How to Build Your First Scripture Look, Step by Step

If you've only ever styled scripture inside a single screen, building your first Look takes about ten minutes and then never needs doing again. This walks through it end to end, including the decisions that are easy to get wrong the first time.

Step 1: Create the Look and pick its layer

From the Looks page, choose New Look. You'll be asked which layer this Look is for — Scripture, Lyrics, or Elements. Pick Scripture.

This choice is structural, not cosmetic. A Scripture Look knows it has three boxes and offers controls for them; it can't later become a lower third. If you're building a sermon-title graphic or a lower third, that's an Element Look instead.

Name it now, while you're thinking about it. Name it for where it's used, not for what it looks like — "Main Overlay Scripture" is something a volunteer can pick correctly on a Sunday morning; "Blue Serif v2" isn't.

Step 2: Style the three boxes

A Scripture Look starts with the three boxes every verse display needs:

• Verse Box — the passage text itself
• Reference Box — "John 3:16"
• Version Box — "KJV", "NIV", whatever translation you're displaying

Each one is dragged and resized directly on the 1920×1080 canvas, and each has its own controls for font, color, alignment, background, border, padding, and animation.

Two things worth knowing before you fiddle:

Font size auto-shrinks to fit. Text scales down to stay inside its box, so set the size you want for a typical verse rather than sizing for the longest passage in Psalms. A long verse will shrink itself; a short one will look right.

A text shadow is always applied. That helps legibility over a busy camera feed, but don't lean on it. Still choose light text on dark, or dark on light, deliberately — the shadow is insurance, not contrast.

Step 3: Decide about next and previous verses

Below the three boxes you'll find optional Next Verse and Previous Verse sections. Switch either on and you get another fully independent box — its own position, its own font, its own styling.

This is genuinely useful for a stage confidence screen, where a preacher benefits from seeing what's coming. It's usually a mistake on a livestream overlay, where three verses of competing text is just noise for the viewer.

Which is a good argument for two Scripture Looks: a clean one for the stream, and one with context boxes for the stage monitor. Same content, different destination, different Look.

Step 4: Save, then apply it

Saving the Look doesn't put it on air. Open the screen you want it on, find the Scripture section of its settings, and choose your new Look from the picker. Do the same for every screen that should use it.

That's the payoff moment: three screens can now point at this one scripture screen design. When the reference box turns out to be clipping in your stream's title-safe area, you nudge it once here — not three times.

Step 5: Check it against a real verse

Preview panels are honest about layout but flattering about content. Before you trust a new Look on a Sunday, push a real passage to a real screen and look at it — ideally a long one and a short one.

The things that go wrong are boringly consistent: a verse box sized for John 3:16 that swallows a long passage into tiny text, a reference box that overlaps the lower third, or a version box positioned where your streaming platform overlays its own UI. All five minutes to fix on a Tuesday, all painful at 10:30 on Sunday.

What not to do yet

Resist building six variations before you've used one for a month. The value of reusable styles comes from a small set that's genuinely right, not from a library that a volunteer has to scroll through under pressure. Add the second Look when a real service makes you want it.