PowerPoint Masterclass - Presentation Design & Animation

This lesson will give you an basic overview as to where find inspiration for PowerPoint slides. I will go step-by-step over the best sources and resources of PowerPoint design and graphic inspiration. Try to browse the websites with me!

With this lesson I want to teach you about color schemes and how to prepare them. I will list 3 top websites which will help you set and select a color scheme for your presentation, so our powerpoint work with go a lot smoother and better.

Another thing we should prepare for work are images. You need to get into the habit of using, downloading and working with images in your graphic and creative workflow. In PowerPoint images can make up a lot of the design for you so they are very valuable.

Icons are very imporatnt as they graphically represent a variety of words. You can use icons for any purpose, wether it is upgrading the design, making a complete slide with it or creating simple logos. I will show you how to properly download them and even how to download multiple icons at once.

The last step in our selection journey will be to select a font. Fonts are very important and can bring your designs to another, higher level. Let's go over where to find good fonts and which ones will definately work properly in PowerPoint!

In this quick lesson I want to give you a brief overview of the softare and it's most important features. I will not explain everything 101 since I assume you are a bit computer savvy and know your way around, so let's make this a quick and useful one!

One of the most interesting PowerPoint tools is it's Quick Access Toolbar. The Powerpoint QAT allows us to insert custom shortcuts and quickly bring them up by pressing our ALT key (Option on MAC). This allows for a quicker worflow and more effective work.

The Selection Pane is another great feature which allows us to sort, select, make visible or invisible (hide) and rename layers in PowerPoints. It's not as detailed as the Layer panel in Photoshop but it can get the job done, especially when it comes to renaming objects or selecting items which overlap each other.

The actual Format Shape tab has a lot more options than the PowerPoint ribbon in itself. With help of the Format Shape tab we have a lot more effect options, color options and general control over the edited object. I want to show you a few details about it and give you some time to explore all it's functions.

Let's go simple - how to insert a screenshot into PowerPoint. Yes, this tutorial is about it. Yes, it has 2 minutes. Yes, you will learn everything you need to know to speed-up your workflow and insert screenshots fast and efficient. Trust me!

What is the difference between Bitmap Pictures and Vector Shapes within PowerPoint? Well, one of the differences is the Coloring options that we get. I want to step over this topic a little bit and talk with you what can be done, what options do we have and which colors are available when we repaint certain elements.

Cropping is another important feature (not only for pictures, but for the way the "Cropping" option is build). When you learn how to properly crop images, change their aspect ratio and change the shape they are displayed in you will know a lot more about PowerPoint from this point onwards. I want to teach you as much hidden features as possible, and cropping & changing shapes is an essential task to know about for an advanced workflow.

Let us start the more advanced (or less used) tricks. Merge Shapes is one of the absolute essential tools when it comes to designing in PowerPoint. Any custom design, custom shape and out of the ordinary slide is most likely prepared with help of this function. We can select several items and subtract them from each other or merge them into one, working vector shape. How cool is that?

This is a very tricky topic which has to be thoroughly explained for all PowerPoint users. Adding vector objects to powerpoint (or rather importing them) is possible with use of vector software - the best software to do so will be Adobe Illustrator. In order to get those files working in PPT we need to convert them to *.EMF first, because this is the format PowerPoint reads but it doesn't always work well. Vector items and PowerPoint can be an obstacle but with the right tools and patience we can get it to work.

It is a lot more difficult to import vector objects and items into the PowerPoint for MAC version, especially the 2011 one where we can run into a lot of troubles. We can't simply take a PDF / SVG / AI / EPS file, export it as EMF and expect to work. For the MAC versions of PowerPoint there is another step required and in this lesson I would like to go over that with you and show you what I was able to learn with my students who use MAC on a daily basis.

It has finally happened. The Microsoft Developers decided to take a step towars vector image usage within PowerPoint as a native, build-in funciton. I love the new functionality of beeing able to import SVG, scaleable vector graphic images into PowerPoint. We have been waiting for such an update for a long time so be sure your PowerPoint version is up to date. go to Account and hit the update button in order to get the latest version and be eliglible for this function.

PowerPoint isn't the best vector tool but it allows and gives us some freedom when it comes to the editing of vector shapes and icons. Wether it's a vector object straight create with PowerPoint shapes or importent from an EMF file outside of PowerPoint we can add additional points to it and change it's design by editing them.

Another very useful feature is the Aligning and Distribution possibility which PowerPoint gives us. No matter how chaotic and spread out all our elements , shapes or boxes are we can make equal spaces between them with 2 mouse clicks. This is a very often used tool overlooked by some users.

This is one of my favorite features of PowerPoint. Quickly formatting an entire look onto another object with one click. I love the magic that happens in the moment you click. I know it's a simple script yet it's so intuitive and well working that I have to praise the Microsoft developers for it. Kudos brothers and sisters!

This can be considered an additional feature or tip for custom work you might want to do outside the normal workflow scope of PowerPoint. By changing the Aspect Ratio you allow yourself to create any type of design, even posters or book covers in PowerPoint.

With this introductionary lesson I want to show you the 4 basic types of animations we have available in PowerPoint - Enterance, Emphasis, Exit and Motion Paths. If you want to learn powerpoint animation you have to get familiar with those.

It is possible to add multiple animations to one object in PowerPoint. With help of the "Add Animation" button we are able to stack up multiple animations, no matter the type on one of our objects.

Some of the powerpoint animations we have available have their own effect options. For example in the "Fly In" animation you can determine from which side the animation should fly in. Check it out!

Text boxes can have their own animations applied. If we animate a box which consists of only text a new option appears to make it fade by letter, word or entire sentence. This can distinguish you from other PowerPoint users right away.

Since you already should know the types of animation let's get familiar with the Animation Pane and all timing options. The 3 types of timings that can be applied include With Previous. On Mouse Click and After Previous. Let us talk about all those options and learn the differences between them.

Since we are talking about animations there is no way we can skip the Transitions Tab. It alows us to make clean and well prepared transitions between the slides in our presentations. Even if we do a video, it most likely consists of several slides and we want the transitions between them to look good. Let me talk with you about this tab during this tutorial.

Can you answer a few simple questions regarding animation?

With this slide I would like to prepare you for the design part of this course. You will have to prepare the first real life design in this course. Be prepared!

Here I would like to end the chapter of creating picture slides since we already created several different designs in that manner. This was all there to teach you various design practices and how to work with objects in order to get a great design done.

With this powerpoint slide I would like to teach you some overall design on how to approach our services or listing multiple items of the same sort on one slide.

This design will make great use of the background color we already have. We will make outlines in powerpoint to make it appear as our elements would have precise cut out parts from them.

We don't always need difficult and hard approachable design, we also need those simple slides and then we can re-use their elements to build better slides and be consistent in our presentation.

Since we already established a pattern for our text animations I would like to switch things up a bit and make something simplier - this time we will animate the text boxes with a Zoom effect and any other suitable effect we can find in powerpoint.

Icons and those types of slides give us the unique opportunity to bind several animations together in order to create something which looks fresh and original. I will tech you in this lesson how you can connect and progress through a slide by animating elements one after another.

Here I would like to take your animation skills to the next level and animate a very advanced slide in PowerPoint. We will use emphasis effects, normal enterance animations and exit animations - the whole palette. With one mouse click I would like to simultaniously grow and make objects dissapear to show you what is possible in PowerPoint when we use it right!

Here I want to teach you anohter thing which you hopefully didn't know earlier! With help of transparent boxes we will create another unique animation in powerpoint where we will explan and then dim boxes.

Here I want to show you how to create a portfolio slide in PowerPoint. This way you will learn how to utilize multiple images in one design.

Here we will make one last take on multiple images / portfolio like slides. I would like to teach you how you can equally distribute 4 pictures and create a nice, solid design out of it.

This will be a design which will help us greatly when we get to the animation part of this course. We will use our overlays to create another exciting portfolio / image slide to reveal several items on the screen.

We already designed several persons and staff members for our slides so we should now approach the design of a single person. Here I will share good practices and ideas with you how to create a clear and visually appealing design showcasing the skills of one person.

In this slide I will teach you how to prepare, start and design an engaging timeline which you can use as bulletpoints, as explanation, as a fancy animation within your presentations or for any other purpose. This is essential design knowledge which you should use daily!

Let us continue our PowerPoint timeline and create the second slide which will be the middle part with 2 more informations to present. Later on we will animate the slide to make them one continuous storyline.

With this lesson I'd like to close the timeline, since we already have the majority of items prepared we can copy the first slide and change a few elements to get this done. This will also teach you speedy slide creation since you can always use the elements you already prepared!

Here I would like to show you how you can possibly animate a portfolio slide. This is just one of many ways we can do our animations.

Since we have so many elements on the slide we will just focus on the smaller things and animate mostly the text and informational boxes of this slide. I will show you how to prepare one animation and then multiply it to our other elements.

Here we will make a very unique and high quality animation where each person will be separately revealed by us. With each mouse click another person will be revealed.

Here we will learn how trigger animations work in PowerPoint. This is something only the powerpoint pros and gurus know and utilize. You will become a member of this elite designers group :)

The following slide will be a simple animation journey for us. We will approach this slide two ways - first we will animate it's left side so we can then focus on the other side and animate each element in.

One of the highest quality slides we can produce in PowerPoint are our timeline slides. They can work as advanced bulletpoint lists or overall storylines for our explanations. Here I will show you how you can animate these types of slides.

We will continue our timeline animation in the second part of this class. Let us prepare a continuous and smooth animation between all 3 timeline slides.

Here I would like to finalize the timeline which cosists of 3 slides. This will teach you how to prepare endless and seamless animation between any type of slides.

In this lecture I will explain to you what motion graphics and kinetic typography actually is. In order for us to know what are we doing and how could we approach creating kinetic movement and animations with text we need to understand some basics. 

This will be our first simple animated text project. It is the perfect way to start with kinetic typography in PowerPoint and we will use the trick that we perform here a lot of times. We will use fly in animations to make the text appear on the screen from behind special obejcts which we use to cover up half of the motion!

Here I would finally like to approach more advanced designs and animations. We will create a fully working minimal title opener / lower third animation in PowerPoint with use of multiple animations on one object. The add animation function is essential for success in this animation and we will definately use it here!

In this lesson we are going to continue the animation we started in the previous lesson. Since we already have the lines prepared now comes the time to finish the animation by adding text and our beloved cover box.

Another thing which will be helpful when creating motion graphics and animations are little sparkles which could help us to reveal a text box in an more engaging way.

In the first part we will animate the first two text boxes with multiple animations like fly in, grow / shring and line motion path. This will be a lot of animating so let's get started!

Here we are going to continue the animation and finalize it with exit animations and adding more sentences to the entire design!