s Wesleyan Church
Old-school clipart! I can't stand that our secretary pulls out CD-ROMs full of terrible images and "adds" them to the weekly program! U-G-L-Y!

John Voelz
Experience Pastor at Westwinds Church
I have difficulty understanding why some churches are built like Costco. I understand the need for space, but blank walls, spaces void of beauty, and entries that feel like bad hospital lounges all make me wonder what the church's form-follows-function approach says about how we view God, life, culture, and people. Auditoriums that hamstring us into always facing the same way with no ability to manipulate the environment don't help: Band goes here. Pulpit goes here. Screen goes there. Chairs bolt down here.

We all know the rate at which technology changes. Designs without crawlspaces, access points, and conduit to change with the times are tough to deal with. We need the space to run cable and cords and the space to work on them. More baffling than a lack of space is a design with inadequate electrical outlets in the right places. Retrofitting for technology requires many hours and more money.

Mike Anderson
Director of theResurgence.com for Mars Hill Church
Churches try to sell happiness with fake smiley stock photography. When I used to do marketing with megachurches, I was told to only use pictures of "someone I'd want to be, or be with." A false sense of perfection will produce a shallow community that values appearances at the expense of deep relationships where Christians lay their sin on the table and help each other honor God with their whole lives.

Cameron Smith
Graphic Designer at Christ’s Church of the Valley
Heroes. Desperate Households. God’s Incredibles. The Office. Extreme Makeover: Life Edition. One of my biggest pet peeves about graphic design within the Christian church is our never-ending quest to ride the coattails of pop culture and chalk it up to cultural relevance. Who says we have to copy culture to be relevant? When did we go wrong with this whole concept? I believe that the Christian church should be setting trends instead of following them. We should be engaging culture instead of copying it. It’s hard to believe that the church has gotten away with this bad habit for so long and even harder to believe that the habit will ever be broken. The Christian church has a responsibility to be innovators, not duplicators.

Aubrey McGowan
Worship and Middle School Pastor at Hope Fellowship
Why do churches put fake stock photos on their websites (my church included)? I mean, are the people at our church not photogenic enough or PC enough to populate the pages of our Internet homes? I know that some will say we are just protecting the privacy of individuals or avoiding putting people up there only to have them leave the church the next week. But whom are we kidding? Our church people don't look like that. They are imperfect, weird looking, blended, and just plain crazy sometimes, but they are also our friends, our family, and the real people that make up our unique cultures. Do we want to be transparent to our community, or will we continue to put up plastic Polaroids of people that misrepresent us? Let's see some jeans with holes in them and tattoos!

Become A Better Designer Now

Learn Your Apps
The Internet offers an endless supply of video training and step-by-step tutorials, so you don’t have any excuses for not knowing the ins and outs of applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, etc. Get a Lynda.com membership or bookmark PSDtuts.com; whatever you do, spend some time and learn to use the tools at your disposal.

Study Design
Design theorists know how and why colors, elements, typography, and imagery work together, so should you. A lot of design knowledge has been accumulated in the last 100 years alone, and you’re remiss if you don’t familiarize yourself with that knowledge. The best “new school” designers are diligent students of the “old school.” Besides, how can you know how groundbreaking you are until you know what ground was laid and broken before you arrived? Let Amazon.com and your local library be your friends.

Sharpen Your Eye
Technical skill isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. How many painters could paint a more lifelike landscape than Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”? A ton. The streets of every tourist town are lined with painters or illustrators who are technically skilled. Van Gogh’s eyes, not his hands, made him great. Artists see the world in unique ways and then create art so they can tell others what they see. Artists see emotion, color, texture, movement, and depth where everyone else just sees a quaint European village, an old guitarist, or a bowl of fruit on a table.

Listen
What does your client hope to communicate to their audience through your design? If you don’t know, either you haven’t been asking the right questions or you haven’t listened for the answers. (Or perhaps you have a confused client, which is a whole other can of worms. Good luck.) Aesthetically pleasing design that reflects the wrong vision and mission isn’t great design; it’s just pretty.

Collect Inspiration
Designate a folder (either tangible or digital) your Inspiration folder. Collect examples of design and art that inspire and challenge you, and then browse through your folder from time to time. Determine what you like and dislike about each of the examples you’ve amassed and apply those same standards to your work. Like it or not, everyone has influences. The least you can do is be intentional about your influences and ensure that you’re influenced by the best of what’s around.

Invite Critique
Few people achieve greatness in a vacuum. The rest of us need to be challenged and informed by people whose opinions we trust. Find people who are willing to offer you thoughtful, honest criticism and make the most of those relationships. Rather than defend your work, engage them in dialogue about their reactions to your design choices.