Stacking Element Looks: Lower Thirds, Logos, and Timers Together

Scripture and lyrics are exclusive by nature — you're showing one or the other. Everything else on a livestream overlay isn't. Your logo bug sits in the corner all morning while lower thirds come and go underneath it and a countdown runs before the service starts. That's three unrelated things sharing one frame.

Element Looks are built for exactly that. Unlike Scripture and Lyrics, where a screen picks one Look, a screen can have as many Element Looks switched on as you want, and they render together.

What goes inside one Element Look

An Element Look is a bundle. Inside it you add elements of three types:

• Text — lower-third name bars, sermon titles, announcement text, service times
• Image — logos, series graphics, sponsor or ministry marks
• Timer — countdowns, with a duration, a format, an end message, and conditional styling that can restyle the timer as it runs low

Each element gets a name (which is what you'll see in the list later, so name it something real), its own position on the canvas, and the full set of styling controls: fonts, backgrounds, borders, corner radius, padding, and entry animation.

The grouping decision that matters

The question that determines whether this stays tidy is: what turns on and off together?

Elements inside one Look are a unit. A screen switches the whole Look on or off. So group by co-occurrence, not by type.

A good bundle:

• "Guest Speaker Lower Third" — the name bar plus the title bar underneath it. Two text elements that always appear together and never separately.
• "Pre-Service Countdown" — the timer, plus the "Service starts in" label above it, plus a background bar behind both.
• "Church Logo Bug" — one image, alone, because it's on for the entire service regardless of what else is happening.

A bad bundle is "All Our Graphics" — one Look holding the logo, the countdown, and three different lower thirds. You can never turn on just one of them, so you end up editing visibility element by element, which is exactly the manual work this was meant to remove.

The rule of thumb: if two elements ever need to appear without each other, they belong in different Looks.

Stacking them on a screen

On a screen's settings, the Elements section lists your Element Looks with checkboxes rather than a picker. Tick the ones this screen should render. A typical livestream lower third overlay setup ends up with the logo bug ticked permanently and situational bundles ticked on and off across the morning.

Because the bundles are independent, turning the countdown off doesn't touch the logo, and swapping which lower third is active doesn't disturb scripture or lyrics.

Where triggers still earn their place

Elements have triggers — rules for what happens when scripture or lyrics appear. Most of the time you want these set to "none," so your logo doesn't vanish every time a verse goes up.

The exception is real, though: a lower third at the bottom of the frame and a scripture reference box in the same region will collide. Setting that lower third to hide when scripture appears solves it cleanly, and it's a decision you make once inside the Look rather than something an operator has to remember mid-service.

The reuse payoff

The bundle you build for a guest speaker isn't a one-Sunday artifact. It's the graphic you use every time someone visits — different name in the text, identical everything else. The countdown you build in January is the countdown you use in December.

That's the whole point. A livestream lower third overlay is worth designing carefully exactly once, and then the work becomes typing a name instead of rebuilding a layout. If your team is still positioning boxes on a Saturday, the design isn't finished — it just hasn't been saved as a Look yet.