Paper, Printing, and Production

This PDF covers a variety of issues, some timeless, such as the importance of paper choice in the quality of your communications and some issues not so timeless, such as delivery methods.

Much of what we do in church communications is timeless—but some isn't and this chapter has a little bit of both.

It is a PDF reprint of my first book on desktop publishing. The information on paper is timeless. The paper choice you make has a big impact on your message and the PDF gives you some good tips for choosing the right paper. I encourage you to read it because there are always church communications pieces printed on paper that was not intentionally chosen, but randomly pulled from the shelf. This method of unthinking production is not a nice way to produce a publication someone labored for hours to produce; nor is it often effective if a cheap paper literally cheapens the message.

The material on printing and the advice on providing mockups is always a good idea.

The material about other production methods, e.g. audio tapes, CDs, is a bit of a retro look back. For many new to church communications, you cannot imagine how revolutionary and shocking it was for me to challenge church communicators to distribute content on CDs. Few computers had CD drives, CD audio was not wide-spread and the few CDs used for data distribution tended to be very expensive. To create movies with computers cost tens of thousands of dollars and to burn your own CDs was impossible. It wasn't until over 12 years later that I started to produce CDs and now their capacity seems a bit confining. All of that to emphasize a frequent refrain in this ministry: our tools will always be changing, but seize every one possible to communicate the gospel.

To download the PDF, click here or on the image.