💸 Fast & Affordable Design for Youth Ministries: 4 Budget-Friendly Tools 🚀

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📅 "1 Month Done for You Social Media Posting Tool"
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🎥LEVEL UP YOUR YOUTUBE GEAR FOR UNDER $100

https://www.hybridministry.xyz/articles/youtubestarterkit

DESCRIPTION

Are you in need of a fast and affordable logo design for your youth ministries? Look no further! In this ultimate guide, we will unveil 4 creative tools that will help you create the perfect logo without breaking the bank. Whether you're leading a youth group, organizing an event, or starting an outreach program, having a captivating logo and graphic design is crucial. It not only represents the identity of your youth ministry but also leaves a lasting impression on your target audience. So let's dive into the world of logo design tools!

Our first recommendation is PowerPoint or Google Slides. Yes, you heard it here first. You can create stunning graphics through a program like PowerPoint, and if your church doesn't pay for PowerPoint, you can pivot over and utilize Google Slides for absolutely free.

The 2nd-4th Tools are available in the next videos in the playlist where we'll uncover the world of...
•Canva
•Adobe Express
•Instagram Stories Editor

Explore these 4 creative tools and let your imagination run wild, as you craft a logo that truly

🆓 FREEBIES 🆓
📅 "1 Month Done for You Social Media Posting Tool"
https://hybrid-ministry-40060036.hubspotpagebuilder.com/free-hybrid-ministry-e-book

😨 "Have I already Ruined my TikTok Account?"
https://www.hybridministry.xyz/articles/ebook

📹 "Adobe Premiere Pro Presets for Animating Layers"
https://share.hsforms.com/1VL1oWwWwQ82PLwsPFkPITgnumis

🛠️TOOLS
Some of the below links are affilate links in which we do recieve a small commission based on your purchase or use of products
//YOUTUBE STARTER KIT FOR UNDER $100
https://www.hybridministry.xyz/articles/youtubestarterkit

AUTO POD
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TRY REV.COM FOR TRANSCRIBING
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👉 STAY CONNECTED
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@clasonnick
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TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clasonnick
Website: https://www.hybridministry.xyz

📓SHOWNOTES
//SHOWNOTES & TRANSCRIPTS
http://www.hybridministry.xyz/063

//FREE COMMERCIAL USE PHOTO BACKGROUNDS
http://www.unsplash.com
https://shop.churchmotiongraphics.com/landing/free-stills

🕰️TIMECODES
00:00-00:51 Doing Graphic Design on a Budget
00:51-06:07 Tool #1: Powerpoint is a mostly free optionf or youth pastors to do Graphic Design
06:07-13:36 Objection Your Honor: Powerpoint is not a design tool!
13:36-16:05 The Shadow Side of Powerpoint: What it cannot do
16:05-17:27 Tool #2: Canva

🕰️TRANSCRIPT
Try Transcribing for Yourself at Rev.Com
rev.pxf.io/R5nDOa

Nick Clason (00:00):
Are you a youth pastor or a youth mystery leader looking to make incredible, amazing graphic design, but you don't have the skill the know-how, and you're also not looking to break the bank with your budget? Well, in this video series, we are going to be looking at four incredible resources that will not only save you time, but are also going to save you money. You can make some of those amazing crispy graphics using these completely free resources and make sure that you hang out and that you stick around all the way to the very end of the video. Because not only are we going to help you level up your design in this video, but I have a resource that will help you level up your design and then implement it into your social media. And I have a sure fighter resource in the description to help you with that as well that we're going to be dropping at the very end of the episode.

Nick Clason (00:50):
So make sure that you stick around. Well, hey everybody. Welcome to the Hybrid Ministry Show. If you and I haven't had a chance to meet yet, my name is Nick. I'm a youth pastor in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and I've been in youth ministry going on 13 years. And when I started in youth ministry, I made graphics myself. I started completely from scratch with absolutely no idea of what I was doing. These are some of the graphics that I used to make, but more recently, these are some of the graphics that I have come up with. And I've never taken a design class. I have simply just hacked my way through learning one little technique at a time. And so in a lot of ways to go from this over here to this, it took a lot of just work time and time again putting the reps.

Nick Clason (01:37):
In fact, in our most recent video we talked about fonts. And fonts are one of the key things that can level up your design going from the default install fonts of the things on your computer to taking some stuff that have been created by designers and implementing that into your design. So if that's something you're interested in, make sure you check out our most recent video on fonts. But in this video, we're going to be talking about a completely free tool for most of us that is going to allow you to really level up your design. And that tool that I'm talking about is PowerPoint. Now, you might be thinking PowerPoint, what I thought you said it was free. Now, first of all, the caveat is PowerPoint's free if your church will pay for it. And here's the good news is most churches are still loving themselves, some Microsoft office from the 1990s. And so most churches have a subscription to Microsoft Office and PowerPoint. But don't worry if you don't have access to PowerPoint, Google Slides, which is completely free through Google Drive and using the Google Suite offers most of the same functionality that PowerPoint has to offer. So what I was early on in youth ministry, like I said, I was creating some of these graphics, but I started realizing that PowerPoint did have some limitations. And so we'll get to those in just a minute. But the limitations were not

Nick Clason (02:59):
Me to do some of the things that I was wanting to do. And honestly, what I would do is I'd get into PowerPoint and I'd just putz around and I'd fiddle around and I'd learn different things and I'd learn different tools that the resource had. But I would realize, man, there's some things that are just not hacking it for me. And what I did was I started going to my church and I was like, Hey, listen, great, I love PowerPoint, but can I please upgrade to something more? Next level. And honestly, the next level thing in this is Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects. Those are for video and stuff. By the way, I have a complete playlist on leveling up those skills if that's something that you want to do. If you want to go to the next level, I have a complete playlist of how to learn those crash course from beginning to end.

Nick Clason (03:48):
Check that out in the description. However, my church didn't let me upgrade. They were like, no, we're not going to do it. We need to be good stewards. We need to be good managers of the money that God has given us. And they wouldn't let me upgrade my software from PowerPoint. And honestly, PowerPoint wasn't even a software that they gave to me. PowerPoint was a software that I inherited because our church was a member of the Office Suite. That's just what, and every church I've ever been to since then has always had a Microsoft Office membership. They use Outlook, they calendar through Outlook. They use Microsoft Teams. I personally dislike Microsoft in so many ways. I am a Google person if I can do it. I like to use docs and sheets and slides. But the one thing out of all of Microsoft, I prefer Gmail to Outlook.

Nick Clason (04:51):
I prefer Slack to teams. I prefer Google Docs to Microsoft Word. I prefer Google Sheet to Microsoft Excel. But the one thing in the Microsoft Suite that I actually like and that I actually use is PowerPoint. And I think that it does offer some incredible functionality. And so I want to talk to you a little bit about that because when I was denied my ability to move on to Photoshop and the other programs that I wanted to, it forced me to stay in PowerPoint. I worked at that church for five years. It forced me to stay in PowerPoint and keep learning and making it the best that I could make it, even with the limitations that it did have. And so if you're looking to level up your design skills for free, and you already have Microsoft PowerPoint installed on your computer or you don't, you can jump over to Google Slides, you can do a lot of graphic design stuff with PowerPoint, and I'm going to show you how and show you some of the unique and individual features that exist in a PowerPoint file.

Nick Clason (05:52):
So let's check it out and let's dive into ways that you can level up your design skills for mostly completely free if you have PowerPoint already installed or if not, you can jump over to Google Slides and do most of that same stuff there. And let's look at some of the features that it has to offer. So you might be thinking like isn't PowerPoint for presenting slides? And at its most basic level, yes, and I think that's a lot of the reasons why people don't think that PowerPoint can actually be a design resource or design tool. But in its most basic form and its most basic level, everything is built into layers, which similarly is what Adobe Photoshop is built into. So if you have a circle and a square, you can have the square go over the circle and it can be on top of the circle.

Nick Clason (06:38):
So if you put any sort of thing into PowerPoint, you can change the order of the way that it lays out. So one thing can be on bottom, one thing can be on top. You can send something to the back, you can bring something forward. And so in addition to that, once you get things going, you can change the design canvas. And so honestly, listen, here's a little tweak. Here's a little hack. But in most cases, when I am creating a P D F, I bring it into PowerPoint. Here's a little tweak, my completely free resource. I designed every individual page of my one month ebook that I'm giving away. By the way, link in the show notes. I designed all the individual pages in Photoshop, but then I saved those as JPEGs. I brought them into PowerPoint, then I exported it from there. As a P D F, it's one of my favorite little tools, one of my favorite little hacks.

Nick Clason (07:33):
If your church runs off of pro presenter, which is what a lot of churches are running off of, I bring everything into PowerPoint. And then when I export it, I click file save as jpeg and save all the slides in the slideshow as a jpeg. And then doing that caused everything to be in a jpeg. It drops it into a folder perfect for PowerPoint or perfect for Purpose Center, I should say. You give that folder to your tech team or you bring it over to your computer and you just command a control a select every file in there and drop it into prayer presenter. So it's a great tool to do some design stuff, but it also can help take you to the finish line of your presentation moment right before you get up to speak in youth ministry, right before you get up to present.

Nick Clason (08:19):
That's how you do it because most people aren't presenting in churches anymore, at least the ones I've been in the last 10 years aren't using PowerPoint anymore. They're using something like pro Presenter to be able to more seamlessly integrate their songs and their worship and videos and all those types of things. And I think that Pro Presenter is a great tool, but PowerPoint helps you get it to a pro presenter ready state. So you can format things, you can edit the sizes of anything in PowerPoint. You can make text boxes, you can make it big for the whole screen. You can make it smaller. You can adjust the font size. So it gets up, it gets down. And just like in our last video with the fonts, if you have different fonts installed, this is where in PowerPoint you can play around with different fonts format where they are.

Nick Clason (09:02):
You literally just click and drag. Like in Photoshop, you got to go over and find the layer. You can in PowerPoint, you literally just click your cursor on the text box that you want, you move it, you adjust it, you put it exactly where you want first. You get over, you design your slide sides and formatting. You create your background. You can create the background, then apply it to the entire slide, the entire slide show. And then every single slide after that can have that exact same background. Or you can insert an image and have a different background or a different feel or flavor or flare to every single thing. You can adjust the background, you can increase the opacity, you can make it darker. You can drop shadows in the words. There are a lot of powerful tools. And so if you just think I did, I need to upgrade to Photoshop.

Nick Clason (09:49):
Don't get me wrong, there are some amazing things in Photoshop that will help you level up your design. And I'm going to get to what some of those PowerPoint limitations are. But you can do a lot in PowerPoint and frankly, it won't break the bank because you're probably already paying for it. And again, if not, go see what Google Slides has to offer because it can offer a lot of the same things. And then the third thing is it's not going to kill you on time. It is not a massive learning curve. It's pretty straightforward. And the difference, if you've ever edited a graphic in Microsoft Word, that will hate you and you will hate it because you'll move something and it'll reformat all the other words and you just got this jumbled mess. But PowerPoint is a lot more intuitive. It's you move one layer and it does what you think it should do when you move it.

Nick Clason (10:39):
And after I moved away from that church and moved to a different church, I did in fact get the Adobe Creative Cloud, obviously as I've been using it. But since then, that was about eight years ago, seven years ago. I think at this point, PowerPoint has introduced a lot of actually new features that I really liked that it didn't have before. So one of the features, for example, that I didn't really wasn't able to do was a lot of times you'll see graphics with things cut out. So if you have this picture of me right now and I cut around myself, that's a PowerPoint thing. Or I'm sorry, that's a Photoshop thing. You cut out layers, you cut out the background, it's just me. But now you drop a image into PowerPoint and they actually have a remove background type of feature in PowerPoint. It's not that great.

Nick Clason (11:31):
There are some limitations to it. It just doesn't look as crispy sometimes as a Photoshop thing, but it does have it. And so if you have a subject on a completely white background or something that's really obvious, it's really easy to tear that out. Another feature that I love that I use all the time is when I am teaching the Bible and notes, a lot of times I will underline things and they have a draw feature. So you go in, you can create, select your pen style, pen size and then color. And then you just go and you just click draw and you just literally annotate right there on the screen. And what it does is it creates that underline or circle or whatever. It's just an individual layer. So you can make it bigger, you can make it smaller, you can copy and paste it onto the next slide if you like, the formatting and the size of it.

Nick Clason (12:15):
And so those are all new things that have come about in the last few years that I really like about PowerPoint that I actually use a lot. Also, don't forget that if you are going to go find different backgrounds, a couple of different websites that you need to know about the links to them will be in the description or the show notes. But unsplash.com is a completely free royalty free website that you can get graphics and photos that people have taken. You can use that. Also. C M G Create is church motion, graphic website with backgrounds for worship. But they will also give you their stills, like the still graphics of the motion graphics away for free. So if you're looking for a good background, check those websites out. If you're looking for fonts, don't forget the video that I talked about last week because fonts is one of the keys and graphics.

Nick Clason (13:05):
And then to just bring those two together from either cmg create in Unsplash, and then the fonts put 'em together. You can do all of that in PowerPoint. And so that is why I love the resource of PowerPoint so far. Listen though, if you've gotten value out of this video, I would love to encourage you to subscribe, share with the friend and turn on the notification bill so that every single time we drop a new video, let's move on to talk about the limitations, the downside, the shadow side of PowerPoint. So you can create things in PowerPoint, obviously, as we've been talking about. And then when you go to export it, you can export it in just about any file that you want imaginable. Now, however, when you bring a subject into Photoshop, for example, if you were to bring a picture of me right now into Photoshop, cut me out, I could export that with a transparent background, and then when I go to pull that up and open later, it will not have, the background will not exist.

Nick Clason (14:08):
So whatever background, if I were to go to Unsplash and get a mountain background and then bring me into that, I would be in front of the mountain background. You can cut me out in PowerPoint, you can export me in PowerPoint as a P N G, which is the file format that you're going to need to do to not have the background. However, whatever that canvas is in PowerPoint, it will still be there. Okay, so if there's a white background, I can't get rid of that white background because PowerPoint is still a presentation software first and foremost, and that's the way they're thinking. Again, bad Microsoft. And so that's one of the limitations. That's one of the things that caused me to really try and push for getting is that the end of the world in youth ministry graphics? No. And if you're just a youth pastor just trying to get by and you're like, bro, I just don't have time.

Nick Clason (14:58):
I don't want to learn how to do a whole new thing in Photoshop or whatever, dude, I get it. Totally. All right. But that cutout tool is one of the things that really levels up Photoshop or if you want to create circle graphics and just make a circle and then the rest of it be transparent around it, you can create a circle graphic in PowerPoint. You can make a circle. You can format the background of that to be like a picture, like a mountain picture or a gradient picture or whatever you want it to be. But there's still going to be the white around it, whatever the slide size is, that slide size, that white, that doesn't go away. And that's one of the major, major limitations in it. That's one of the key things that doesn't allow it to be a absolutely next level feature.

Nick Clason (15:42):
Also, it does have the remove background feature, but like I said, it's just, it's not as crispy as Adobe. And so like I said, if you are ready to make the investment, make the jumper, you already have link in the description of our Adobe, both Photoshop premiere and editing and Premiere for long form and short form videos. All that three part playlist in our series, make sure you go check it out. So PowerPoint is a really powerful tool. It is one that you can use anytime all the time. And if you're just looking to get by, you're like, Hey, we're going to play dodge ball and I guess slide for dodge ball. You can get in there, you can find a cool font, you can go find some dodge ball, like clip art or a dodge ball style background on Unsplash, and you can create yourself a Dodge ball graphic, drop it in pro presenter, and you are good to go.

Nick Clason (16:31):
And it is going to be quick, fast, seamless, and easy, and I want to recommend that you check it out. But if you're looking for a super duper powerful tool that is going to be Canva, and guess what? Here's the deal. Canva is the next video coming up, so I want to make sure that you guys check that out. They offer the pro version to all nonprofits for completely free. So we're going to show you how you can go ahead and get that. So make sure you click that link right here in that video. Also want to let you know that if you're just like, man, why do we need all this for youth ministry? We want to help you level up not only your design, but also your social media. So check this video out, why every student ministry needs a strong social media presence. And be sure to grab the ebook with a link in the description, and we will catch you next time. We're making digital discipleship easy and possible. Don't forget to stay hybrid, subscribe, share with a friend, and we'll talk to you next time.