One design, three shapes for church social media graphics

The fastest way to make church social media graphics is to stop making them separately. Design the thing once, for this Sunday’s series or event, then let it take three shapes: wide for the screen in the room, square for the feed, and tall for stories. Same colours, same type, same picture. Fewer words each time it gets smaller.

That’s the whole approach. The rest of this post is the detail that makes it work.

The three shapes, and when you need each

Every graphic your church makes is going to end up somewhere with a fixed shape. There are really only three you need to plan for, plus one optional extra.

If you only make one social size, make the square. It shows up properly almost everywhere and nobody’s app crops it badly. The 4:5 is a nice-to-have: it fills more of a phone screen in the feed, but it’s a fourth file to keep track of, and a square post does the job.

Don’t stretch a wide slide into a square. And don’t just paste the wide slide into the middle of a square with bars above and below. Both look like what they are, a shortcut, and the words end up tiny.

Start from the wide one

Most churches make the screen graphic first, because Sunday has a deadline and the feed doesn’t. That’s fine. Build the 16:9 version properly, then use it as the parent for the other two.

What carries over:

• The background image or texture, recropped for each shape
• The colours, exactly
• The typeface and its weight
• The title, worded identically

What changes is the layout. A wide slide has room to put the title on the left and the picture on the right. A square doesn’t; it wants the title stacked over the picture, or set in the lower third. A tall story wants everything stacked vertically, with the title somewhere near the middle.

So when you pick a background, pick one that can survive being cropped three ways. A photo with the subject dead-centre and plenty of quiet space around it recrops well. A wide scenic shot with the interesting part on the far left edge doesn’t. You’ll lose it the moment you cut a square out of the middle.

If you’re working from a finished design rather than starting blank, check it exists in all three shapes before you commit to it. In Congregate, anything you keep in your Library re-downloads at 1920 × 1080, 1080 × 1080 and 1080 × 1920, which saves you rebuilding it.

Less text than a slide

A slide on the wall in your sanctuary is seen by people sitting still, facing it, for as long as you leave it up. A feed post is seen by someone scrolling with their thumb, for about as long as it takes to pass it. That’s the big difference, and it should change what you write.

A good rule: the social version gets the title and one other thing. Not three other things.

For a sermon series, that’s the series name and maybe “New series starts Sunday.” For an event, the event name and the date. The time, the address, the sign-up link, the childcare note, the bit about bringing a dish: all of that goes in the caption, where people who are interested will read it and where it can be copied and tapped.

Put the words you’d normally cram onto the graphic into the caption instead. Captions are searchable, readable by screen readers, and easy to fix if you get the time wrong. Words baked into an image are none of those things.

Keep the type big. On a phone, a square post is maybe the width of your palm. If the second line of text is smaller than the first by much, it’ll disappear. Two sizes of text, no more. For more on picking type that holds up at a distance (or at a phone’s width, which is a similar problem), see fonts for church slides.

Safe areas on a tall story

The tall 9:16 shape has a catch. When someone views a story, the app lays its own interface over your picture: the church’s name and profile picture and a progress bar across the top, and a reply box or a set of buttons across the bottom. Anything you put in those strips gets covered.

So treat the top and bottom of a 1080 × 1920 graphic as background only. Keep the title, the date and anything someone needs to read inside the middle of the frame, with roughly 250 pixels clear at the top and a bit more than that at the bottom. The exact amount the overlays cover changes from app to app and phone to phone, so be generous rather than precise. Leave some room at the left and right edges too, since tall phones sometimes trim the sides.

The background can and should run all the way to the edges. It’s just the words that need to stay in the middle.

A quick way to check: open the story on your own phone before you post it publicly, or send it to yourself, and look at what’s hidden. If the date is under the reply box, move it up.

What to post in a week

Church social media posts don’t need to go up every day. A steady handful of posts that say something real is better than a daily stream nobody on staff can keep up with. Here’s a plain week that one volunteer can manage:

1. Monday: a square post with one line from Sunday’s sermon, set over the series background. Short enough to read in a glance.
2. Wednesday: whatever’s coming up. The event, the sign-up deadline, the youth night. Square in the feed, tall in stories.
3. Friday or Saturday: “This Sunday” with the series graphic, the service times in the caption.
4. Sunday morning: a story or two from the room, if you have permission to show the people in it. Photos of the band setting up, the coffee table, the kids’ check-in. Nobody’s face without their say-so, and no children’s faces without their parents’ say-so.

That’s four or five posts and only one new design. The series graphic does most of the work, in different shapes, all week.

Notice how much of this reuses the screen graphic. The quote card on Monday is the series background with new words on it. The Saturday post is the same slide you’ll put up before the service starts. If your announcement slides are already clear and short (and church announcement slides people actually read covers how to get them there), they’ll turn into decent feed posts with very little work.

Keep the set together

Once you’ve made all three shapes, save them together with names that say what they are. “Rooted series, wide,” “Rooted series, square,” “Rooted series, story.” Not “final2.png.” Next Tuesday, when someone asks for the square one for the newsletter, you want to find it in ten seconds, not rebuild it.

Before you post anything, do one check on your phone, not your computer. Look at the square post at the size it actually appears in the feed. If you can read every word without zooming, post it. If you can’t, cut a line and try again.