One design, two languages, every week
A bilingual church needs weekly content in both languages but has one creative person and a volunteer team. Doubling the output was not an option, so the system had to make bilingual design cost almost nothing extra.
The constraint
Spanish runs roughly 25% longer than English. A caption or title that fits in one breaks the layout in the other, and a congregation from thirty-plus nations means neither language can be the afterthought version.
What we made
- A carousel and post system with layouts that hold at both text lengths
- A house caption style: short lines, warm and invitational, low insider jargon, written to be read by someone who has never been to church
- Bilingual hashtag sets for a multicultural city audience
- A Python automation for DaVinci Resolve that assembles the weekly recap reel, turning a manual edit into a repeatable process
- A batch cropping utility that outputs service photography at 4:5 for feed without hand-cropping every frame
- Templates a volunteer can fill without design skills
Outcome
[FILL: weekly content ships in both languages on one person's hours. The recap reel that took [TIME BEFORE] now takes [TIME AFTER].]
The insight worth naming
Most church media problems are not design problems, they are throughput problems. The fix is usually a system or a script, not a better graphic.