Good Design Matters

Show Notes

In this episode

Graphic design helps communicate clearly, and it helps deliver your message well. Yet, most churches don't have the budget to hire a full-time, in-house graphic designer (there are people who get full degrees in graphic design!). Instead, design often falls to a person who has lots of other responsibilities, and little time to learn the art and science of graphic design. In this episode, we talk with Josh Starr, founder of Pixel Painters, about how your church can take its communications to the next level with improved graphic design.

Our guest

Josh Starr, Founder of Pixel Painters

Josh grew up a pastors kid, and that’s how he met his wife—Josh's dad was the Senior Pastor, and his future wife's dad was the Youth Pastor. After dating in high school and through college, they got married. Later, in 2013, the Starr's adopted their son, Isaac Lee Cole Staff, from Missouri. Soon after getting married, and long before Isaac became part of the family, and early in Josh's career, he had the pleasure to work with some Fortune 100 clients. One of those clients meant he was part of the team that built the e-commerce portion of Walmart.com. While that time was exciting, after a few years, Josh and his wife felt the Lord leading them to move across the country to be part of a church outside of Louisville, Kentucky. While serving at the church, Josh still had a passion for web development and graphic design, so he started a business that's allowed him to work with hundreds of businesses, ministries, and churches. In 2018, Josh started another business pixelpainters.co to help churches around the US with their graphic design needs. Josh found that most churches don’t have the budget to hire a full-time graphic designer on staff, but really would benefit from professional graphic design. Which is where we are today!

Links and resources

• Pixel Painters

• Article: "Church Graphic Design"

• Join the Church Juice community

• Support the work of Church Juice

Transcript

Jeanette Yates:

On this episode, we're having a conversation about graphic design in church communications. The truth is, good design matters, and we are here to help you recognize good design, but maybe even more importantly, to avoid bad design. Let's go.

Bryan Haley:

Hi, friends. Welcome to another episode of the Church Juice podcast, where we are here, energizing church communications. I'm your host, Bryan Haley, and I'm joined by Jeanette Yates.

Jeanette Yates:

Hey, that's me. Oh, my goodness. So this is going to be a fun episode because we mention graphic design in our episodes, Bryan, but we don't often get down to the actual design elements and why it's so important. So I'm excited today to bring on Josh Starr. He is the owner of Pixel Painters, which we will have him tell us all about here in a minute.

Just to let you know a little bit about him, he is a preacher's kid, grew up in the church, and then he went from preacher's kid to working with Fortune 100 clients, to serving a ministry with his wife. He's also the father of two wonderful children and he is passionate about helping churches with graphic design. In 2018, he started Pixel Painters and we're going to be letting him teach us about good graphic design today. So let's go ahead and jump on in.

Bryan Haley:

That's right. Welcome to the show, Josh.

Josh Starr:

Awesome. Thanks for having me, man. It's a blessing to be a part of this. I appreciate you guys.

Bryan Haley:

Absolutely. So you're a pastor's kid. You've been in ministry. How did you even get into design in the first place?

Josh Starr:

So growing up in the church as a pastor's kid, I saw a lot of the behind-the-scenes, and I swore that I'd never work in a church, honestly. I was like, "I'm not going to do it." So I went into Google for illustration and design down in Clearwater, Florida, and just loved the design side, and down there, there's a bunch of agencies. So I was blessed with getting a great job at a big agency doing illustration design. It was at the beginning of the eCommerce world and one of our big clients, I was building these illustrated, animated webpages for walmart.com and I just loved it. I absolutely loved doing this and I got to work with a ton of cool clients and a lot of their new product roll-outs.

But like everyone, I was young and I overworked for a couple of years. I was like, "Man, I love this so much." I was working so many hours that, at one point, I was newly married and I thought, "Man, what would it be like to work at a church at this point? What would going into ministry look like as a designer? I didn't know. I just thought you've got to be a pastor or a youth minister. I didn't know you could use illustration or design skills. So I found a job at a church up in Kentucky that needed a graphic designer or web designer, and so that was what got me back into the ministry at that point.

Jeanette Yates:

Yeah, I'm glad you made that turn to talk about how you got back into ministry because I was like, "How do you make that jump?" So you were working with this church as a graphic designer and then, in 2018, you decide to start Pixel Painters. I want you to tell us a little bit about what made you start that and how that whole process went.

Josh Starr:

Yeah, so like I said, I was working at this pretty large church because if you have a budget to hire a graphic designer and a whole creative team, you have to have enough members and a big enough budget to pay for that, and the church. So I think the church was around 8,000 members at that point. It was pretty large. So I worked with, there was probably 30 or 40 ministries a part of the church. So I got to work with ministry leaders and do their event graphics and website things and way-finding signs and the whole nine yards for graphic design.

When I left there to start my business, I realized that it's not just the big churches that need that help, it's the small churches, it's the medium churches, but those churches don't necessarily have the budget to hire a full-time person to sit at a desk. So it was this aha-moment in 2018 where I thought, there's all kinds of these subscription model services. If we did a subscription model and we split it across multiple churches, then it would be affordable for them. The risk for me was, can I get enough churches to do that subscription model to where I would absorb the cost of this full-time graphic designer and split the work? Smaller churches need the same quality, they have the same needs, communicating the gospel and communicating clearly, but they might not have 40 hours of work for a designer.

Jeanette Yates:

I think too when you're not a graphic designer, it's hard, even to use some of the tools they have out there to help non-graphic designer people like me do that. If you don't have that eye, if you don't have that training, it takes too much time and then you're not able to be in ministry as much as you'd like to because you're trying to figure out how to use some tools. So it's nice to have somewhere you can go to have that stuff done and done well.

Bryan Haley:

Let's dive into that a little bit more. You obviously work with a lot of churches through Pixel Painter and like Jeanette was just saying, a lot of churches or church designers or communicators, whatever their role is, they don't have that skill. So let's talk about design a little bit. Why is design so important, especially in the church? Why is design important in communications?

Josh Starr:

So I hear a lot from the churches we work with when we're doing projects, and you've probably heard this too, that you'll know it when you see it. It's this general feel of you know that good design communicates clearly. You know that it helps with your message. It helps get people to events. In a very practical sense, it helps deliver your message well. So as far as a good design, you know a good design when you see it and you know a bad design when you see it, but it's hard to teach that to a volunteer or teach it to a ministry leader, that it takes typography, it takes spacing. There's a lot on the study side that it takes to learn and work through, but for us, I always see us as a ministry partner alongside the church.

There's a lot of bad mojo out there with the designers with big egos, and it's like, "This is my design and if you don't like it, then I'm leaving" type of mentality. So we want to communicate the gospel clearly. We want to communicate on behalf of the churches so that they get people listening and hearing scripture well, that they get people understanding when and where events are, but ultimately, we want to be a partner with them. We don't want to choose a design that's too complicated, that doesn't ultimately deliver what it's supposed to, and it's supposed to communicate clearly.

Jeanette Yates:

So a good design communicates clearly, gets people to do whatever action you want them to do, come to the event or find the nursery, whatever. What is a common mistake or a bad design?

Josh Starr:

Certain personalities like to put a lot of text in things. So they like to say, "All right, let's just fill this." If it's an event flyer, let's fill it with everything because they think everyone's going to need all this information, but the point is that entry-level into the event. So for event graphics per se, it could be, let's do a whole flyer and it's just a ton of text in there. So that's a big pitfall of over-communicating.

Jeanette Yates:

That is probably the biggest problem I see. You were saying it's one of the ones that you see all the time. How can they stop making that error because I know this happened when I was working at my church, we would say, "Ugh, this had too much. Next time we're not going to do this.' And then it was like, "Oh, but we have..." So how do we stop doing that?

Josh Starr:

I was listening to a podcast this morning and he had an analogy of juggling. He was talking about, he might be able to juggle three balls at once, but when you get into juggling four or five or six, it's hard to not start dropping balls. So as we communicate these things, put yourself in that either visitor or member shoes. Have some empathy and understand that they have multiple balls that they're juggling already, and so when you're communicating, they're not going to have the time to read through this entire flyer or whatever it is to get the purpose.

Just choose one action step. So if that's an event, say, "Who is this event for? What's and where is it?" Then the visual style can grab them and get them to look at it initially, and then the text communicates who is it for and where is it. Then let them decide. If they want more information, you can, of course, put more information maybe on the website or something, but for that initial attention grabber, you're not going to grab their attention if it looks like a huge page of text or a book report or something. So don't over-communicate and just think of one action item.

Jeanette Yates:

I was glad when the QR code came back into style and we got to start using those on flyers again. Then I thought, "Oh, is that a no-no?"

Josh Starr:

There's all kinds of different churches. It depends on who the audience is. Whenever I communicate with churches, if you're using the QR code, make sure the audience that it's intended for knows how to use it otherwise, the purpose of the QR code has failed miserably. So it depends. If it's a younger audience, then yeah, go for it. If it's an older one that don't know what it is, then the ultimate purpose is going to be lost.

Bryan Haley:

Yeah, I think that was a good point though. We talk about this a lot, that everything you do needs to have a clear next step or a call to action. As you're designing stuff, we're thinking through, we talked about events a little bit, but when you're designing a flyer, what's the next step? Probably, it's not just showing up, you want them to go to your website to get more information or to register, whatever. So simplifying what you do and think through that next step is important, and I'm glad that you pointed that out.

What are some principles or just foundational things that could help a church communicator grab hold of their design work? Like you were talking a little bit a few minutes ago, a lot of people have so many things going on. So if my job is administrator, but I also have to do design work, what are some key principles that would help me improve my work?

Josh Starr:

One of the most helpful things that I can share is what I call the whiplash effect, and you guys might have heard this before in different areas, is when we communicate for churches, the visual style, the branding, how it makes the audience feel, is one thing, and whenever this visitor or this member or whoever comes to the event or they come to a weekend service, they might feel a completely different thing. So the whiplash effect is, say your design is just terrible, just the worst design of all time, but then they come to the event or they come to a weekend service and it's a very well-produced, very friendly, just a great connection. So the whiplash effect is, it was completely the opposite of what that person saw. So what you want to do is you want to have a consistent strategy and feel for the design and how this person experiences things in person.

I know you guys have probably talked through this a ton as authenticity is key, especially as we communicate these things. So you want to be authentic in a way that's consistent. You want great graphics that communicate, but also the inverse. If they come to a weekend service and it's a disaster and they don't feel welcomed, then it's almost like, "I feel like I got cheated. They got me here, but it's not consistent." So the whiplash effect is, don't do that, be consistent in how you communicate.

Jeanette Yates:

Yeah, we talk a lot about that when we talk about website and your plan-a-visit page or whatever, or the graphics that you post on social media have to reflect your church. There is also this debate about, should you use stock photos or not. And it's like, well, if you have to, you can, but make sure that it looks like it represents what's going on at your church. So that's a good point. I like that. I just was thinking, as you were talking about, how many times people show up expecting one thing and getting another based on what the flyer said, or maybe even you say when it looks like this, and so that's a good point.

At Church Juice, we have a ton of church communicators following us and listening to this podcast, and hanging out with us in the Church Juice Facebook group, and they wear a lot of hats like we all do. So quality design and proving your design skills is often, they're just like, "I just need to get it done. I don't have the time to do any better than I'm doing." As people are trying to figure all this out, when would somebody need to offload this and connect with someone or something like a Pixel Painter? When would they need to say, "Okay, this is at the bottom of my to-do list. Instead of keeping it there, I should just hand it over and ask for help through a Pixel Painter," for example?

Josh Starr:

Oftentimes, a church will come to us and it's either the senior pastor if it's a small church, the communication director, it's someone that's doing way too many things. So they come to us and say, "Hey, I can do design. Maybe I even went to school or I like doing it, but I just have so many responsibilities that I'm not giving it the attention that it deserves. I just can't focus on everything else." So most of the time, for us, it's a decision of allowing that leader or pastor to get back to what they enjoy doing and what they need to be doing. Offloading the design, helps them get back to where their true calling is, where their heart is.

We love doing what we do. We're passionate about design and serving the church and coming alongside the church. This is our passion, and we love to fit in with churches that need the design. Every church needs design help, for sure, but we love to fit in with the pastors that are just overworked and they're adding graphic design to their plate and they're just pulling their hair out saying, "I don't have time for everything." A lot of these churches, we save them dozens of hours a month. There's one pastor we worked with where he'd do a sermon series for the senior pastor and he'd spend 20 hours a week doing these graphics just because he liked doing it, but he was very particular, and helping him save that much time was a huge blessing.

Jeanette Yates:

So sometimes it's not even about, "I can't do it," but it's like "I can't spend this much time doing it." So that's a good point too. People like me need a designer because we do not know what we are doing, but some people like it and they want to do it, but they can get in that rut of spending so much time doing it. So that's a good point.

Bryan Haley:

I have one more question, just to wrap it up. What's next for Pixel Painter? What are you guys up to?

Josh Starr:

We are slowly growing. I just brought on a video guy, and we are adding video services to our list. Right now, we do any sort of graphics, so sermon series graphics, event graphics, anything that's digitally designed. Now we have social media, website management, and video. For us, we want to be the creative agency for churches. We just love serving churches. We view this as our ministry to the local church. The Lord willing, hopefully, we can bless a lot of churches along the way. So that's upcoming.

Bryan Haley:

Thanks for listening to the Church Juice podcast. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe wherever you're listening. It would mean a lot if you took the time to leave us a review too. That helps other leaders find the podcast so we can continue to serve and support churches by energizing church communications. By the way, we'll continue today's discussion in our Facebook group. You can find the link to our group along with the show notes at churchjuice.com/podcast.

Jeanette Yates:

The Church Juice podcast is a listener-supported production of ReFrame Ministries, a family of programs designed to help you see your whole life reframed by God's gospel story. Church Juice is produced by Bryan Haley, with post-production by Mill Media Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For more information about Church Juice, visit churchjuice.com. For more information on ReFrame Ministries and our family of programs, visit reframeministries.org.