Bookmark this list: The only church graphic guide you’ll ever need.
Aboundant is constantly scouring the web to help you find the best graphic resources for your church. We took a close look at many of them and ranked the best ones. Here’s what we came up with:
These sites have great free images for church use. Check out the complete list with ratings and screenshots.
- Unsplash
- Pexels
- Pixabay
- Visual Hunt
- StockSnap
- CreationSwap
- Freephotos.cc
These sites have great church-specific graphics for use for things like bulletins, worship slides, and web banners. Check out the complete list with ratings and screenshots.
- Church Media Drop
- CreationSwap
- Open Resources
- Life Church Open Network
- New Life Church
- Seeds.
- Graceway Media
- CCV Resources
These sites have a great selection of free videos that make great video backgrounds for websites or for worship slides. Check out the complete list with ratings and screenshots.
- Pixabay
- Videvo
- Videezy
- Pexels
- Mazwai
Icons
These sites have a great selection of free icons to use on you print and web publications.
Fonts
These sites have a great selection of free fonts for use in print publication or on a website.
Colors
These free sites are helpful in generating color schemes that follow sound color theory.
Important Things to Remember About Usage
If you need images for your church website, worship slides, communications materials, and social media, there are several options:
- Take photos yourself or use ones created by church members.
- Pay a lot for high-quality images from stock photo and image websites.
- Pay less for low- and medium-quality images from stock photo and image websites.
- Find free images that will work well-enough for your needs.
Let’s get one thing perfectly clear, though: you do NOT want to use images on your church website that don’t fall into one of these categories:
- Images you have paid for AND which have usage rights appropriate for your context (e.g. personal, business).These may or may not require attribution, so pay attention to the licensing restrictions.
- Photos you have taken yourself or that other staff or volunteers have taken for you.
- Images that are in the public domain, such as old images and images on Wikipedia.
- Images that you have created yourself, such as illustrations. (Note: this does not necessarily include taking someone else’s photo or illustration and editing it.)
- Images which are covered under a Creative Commons license appropriate to your setting.
- Images which are royalty free and OK to use in your setting. (Note: “royalty free” is not the same as “free.” Many royalty free images require a payment first.)
Please read a few of these examples of lawsuits against businesses and organizations for copyright infringement. Could your church afford an $8000 bill sent to you by a lawyer claiming you had used an image without permission? I didn’t think so. Next, bookmark, read, and circulate this page to all of your church staff. It’s a terrific overview of all things related to stock images.