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- About This Makeover
- Step 1. Apply a Clean Theme
- Step 2. Create a Slide from Each Bullet
- Step 3. Change the Slide Layout
- Step 4. Consolidate the Slides
- Step 5. Add More Slides
- Step 6. Add Pictures
- Step 7. Work with the Titles and Slide Backgrounds
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This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Step 7. Work with the Titles and Slide Backgrounds
Now that we have the actual slides in place and the pictures inserted, it's time to work with the titles. Essentially, this entails two tasks:
- Remove titles where they are not required. For example, remove them from slides that have visuals. A cup of coffee is so recognizable that you don't need to add a title that says "coffee"!
- Format and position the titles. This comprises making some words bold and maybe moving the location of the title to a different part of the slide. Because there's no single fixed position for the title in these slides, we need not work with any of the Slide Layouts within the Slide Master.
In addition, there are plenty of slides that have no pictures. However, they do have titles. We'll change the slide backgrounds of those slides to black, and we'll change the title text to white.
If you are following the makeover step by step, continue using your saved presentation. If you just stepped in, you can use the nobullets_06.pptx presentation from the Makeover 07\Steps folder on the CD.
Now that you know what has to be done, do the following to get started:
- Click the View tab on the Ribbon, and select Slide Sorter to view the slides in Slide Sorter view.
- Press Ctrl and click all the slides that have no pictures, to select them.
- Now click the Design tab on the Ribbon, and click Background Styles to see the Background Styles gallery. Right-click the black thumbnail on the top row, and in the resulting menu, click the Apply to Selected Slides option (see Figure 8.13).
Not only does this cause all the backgrounds within the selected slides to turn black, but also it changes the title text on all these slides to white.
Figure 8.13 Change the background style of slides.
- Now click the View tab on the Ribbon, and click Normal. Go to Slide 1, and select Henry in the title. This should bring up the mini toolbar that contains almost all the text formatting options you might need (see Figure 8.14). If the mini toolbar does not pop up, you can right-click the selected text to summon it. Click the Bold option in the mini toolbar to make the selected text bold. Now you have a title that's partially bold.
Figure 8.14 Do your text formatting with the mini toolbar.
- Reposition the title "meet henry" anywhere that you find appropriate on the slide (see Figure 8.15).
Figure 8.15 Playing with the slide titles feels like breaking rules, but it can be fun!
- Using the suggestions in the previous steps, go ahead and alter the remaining slides to your liking. Here is a list of some other stuff that I did to our sample makeover:
- Removed the titles for slides that don't need them; these include the slides that have a picture of a car, coffee, or Seattle.
- Added ellipses to the end of some phrases to provide a sense of continuation between text and picture slides. So if the text in one slide was "Henry lives in...," the second slide had a picture of Seattle to complete the thought.
- Moved the titles to various positions, including at the bottom of the slide, so that the title in some slides was placed away from the pictures. Really, this sort of decision is based more on the picture within a slide and how it copes visually with the accompanying title. Indeed, there's a method to this madness, but it's also a combination of several things that might require an entire book to explain. We suggest you look at billboards, television ads, movie posters, and so on, and observe how they place the text in relation to the visuals (or even on an empty expanse), and try to replicate that. Practice makes perfect!
- Moved the location of pictures, too. This again followed no rules. Every slide is different, and every picture is distinctive—you need to see what works best in a given scenario. For example, if the picture is of a boy looking toward the left, we'll move him to the right side of the slide so that he can look inside the slide area rather than outside. Many of these ideas are inspired by photography techniques—look up concepts such as the "rule of thirds" in a photography composition book to learn more. You also can learn much by just observing more slides and photographs.
- Save your presentation.
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