Constantly creating fresh and original design resources for your church can be difficult, especially if you are on a budget and are unable to afford to purchase a lot of church stock photos and graphics. Here are six websites which offer completely free design resources.
stock.xchng
This is my favourite free stock photography site. There are stacks of quality high-res photos and graphics available for you to download for free. Most are available under a fairly permissive standard licence, although check the terms of each photo as some require attribution. The biggest downside of the site is the search feature – it can take some time to find what you are after, but once you get there it is worth it.
Google Web Fonts
Google Web Fonts contains a large library of fonts available of use online and offline. Once you have selected a set of fonts you can grab the CSS to install in on your website, or download the whole collection if you want to use it on your own computer. There are a lot of different fonts to select from, and the search feature makes it easier to narrow down your selection.
Dan Stevers
Dan produces amazing animated clips for use in churches, and also happens to provide some for free. There is a great variety of video, animations, loops and still graphics on his website. Some of the collections provide still graphics as well as the videos, so these can be used across multiple platforms and mediums.
Triple Wide Media
Triple Wide Media have entered a relatively new market – the triple screen content market. As some churches experiment with blended images, environmental mapping, LED walls and multi-screen arrangements the need for content at very wide resolutions as emerged. While they do charge for most content, you can get a few for free. Even if you only have one screen, you could still use a scaled down version of their content.
Church Stage Design Ideas
The graphics are slick, and now you need to work on the actual appearance of your stage. This website has countless ideas, many of which are achievable with low budgets. I’ll be honest – I’ve never implemented one of these ideas before, but I get very excited by the potential of doing that sometime.
re:think worship
An essential blog to browse through if you are looking for ideas and suggestions to use within your church, particularly in a worship context.