We’re still in the middle of the CoVid-19 pandemic and, despite a number of churches confusing being told to love their neighbors with “oppression,” most churches are closed for public worship. It’s not like churches are being singled out, in most US locations all mass gatherings are under restriction at present, but American’s seem to think, “But I wanna” is a compelling Constitutional argument ¹.

But we are going to have to learn with this virus for the foreseeable future, at least until either an effective treatment or vaccine can be found. That means, now that we are approaching a point where contact tracing and mitigation strategies can be used to contain new outbreaks, we need to work out how we will live. For Churches, that means worship. And worship is going to look and feel different because of the mitigation strategies we will need to have in place

Because our mitigation strategies clash with a number of our typical Sunday morning behaviors, I wanted to create a poster which could remind people of the basics. I had two requirements for the poster.

1. It had to look good, because I can’t stand it when churches slap words on something and say “good enough.”
2. It needed to convey “Love Your Neighbor,” because that’s the whole point of practicing mitigation.

I also like to make the posters I create to be a bit “unique” so for the post I created two of the four icons myself in Affinity Designer, the masked face and the sanitizer icon. I also tweaked the social distancing icon ² and made the “anti” symbol myself. When I insist that my creations have a unique look it means I have to learn while I’m creating, and that’s an immense personal benefit for me. The church was also donated a color inkjet printer which can handle huge paper sizes, so the poster is printed on size A3+ paper ³. It’s a lot more noticeable than a U.S. Letter flyer!

I’m sure there are a number of organizations out there which could benefit from this poster, so I’m making it available for folks to download and edit. I’ve locked every element except the logo, which can be replaced. If any organization needs to resize the poster, the locked layers can be unlocked with a click. Just use the button to download the file!

I created this poster in Affinity Publisher which, at the time of this writing, is on sale for $25. I cannot express enough how much of an absolute steal this application is at that price, and even at it’s normal price of $50 it’s one of the best values out there. If you really want to have fun pick up the other two applications in the suite, Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer, which are also on sale for $25. Both the latter applications also have iPad versions ⁴. You will need Affinity Publisher to edit the poster ⁵.

I hope you find this poster helpful. If you put it online anywhere, please link back to this post.