Lone Duck Designer & Sermon Title Slides

This is the third option. Added texture to the picture, changed the eye color and levels.

This is the second one I did. The first one felt busy, and I wanted to see if the design would work with some negative space.

This is the first version I did. Sure, there were lots of text arrangements and such that I tried first,
but this is the first one I thought might actually work.

So... yeah, sermon title slides. They're the weekly challenge at this job. Sometimes they're fun, but sometimes they're so much of a challenge that I'm right up to the wire working on them. I wish we had a communication team who could help me develop looks for various things - a sort of collaborative environment, but I'm the lone duck designer around here.

When the new pastor came on board, we agreed that it would be better to use the SD image dimensions for the sermon slides since they were being shown on an SD projector. I'd been making everything in HD as per the new media director's request (he was trying to make less of a work load for me - bless his heart), but the HD slides would get stretched and skewed when displayed in the main worship center's projections. I tried to explain that if he would make sure that the slide was set not to fit to frame that it would display fine, but there isn't exactly a check box in ProPresenter that allows you to change the default import settings. You have to go in and change each image's settings and that takes time none of us really have on Sunday mornings.

Anyhow - this week's AM sermon is "His Temptation." I adapted something from Graceway Media for that one so it went together really quickly, but the PM one about our temptation has been more of a challenge. At first the title was going to be "Tackling Temptations: Be Killing Sin or It Will Be Killing You." The last part is a reasonably famous John Owen quote, but the title is forever long and when I began to work on the particulars of the layout, I realized that a football tackle was a tame idea compared to the idea of killing sin. Somewhere along the line while I was looking for images I could use, thinking about synonyms and various connotations and puns that could possibly be developed into something interesting visually, I happened upon several images of green snakes. Yeah, they're creepy and dangerous if you consider that a bite from one of those green pit vipers can be deadly...

Anyway, that pushed me off in a different direction. I shortened the title with hopes that the boss will be ok once he sees it on the slide, but we'll see. The image of the snake may be too provocative, but when I started looking for snakes for this slide, I was looking for an image of a snake's mouth - wide and zooming towards the viewer as if to strike. The images of the docile snakes in the above images are pretty tame in comparison to that original idea. If I had more time I might would have painted one, but one of these will have to do considering the time constraints, unless he cringes and says he'd prefer something different.