Currently finding the text editing of "content slides" to be a little clumsy.
For example, if we were to have the following text:
"Alpha
The Alpha Course begins on Tuesday at 7:00pm
Please speak to James after the service for more information"
It appears that all of the text needs to be the same size, font and colour. The only way to have multiple typefaces and colours is to "add caption". Surely it would be better to be able to select areas of the text and choose font, colour etc, much like you would do with a word processor, or Mediashout?
Thanks for the feedback.
One of our goals with Proclaim (right or wrong -- we're still listening to find out!) was to make it easier to build a great looking presentation if you aren't an artist or designer. We wanted to make it easy to try different backgrounds and not have to pick new colors, fonts, etc. everything you change things.
Our Logos-created art is "extra-smart" this way, and we're working with third-party providers to put more "auto-design" into the other content.
If we add full font, color, size formatting to individual words within a single text block, it becomes more difficult to "always make it work" as you try different art, and we've now put more design burden on the user.
Yes, some users want that, but we were aiming for "easy."
In the Proclaim model, we'd rather have an "event" slide that had title, description, and details fields, all appropriately sized and styled, with many different "themes" to choose from, each of which would correctly re-style automatically.
We'll continue to evaluate these decisions / design-ideas through the beta period.
Thanks!
That makes sense, and I think that the font colour changing automatically when you switch backgrounds is a great feature.
However, there is no reason why that still can't work with different font sizes within a Content Slide. The text size could stay the same, yet all the colours change with any new background.
I agree that not everyone using the software will be a designer/artist and that you want to make it easier to build a "great looking presentation". However, I think that the current level of restriction on user editing within content slides is actually preventing user created "great looking presentations". Example being the excellent facebook screenshots you've released ("follow along with the service" & "welcome to church"), which both contain two font sizes. Notices with the text in 1 font, and all the same size, will usually look very poor, regardless of whether the font colour nicely matches the background.
On the whole the software is great, and we had a blast using it in our service last week, but it will be a pain having to create images in photoshop, saving as jpgs, then uploading them, simply because the basic option to have multiple fonts/sizes within a slide is prohibited.
Bob Pritchett:One of our goals with Proclaim (right or wrong -- we're still listening to find out!) was to make it easier to build a great looking presentation if you aren't an artist or designer. We wanted to make it easy to try different backgrounds and not have to pick new colors, fonts, etc. everything you change things.
I'd like to talk about this. The entire premiss of Proclaim (from how I saw it advertised) was to ensure that the presentation would look the same, no matter where you built it at. You talked about slides, audio, and videos in the preview video. What you were talking about was advanced presentation abilities. Our current advanced programs (ProPresentor, EasyWorship, MediaShout, etc) are feature-packed, but it's hard to build them.
Where Proclaim is different is that my worship leader can do the slides for songs, the pastor can put his sermon in, our media guy can insert the Church New video, and I can work on pre-service slides. This is advanced stuff. Stuff every church either needs or will need.
I think you should focus on making Proclaim work with that in mind. Don't try to "dumb it down" to keep it simple. Allow it to be simple for those who need it to be, but give more features that can be used by those who want it to be used.
Either way, there will be a learning curve. Once we learn, it'll be easy. So, don't worry about making it easy. Worry about making it meet the needs of the church.
That being said... I'm loving it! I still switch to MediaShout for content/slide/text editing, but I do use Proclaim for videos and songs. Obviously, we have no intention of using two presentation softwares.
I like the auto format concept, but it would be nice to have some options as well. (especially for some stock backgrounds we currently use) Right now we are just using a graphics program to add the content, but it would be nice to have two options.. auto format and custom format.
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