Better design

I’ve had a little series tucked away in the back of my head (and several drafts written already) for the past 6-7 months. I decided that I would actually post/write these during the week between Christmas and New Year. It’s a holiday and so many people are on vacation. Since this is a Children’s Ministry blog, this series isn’t core to the topic (although I do believe it relates… which I’ll explain later), so I’ll plant to post these when most of my readers aren’t all reading. This way the content is here if you’re looking for it but not annoying the readers who are just looking for ministry related content.

So, here’s a little series on design.

I’m by no means a professional graphic designer. I did teach myself photoshop about 8 years ago (and continuing to learn) and I’ve dabbled in design both or fun and work ever since. When I was between ministry jobs, I actually made a little income from design work as well. So, I know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to design something without getting a lot of input from trusted sources (many of those are you!).

When working on my masters (Masters in Curriculum and Instruction) a few years back, one of the classes I took was a design class. I’ll explain why I had to take this class as a part of an education masters in my next post. Although I didn’t learn all that much from the course, the book required for the course transformed me as a designer. It confronted all the ways I designed in the past and helped me learn a few basic design rules I didn’t really know about. In this series, I’m going to share the four rules of design I learned from this book. At the end of the series, I’ll link to the book so you can pick up your own copy, which I suggest you should.