Someone asked me about this graphic zooming around on Facebook. For those not familiar with the platform, Facebook makes it easy for individuals to share a photo or graphic, sending it to all their friends. I have over 1430 friends (in spite of what the Syn Conference love salesmen say) and often do that with material worth sharing that I get.
I posted the graphic above on someone's FB wall. He had quoted Krauth, using just the text. I thought he would like the graphic, so I put it on his wall. Next, one of his FB friends saw it and shared it with all of his friends. That other Lutheran teaches at Ft. Wayne's seminary, so the graphic really caught on fast, so much that one of my friends asked me about it. He said, "I see it everywhere. Was that yours originally?"
That was my intention, to create graphical versions of doctrinal and Biblical statements. I added hymns to the list. The graphics often get noticed, liked, and shared a few seconds after I post them. Because so many SynConference members are really Mennonites who specialize in shunning, I leave my name off. I would not want them to violate the shunning rule when they share a graphic.
I cannot take much credit. In Photoshop, I pair a statement worth studying with a painting or image worth enjoying. The process is fairly simple. I normally size the graphic to 640 pixels wide, because that works best on the blog and FB. I upgrade the colors if necessary, because many graphics on the Net are faded or distorted. The challenge is to work in the text so the words match the illustration when posted. I rasterize the text to make it clearer and I pick a background that enhances the text-graphic combination. Experience and advice from Norma Boeckler have helped improve the backgrounds. I like experimenting to see which ones work for the final version. Each part is done with an independent layer, so it can be repaired or deleted easily.
