Introducing Looks: Reusable Screen Styles for Your Church

For most of AllStreamHub's life, a screen carried everything: the background, the scripture styling, the lyric styling, the lower thirds, the logo bug, the countdown. That worked fine when a church had one screen. It stopped working the moment teams started running three or four — a main livestream overlay, a lobby display, a stage confidence screen — because every one of those needed the same fonts, the same colors, and the same lower-third treatment, and each one had to be styled by hand.

Looks fix that. A Look is a saved style for a single layer, and any number of screens can point at it.

What a Look actually is

There are three kinds, matching the three layers every screen has:

• Scripture Looks — the verse box, the reference box ("John 3:16"), and the version box ("KJV"), styled together.
• Lyrics Looks — the current lyric line, plus optional next-line and previous-line boxes.
• Element Looks — a bundle of everything else: lower thirds, logos, static labels, countdown timers.

A Look holds the styling and positioning only: fonts, colors, backgrounds, borders, padding, animation, and where each box sits on the 1920×1080 canvas. It does not hold the words. The verse text still arrives live from whoever is running scripture that morning.

What's left on the screen itself

Screens didn't go away — they got simpler. Open a screen now and you'll find a settings panel rather than a full designer:

• The background color or image
• Which Scripture Look and which Lyrics Look this screen renders with
• Which Element Looks are switched on (as many as you want at once)
• Per-layer visibility, triggers, and persist-on-disconnect behavior

That last group is deliberately still screen-level. Two screens can share the exact same Scripture Look while one auto-hides scripture when lyrics go up and the other doesn't. Style is shared; behavior stays local.

The part that changes your Sunday

Because screens reference Looks instead of copying them, editing a Look updates every screen using it — including screens that are live on air at that moment. Nudge the lower third up two percent because it's clipping in your stream's title-safe area, and it moves on the livestream overlay, the lobby display, and the confidence monitor at the same time. No re-saving four screens. No "did anyone update the lobby one?"

This is the single biggest practical win of reusable screen styles: fixes propagate instead of needing to be repeated.

And switching a screen from one Look to another mid-service doesn't disturb what's currently displayed. The Look's own placeholder text never overwrites the live text — if a verse is on screen when the style changes, the verse stays and simply restyles.

A few guardrails worth knowing

• Creating and editing Looks is limited to team owners and admins. Operators can open and view them, which means a volunteer running Sunday morning can't accidentally restyle every campus screen at 10:58.
• Deleting a Look is blocked while it's still applied to a screen. You'll be told to reassign those screens first, rather than discovering a blank overlay next Sunday.
• Every Look shows a preview thumbnail in the Looks list and in the pickers, so choosing between "Sermon Series Scripture" and "Baptism Scripture" doesn't require opening both.

Where to start

If you already had screens before this change, your existing designs came along — you don't need to rebuild anything. The most useful first move is to open your Looks list, find the Scripture and Lyrics styles you actually use every week, and give them names your volunteers will recognize on a Sunday morning. "Main Overlay Scripture" beats "Untitled Scripture Look" at 9 a.m.

From there, build the second one only when you genuinely need a second one. The point of reusable screen styles isn't to have a lot of them. It's to have a small number that are right, and to only ever fix them once.