4 Slide Design Tips for Worship

Design­ing the slides that present your con­tent dur­ing wor­ship times is really impor­tant. They make or break the atten­tion that your con­gre­ga­tion will pay, and if they look tacky, it’ll be noticed. There are a whole host of needs and styles out there, and each church will be dif­fer­ent in its approach. Here are a few generic tips for design­ing slides for worship.

1. Find a great font:

Con­sis­tency is key. Make sure that your fonts are con­sis­tent from slide to slide. It takes a lot of excep­tional cre­ativ­ity to make dif­fer­ent type­faces work, and more often than not, if it’s exe­cuted badly it’ll just end up as a big dis­trac­tion. Also, make sure that font sizes are con­sis­tent — 40 point works well as a catch all for most peo­ple. Sans serif fonts work really well, as they’re easy to read and also easy on the eyes.

2. Make sure the lyrics flow well:

Some songs are eas­ier than oth­ers in this regard, but you should make sure that your slides log­i­cally break up lyrics into phrases that make sense. Lyrics are writ­ten to flow, and putting line breaks in awk­ward places will lead peo­ple to switch off or strug­gle to pay atten­tion to what the song says. Make sure your lines are struc­tured in a way that mir­rors the musi­cal­ity and phras­ing of the lyrics. It’s also good to restrict the num­ber of lines per slide — 5 should be your max­i­mum because any more than that will feel clut­tered and busy.

3. Style and for­mat your lyrics:

There’s a few schools of thought here. Many churches will remove as much punc­tu­a­tion as they can from songs, keep­ing only the com­mas, full stops or phras­ing that directly inform the singer of how the song flows. Other churches try to empha­sise the poetic devices employed by song­writ­ers by using punc­tu­a­tion. This is a mat­ter for you to deter­mine with your pas­tor or offi­cer, but nev­er­the­less, all of your slides should be spell checked. It’s also good to make sure ref­er­ences to God are cap­i­talised. Lyrics pre­set the best when cen­tered ver­ti­cally and hor­i­zon­tally, and it’s also a good idea to put a light out­line around your text so it pops out against its background.

4. Look for suit­able backgrounds:

This can vary as well. Depend­ing on your con­text, you might just use solid colours, or busy pat­terns, mov­ing motion graph­ics or still pho­tos. Try and match the mood of the slide to the mood of the song and con­gre­ga­tion. Just be sure to keep the focus on what needs to be seen, and work in sub­tlety. Jar­ring changes in colour or style really break atten­tion, so make sure your slide flow pro­gresses logically.
 

There’s a ton of free graph­ics avail­able online. Our Exter­nal Resources page lists a few of our favourites, but there are plenty of free and sub­scrip­tion based ser­vices out there. When design­ing your slides, stick­ing to these guide­lines will ensure that you have engag­ing and easy to read con­tent, con­tribut­ing to a great wor­ship experience.

• training
• design and visual media
• graphic design

Article written by: Kris Singh

Kris joined Creative Ministries team in late 2014, bringing with him a Degree in Media Studies and Sociology, as well as experience as a worship leader, musician, writer and producer. He is passionate about advancing the cause of creativity in The Salvation Army and seeing people discover their God-given creative potential.

All articles by Kris Singh