Design Social Media Posts with PowerPoint

With this lecture I need to teach you something very important - changing the slide dimensions. I would like to showcase how to change PowerPoint slide size to a Full HD image since it is in inches and HD Ready normally.

This might be a very simple yet important question. Since PowerPoint (at least for now) showcases slide sizes in inches we need to convert inches to pixels if we want optimal post sizes for our projects!

Here I will tell you to search for a specific theme / topic or at least inspire yourself to be prepared for the work. For me (or for us?) I have chosen to make the design around a "jungle", "forest", "wild" theme and stick with this kind of pictures for the entire design.

If you want to achieve great results you can only go for the best possible pictures you can find. The good thing is that we have absolutely outstanding websites with resources available, even for free! There are big librarys of amazing photographs published with the CC0 license which allows us to use pictures both personally and commercialy in our work, and that is what we will use!

No good design will be complete without some out of the ordinary fonts used - and we will be no different. We will search together for 2 great fonts to use in orde r to make our work later very easy. We will be using consistently the same fonts over the course of our project / template.

This lecture will briefly inform you where to find great color schemes if the need arises. For our design this time I will be working without a color scheme - because pictures will be the main factor, but if that would be a template for a company or specific project where we would get some guidelines regarding coloristic we should use ready color-schemes which make the work really easy.

With this social media post I will show you how to start the design with a very generic slide using a picture, text and a few additional elements to get us rolling!

For this instagram story post design we will use multiple photographs to create a double showcase. For the text part we will utilize a circle and showcase a discount amount in the middle

On this social media post graphic design lecture I will prepare a post with the left side beeing white. On that white space we can add all text information we want, in our case it will be the webiste and discount amount (or price, depending on what you need) and the rest will be a big photo showcase!

One of the nicest design from this series in my opinion will be the triple instagram stories template slide. Here we will utilize multiple pictures to create a consistent scene. We will also make great preparations for the animation part since I will show you some cool techniques later on with it.

You do not always want to have just pictures, sometimes you want text in the very middle of your slide - and for that reason we will be preparing a slide which has a slogan in the middle. This will be also a great foundation for the animation part since the text can be animated in a very interesting and natural way!

As a last bonus design for our template I wanted to create something different - this is why I used a big circle for the middle and a picture with a theme going a little bit off the regular "jungle" theme. Take a look at how it looks like in the end and try designing it on your own!

Let me start with section with the animation of the first slide. We could of course export the image as a still object but it will be nicer to animate the entire thing. I will animate the text to fly in from sides and then I will go over to the animation pane to teach you everything you need to know about animation for this part of the section.

Try to replicate the steps that I'm taking in the class and prepare similar kinds of animation. Remember that you can always download my project files to use them as guidance and check out the animations itself in those files. For this social media post design we will animate the circle and its elements. We have 2 pictures here and we need to consider what exactly would we like to move here.

Since we already animated several elements in our template I wish that you take those ready animations, copy the animated elements over to other slides and simply paint the animations over. This way we won't waste any unnecesary time to animate things twice in the same way. With this technique you will save a lot of time in PowerPoint, no matter which version you use - PowerPoint for MAC or PowerPoint 2019 for windows (from the office 365 subscription)

This can be one of the greatest and most catchy things we will do for animation here in this course. I will teach you how to showcase multiple images on one slide with intelligent fade offs and animation techniques. Stay tuned!

I'm glad that you are still reading those lecture descriptions :) Here we will make a great showcase with the triple instagram story slide desing. I will try to animate the middle picture so it will grow towards us. This will create this kind of parralax effect where some elements are static and the middle object will enlarge towards us.

All right we have already animated circles, objects, pictures. We added enterance, emphasis and exit effects so now comes the time to use the advanced animation features we have available in PowerPoint. I will showcase you how to animate text on a slide like this where the middle portion of the slide is a big, catchy slogan.

We will close out the animation of this template by creating this interesting spinning effect on the circle we have present. This can be used and applied to various objects but it really will look well on the circle we designed. Remember, that we can both replicate the animation until end of slide and we can adjust how long does it spin (or how much degrees for one full animation). This is also something not all PowerPoint users know about!

We have arrived at the point where I would like to show you how to package everything up and be ready to export posts, videos and animated presentations as publish-ready content. Here we want to take a last brief overview on what we done!

Working with transitions can be tricky in PowerPoint. We need to learn the difference between a transition and an animation in PowerPoint, once I explain that you are ready & set to go further.

Timing is essential to understand if we want to know how long our exported videos will last. I will explain you everything with examples so you will be able to craft your own videos and posts in no time!

I want to show you with this lecture how to customize the appearance and dissapearance of a slide, we will use both animations and transitions here to utilize the full potential of PowerPoint. I will also create a blank, black slide to make a smooth fade out of any type of video.

The final product will be a ready-to-post video to any social media platform you desire. I will show you how to export the ready video and what are the possible advantages / disadvantages of using the native powerpoint exporter vs some video capturing software.

With this lecture I wish to answer one of our students questions on how to add edit and use the recording tools inside of  PowerPoint to record narrated videos.

With this lecture, I will teach you how you can adjust your Grow/Shrink animation to use for any picture, background or object and make a looping animation out of it. With a few PowerPoint options and tweaks we can repeat, loop and smooth out our animation to act as a little enhancement in our slides.

Here we will design a modern neumorphic PowerPoint slide in Microsoft PowerPoint 365. Neumorphism is a new trend in UI design to create consistent and well-readable desin across a device or product. It uses bevels and shadows to highlight its elements rather than just flat design. Certainly an interesting trend worth knowing about.

This is a kinetic text and typography animation made completely in PowerPoint. With this After Effects like animation I wanted to show the capabilities of text and shape animation within PowerPoint with the Microsoft 365 subscription.

Here a little lecture about a text + background design for simple posters made in PowerPoint

I would like to thank you personally for taking the time and effort to study and learn PowerPoint with me. I hope not only your social media platforms and marketing efforts will fourish with beautiful and outstanding designs but you have also grown as a person and enjoyed our little design journey. I had plenty of fun, thank you very much for your attendance! 

This is a bonus lecture for the course.