Screens vs. Looks: How the New Screen Design Model Works

The most common question after a tool changes its structure isn't "what's new" — it's "where do I go to change this thing." If your lower third is sitting too low, or the verse font is too small on the lobby TV, you need to know which door to open. Here's the mental model.

The one-sentence version

A screen is an output. A Look is a style. Screens say where content goes and how it behaves; Looks say what it looks like.

Everything else follows from that split.

What lives on a screen

Think of a screen as one destination — your OBS browser source, the lobby display, the stage confidence monitor. Its settings are the things that are true of that destination specifically:

• Background — a color, an image, or nothing at all (transparent, which is what you want for a livestream overlay).
• Which Looks it uses — one Scripture Look, one Lyrics Look, and any number of Element Looks switched on together.
• Visibility — whether each layer is showing right now.
• Triggers — what happens to this layer when another one appears. Usually scripture hides when lyrics go up, and vice versa, so an operator's toggle behaves like an on/off switch.
• Persistence — whether a layer stays on screen if the operator's connection drops.

Notice that none of those are visual choices. They're routing and behavior.

What lives in a Look

A Look holds the visual decisions, scoped to one layer:

• Position and size of each box, as percentages of the canvas
• Font family, size, weight, color, and alignment
• Box background (none, solid, or gradient), opacity, borders, corner radius, padding
• Entry animation — fade, slide up, slide down — and its duration

A Scripture Look covers the verse, reference, and version boxes together, plus optional next-verse and previous-verse boxes. A Lyrics Look covers the current line, plus optional next and previous lines. An Element Look is a bundle: a lower third, a logo, a countdown timer, or all three, grouped because they belong together.

Deciding which one to open

When something needs changing, ask whether the change should follow the content everywhere, or stay on this one output.

Edit the Look when: the font is wrong, the text is clipping, the color doesn't match your series branding, the lower third sits too low, the animation is too slow. These are style problems, and fixing them in the Look fixes them on every screen at once.

Edit the screen when: the lobby display should show a background image but the stream overlay shouldn't, this particular screen should keep showing scripture when the operator's laptop goes to sleep, or you want to swap in a different style just for this output.

The tell is simple: if you'd want the fix to apply everywhere, it belongs in a Look. If it's specific to one destination, it belongs on the screen.

Why this is a better church presentation screen setup

The old model — every screen carrying its own complete design — has a failure mode that gets worse as a church grows. Four screens meant four copies of the same design, which meant four places to make the same edit, which meant one of them quietly drifted out of sync. Usually you found out on a Sunday.

Under the new model there's one copy of each style. Four screens can share it. A fix is a fix, not four fixes.

The trade-off worth naming: because Looks are shared, editing one really does change every screen using it. That's the feature, but it's worth a moment of thought before a quick tweak — "is this something I want on the lobby TV too?" If the answer is no, that's a signal you want a second Look, not an edit to the first.

A reasonable starting structure

Most churches land somewhere near this without much effort:

1. One Scripture Look and one Lyrics Look that match your church's brand — used by everything, most of the time.
2. One Element Look holding your standard logo bug.
3. One Element Look per recurring situation: guest speaker lower thirds, pre-service countdown, baptism graphics.
4. Seasonal variants only when a season genuinely needs a different treatment.

Start there. Add a Look when a real Sunday makes you want one, not in anticipation of one.