Apart from a substandard worship team on stage, the 2 biggest distracters during the worship session are:
- Badly mixed overall sound
- Onscreen lyrics that are not easy to read
Here are some tips to take care of potential distraction-2:
1. Font
There are fonts which are glitzy and look hip and then there are fonts, which are clear and easy to read. Here is where we need to understand ‘serif’ fonts and ‘sans serif’ fonts.
Serif fonts have horizontal lines (or little feet) like Times New Roman.
Non-serif fonts do not have those horizontal lines like Verdana.
I prefer non-serif fonts because the characters are well spaced out and easier to read especially when looking at brief chunks of text like song lyrics.
White colored text on dark backgrounds are especially easier on the eye when displayed onscreen. Opensong, the free worship projection software even has the option of setting border for the fonts. See the sample images below – notice the black border around the text making it readable regardless of the background color or image?
This border size can be increased or decreased according to user preference in Opensong.
With respect to size of the font, 34 is the minimum recommendation and can go up to 40+ depending on the venue, screen-size, distance between the last pew and the screen and so on.
2. Background
When creating visuals for song lyrics, readability is priority 1, everything else is secondary. Contrasting the colors between font with background works best any day. Plain single color worship backgrounds are the safest. If you still want to experiment with lyric related pictures as worship backgrounds, that’s OK too as long as they don’t draw too much attention away from the lyrics.
What about video worship backgrounds then? Well, I’ve never used them and I don’t see great enough value to try them out either. At the risk of sounding ancient, I’d say motion worship backgrounds can be a needless distraction during worship. Maybe if the song is so familiar that people don’t really have to look at the lyrics to sing along, a video background could be used.
To repeat, readability is priority 1.
3. Formatting
People read from left to right unless your congregation worships in Arabic. See these two examples – it takes time to get used to the placement of the lines before actually starting to read the lyrics:
Also, why should the song title be bigger than the lyrics? People need to read the song more than its title. Also, why should the title be placed at the top of the slide taking up precious reading space on the screen? These I believe are carry-over habits from using Powerpoint or other similar software before switching over to a worship software.
See these two examples of ideal slides for worship:
- 4 or 5 lines per slide
- Song title unobtrusively placed at the bottom
- Left aligned text for comfortable reading
- Font type and size chosen more for readability than jazz
Do you have any other tips to create congregation-friendly visuals for worship?
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