Essentially, I am looking for recommendations on an mac program/app that would be best for simply graphics projects. For lack of a better way to explain it, I will give you my situation.
I am responsible for managing our church website which I like to keep very up to date as well as very professional looking. To do this is spend a great deal of time making sure everything on the site looks nice (unfortunately this is a job that never ends). For various reasons, I will incorporate graphics into many of the pages or use them as announcements. Typically, graphics will consist of a few different parts that I will be pulling from different places. A background (if needed), any relevant pictures or graphics (often from other churches or third parties over which I have no control of design and am forced to work with for better or worse) and most importantly text. It would be useful if it had a drawing feature (different colors of pens mostly), but this is not a requirement as I can always export into a different program if necessary.
Because of the nature of these projects, I am occasionally asked to do several at a time and am looking for the best program to handle all of these things in a time efficient manner. It is also very important for me to be able to save these projects in a native format and be able to quickly and easily go back and edit some aspects of the graphic, particularly the text (i.e. the date of the activity changed or the price is different and I need to change the text to match it).
Just for comparison sake, I have used powerpoint for several of these projects and it works fine but it can be problematic when i have to use a graphic from third-parties (which happens a lot) due to size of the picture typically. Also, nothing in the program was designed with graphic design in mind which means that I can often spend a lot of time looking for a feature that is hidden or does not exist.
I am not necessarily looking for something advanced such as photoshop (although I am not opposed), I simply would like a program that i can set the size of my image, put in a background, paste or import all different types of pictures/graphics and add some text. Again, the drawing aspect is not required but it would be a nice bonus. Free is always great but I am always willing to spend a few dollars to save me some time or headaches in the long run. Learning curve or ease of use is also not much of a problem for me (at least it normally is not in dealing with new programs). I have just taken over this job recently and have not tried any programs for this except powerpoint (because it was how they did it before) so I am open to any suggestions you have.
I am responsible for managing our church website which I like to keep very up to date as well as very professional looking. To do this is spend a great deal of time making sure everything on the site looks nice (unfortunately this is a job that never ends). For various reasons, I will incorporate graphics into many of the pages or use them as announcements. Typically, graphics will consist of a few different parts that I will be pulling from different places. A background (if needed), any relevant pictures or graphics (often from other churches or third parties over which I have no control of design and am forced to work with for better or worse) and most importantly text. It would be useful if it had a drawing feature (different colors of pens mostly), but this is not a requirement as I can always export into a different program if necessary.
Because of the nature of these projects, I am occasionally asked to do several at a time and am looking for the best program to handle all of these things in a time efficient manner. It is also very important for me to be able to save these projects in a native format and be able to quickly and easily go back and edit some aspects of the graphic, particularly the text (i.e. the date of the activity changed or the price is different and I need to change the text to match it).
Just for comparison sake, I have used powerpoint for several of these projects and it works fine but it can be problematic when i have to use a graphic from third-parties (which happens a lot) due to size of the picture typically. Also, nothing in the program was designed with graphic design in mind which means that I can often spend a lot of time looking for a feature that is hidden or does not exist.
I am not necessarily looking for something advanced such as photoshop (although I am not opposed), I simply would like a program that i can set the size of my image, put in a background, paste or import all different types of pictures/graphics and add some text. Again, the drawing aspect is not required but it would be a nice bonus. Free is always great but I am always willing to spend a few dollars to save me some time or headaches in the long run. Learning curve or ease of use is also not much of a problem for me (at least it normally is not in dealing with new programs). I have just taken over this job recently and have not tried any programs for this except powerpoint (because it was how they did it before) so I am open to any suggestions you have.
