Backgrounds & color

Using abstract images to create unique backgrounds for slides and shapes

January 30, 2025 by Ellen Finkelstein 2 Comments

You can use abstract images to create interesting, textured backgrounds for slides or shapes. Just as important, they will be unique. You’ll see why as you read further…

Here’s an example, using abstract images as a fill for the shapes of a diagram.

First, you have to find an abstract image. That’s fairly easy. For example, go to pixabay.com or your favorite stock images site and enter abstract in the search box. Find some images and download them. Here are 3 that I downloaded from pixabay.com:

Another easy technique is to take your own abstract photos! Any object with a texture that is mostly one color works well. Here are some ideas:

A close-up of a piece of fabric or carpet
A close-up of the hair of a pet
A piece of wood or furniture

Here’s a photo of a gravel pathway that I took>>>

Modify the texture image

You can make many modifications to the texture image. Select the image, and choose the Picture Format tab. For example, you can do the following:

In the Adjust section of the ribbon, choose Corrections to soften or sharpen the image, as well as change the brightness and contrast. For more precise changes, choose Picture Corrections Options at the bottom.
Choose Color to change the saturation or tone, or to recolor the image.
Choose Artistic Effects to choose one of the preset effects.

Here, I took the abstract image on the left, then blurred it, colored it, and reduced the contrast to create the one on the right.

Use the image as a fill for a shape

To use an image as a fill for a shape, follow these steps:

Click the shape to display the Picture Format tab and click the tab.
Choose Shape Fill> Picture> From File, navigate to the picture you saved, and double-click the picture file you want to use. (See an alternative method below.)
If you want to remove the outline (I often do), choose Shape Outline> No Outline.

If you have already inserted the abstract image you want to use on a slide — since you may have created and modified it there — follow these steps:

Copy the abstract image to the clipboard.
Right-click the shape and choose Format Shape to open the Format Shape task pane.
On the Fill & Line tab, expand the Fill section and choose Picture or Texture Fill. (PowerPoint automatically fills the shape with the default texture and changes the name of the task pane to Format Picture.)
Choose Clipboard
If you want to remove the outline, choose Shape Outline> No Outline from the ribbon or from the Line section of the Format Picture task pane.

Use an abstract image as a slide background

To use an image as a slide background, display either the slide or the slide master. If you want to apply the background to all layouts, click the top, larger layout in the left pane of the slide master.

Right-click an empty area of the slide or slide master and choose Format Background.
In the Format Background dialog box, for the Fill category, choose Picture or Texture Fill.
Choose Clipboard if you have the image on the clipboard or choose Insert> From a File, navigate to the file, and double-click the picture file that you want to use.

These options give you unlimited possibilities!

How do you use abstract images?

Leave a comment or question and please share this post using the Share buttons below.

Use contrast to make your text and colors pop!

May 6, 2021 by Ellen Finkelstein 1 Comment

I’ve been working on some training about presentations that are accessible to people with sight and hearing challenges and have learned some techniques that I believe everyone can use.

One has to do with increasing contrast between the background (of the slide or a shape) and the text. When you do this, your colors become richer and your text is much more clear. This helps your viewers to focus on your content.

PowerPoint 365 now gives you hexadecimal stats for colors. Hexadecimal is the system used for websites. It’s similar to the RGB (red-green-blue) system that PowerPoint has used for years. I say this because the service that you can use to measure contrast uses hexadecimal notation.

How to check for color contrast

[Read more…]

Create a mood or duotone look in PowerPoint

August 18, 2018 by Ellen Finkelstein Leave a Comment

Color can have a powerful effect on your audience. While you need to be cognizant that colors mean different things in different cultures, you can use color to influence your audience’s mood and feeling about your message.

Or you can just create a fun feeling with one color or indicate a change in mood by transitioning from one color to another.

Duotones — photos that display 2 colors — are very much in vogue these days.

Here are some examples using a 2-tone semi-transparent overlay:

Here are 2 more examples using a more difficult technique that colorizes parts of one image with 2 different colors.

These types of slide will always stand out.

Semi-transparent gradient overlay

The first set of slides use a semi-transparent gradient overlay. For these slides, I used the Title Only layout. Here are the steps:

Insert an image.
To crop it for a widescreen slide, on the Format tab, click the down arrow at the bottom of the Crop button and choose Aspect Ratio, 16:9. Then click off the slide to finish the crop.
Right-click the image and choose Send to Back so that you see the slide title.
Optional: To make the colors on the overlay clearer, make the image grayscale. On the Picture Tools Format tab, choose Color, then Saturation: 0% under Color Saturation.
From the Home tab, click the Rectangle shape in the Drawing group and drag it across the slide to cover the entire slide.
Right-click the rectangle and choose Send to Back, Send Backward to move it behind the slide title but keep it in front of the image.
Right-click the rectangle again and choose Format Shape.
If necessary to display the fill options, click the Fill & Line icon (a bucket) and expand the Fill section by clicking its right-facing arrow.
Choose Gradient Fill. You’ll see the last-used gradient. Lower down, for the purpose of these steps, drag off all but 2 of the stops on the Gradient Bar.
Click one of the stops, click Color (below the Gradient Bar) and choose one of the colors or click More Colors for the full range of possibilities.
Use the Transparency bar or the text box to its right to set the desired transparency. I used about 50%.
Click the other stop and choose its color and transparency.
Add your text, making sure it stands out from the colors of the overlay.

Here’s an example shown larger…

Colorize parts of one image with 2 different colors

You can colorize photos in PowerPoint and with a little sleight of hand, you can color one part of a photo with one color and another part with a different color. You’ll need to find a photo with distinct sections.

Follow these steps:

Insert the photo and make a duplicate of it. Decide which parts of the photo you want to be which color. For one photo, you’ll use the Remove Background feature to remove everything except the part you want in your second color and you’ll put it on top of the first photo. So for the photo of the woman with the megaphone, for one of the copies, I removed everything except the megaphone.
Select the duplicate and choose Format Tab, Remove Background. (You can see a video tutorial about removing an image background here.)
Click Mark Areas to Remove on the Remove Background tab and drag across all of the areas of the photo that you want to remove. In my example, it was everything except the megaphone.
When you’re done, choose Keep Changes.
With the photo still selected, on the Format tab, choose Color and choose a color in the Recolor Section. You can choose More Variations, then More Colors to use any color you want.
Select the second photo and colorize it with the second color.
Place the first photo on top of the second photo so it matches exactly.

You’ll now see a photo colorized with 2 different colors. I also placed the 3 blue petals on top of the text and box.

If you want to learn simple design principles for non-designers…

…then you’ll love Slide Design for Non-Designers, updated for PowerPoint 2016/365.

Learn easy principles and techniques that designers use. If you need to create high-impact, professional-looking slides but aren’t a designer, this e-book will show you, step-by-step, how to easily get the results you want. Plus bonuses:

Theme, template, and sample slides/presentation
Rule of thirds measurements for widescreen slides
5 short video tutorials to make implementing the principles easy!

Check it out here

5 principles for easier and faster slide creation

June 9, 2017 by Ellen Finkelstein 2 Comments

I recently made over some webinar slides for a client and I can honestly say that the slides were the most messed up of any I’d ever seen.

It wasn’t the content; it was the way the slides were created. Now, my client was a PowerPoint newbie, so it wasn’t really her fault.

In fact, she bought a template for a sales webinar and part of the problem was due to that template. I’m not sure where the rest of the mess came from but here are some principles that will help make your slide creation easier and faster. Your presentation will look more professional, too.

1. Set the slide size correctly before you start

I have no idea why and I’ve never seen this before, but the slide size was set to 26.667×15, which is exactly double the size of the default widescreen size. This meant that all of the fonts were huge (88pt instead of 44pt, for example). This might make sense if you’re projecting a slide onto a large screen at a live event, but my client was doing a webinar.

I didn’t pick this up right away because when I checked the Slide Size drop-down, widescreen was chosen. But when I went back and clicked Custom Slide Size, there it was, as you can see in the screenshot.

These days most projectors, screens, and TVs are widescreen and a standard-sized (4:3) presentation will make you look a little out of date. If that’s what everyone in your company uses, then you’re OK, but if you’re presenting outside, consider using a widescreen (16:9) slide. It’s been the default in PowerPoint for a while now.

My problem was that I was going to insert a lot of images and they were too small in relation to the slide. So I had to resize the slide to the default 13.333×7.5 and do a lot of fiddling with the Slide Master and individual slides.

2. Please, please use the standard layouts!

The template my client bought did away with all of the standard layouts and included only custom layouts. The problem was that my client needed some standard layouts. There was no way for her to simply add a slide title and some text or an image!

Of course, her solution was to delete the custom layout placeholders and add text boxes. You can see an example (with text changed) on the right–I’ve selected all of the objects so you can see all of the text boxes. In her case, she didn’t have much of a choice, but I see unnecessary text boxes a LOT on my clients’ slides. Unless you’re a designer, it’s best to use the layouts that come with PowerPoint. If you know how to create custom layouts, that’s a good thing, but don’t delete the default layouts. They are really pretty useful. (And if you import slides from other presentations that use those layouts, you’ll often get a mess.)

When you add text boxes on slide after slide, not only do you waste a lot of time, but your slides will look chaotic. This adds “cognitive load” for the audience and they have to figure out each slide. The information doesn’t get digested easily.

In my blog post, Create a Custom Layout, I explain the process of creating custom layouts.

I had to recreate the standard layouts and transfer a lot of the text from textboxes to placeholders–on all 98 slides. (Placeholders are the boxes that the layouts put on the slide where you can insert text, images, etc.) This process is always very time-consuming. And annoying.

3. Keep your backgrounds simple

Branding your presentation to match your website is a good idea, especially in a sales webinar where you hope people will buy the product you’re selling and end up on that website.

But be careful.

My client took an image from that website that was vertical and huge and put it on every slide to create a background. I had to zoom out to 10% to see the entire image! This meant she really didn’t know where her slide was because the image covered the slide and so much more. So she sometimes put text off the slide (but it was on the background image, so it looked like it was on the slide).

My solution was to crop the image and then insert it on the slide master. This meant deleting it from all 98 slides.

But that wasn’t all. The template came with a background and sometimes my client left that on a slide and placed her background on top. So sometimes I had to delete 2 images!

My client’s coach told her to put her logo and link on every slide. Ugh!

It really distracts from the content, especially in a sales presentation. And the link she used was her home page, not the sales page — major confusion. So, use your logo on the first and last slides. For a sales webinar, don’t use a URL until you’re at the point of making your offer and then — of course — use only the URL of the sales page.

4. Use images consistently

Try to find images that have a similar look or choose 2-3 looks. Some “looks” are:

People with a full background, such as a nature scene behind them
People with no background (often called “isolated”) — you can make that background transparent
Light photos vs. dark photos
Stock photos vs. photos you take yourself

In the same way, you want to choose 2-3 treatments. For example:

Flat
A slight shadow
A white border and rotation (snapshot look)

Try for some consistency in where you put images on a slide, as well.

You want some variety, but without getting that chaotic look. It’s a balancing act.

Also, make sure images aren’t fuzzy when you look at them in Slide Show view. Fuzzy images are a sure way to project an unprofessional impression!

5. Be consistent with fonts and text

The slide master used Helvetica fonts. (This is a Mac font and my client was working on Keynote on a Mac. That created other issues, but they aren’t part of a typical situation.)

But her slides used Garamond for slide titles and some slide text and Helvetica for the rest. It was quite a mishmash. I’ve seen professionally designed slides that combined a serif font (like Garamond) and a sans-serif font, but I think it looks odd.

Of course, she manually changed the font on many slides — again a time waster.

Another common problem I see is inconsistent capitalization. Again, it looks unprofessional.

I prefer “Sentence case” for slide titles and definitely for text on the body of the slide.” This means that the first letter is capitalized and the rest is not (like this sentence). The reason I like Sentence case is that it makes the text easier to read and comprehend. When you use Title Case (each word capitalized), Each Capital Letter Is Like a Little STOP Sign for the Audience, notifying them that each word is important. This makes it harder to quickly read through the entire phrase or sentence. I’ve read that there’s some evidence that people read Title Case more slowly.

I think Title Case has its place. On the first slide, for the name of your presentation, Title Case makes the presentation topic seem more important. And the first slide is usually on the screen for a while. For certain types of calls to action, Title Case commands a little more attention. (This is true on websites, too.) Title Case looks more formal while Sentence case looks more casual and friendly.

A little forethought and planning will save you loads of time and give you better results. If you’re making changes on every slide, you’re doing something wrong!

What do you think about Title Case vs. Sentence case for slide titles? Have you had to redo a messy presentation? What challenges do you face in keeping the presentation building process simple? Leave a comment and please use the Share buttons to help others!

Working with multi-speaker presentations

March 19, 2017 by Ellen Finkelstein Leave a Comment

I just finished work for a client on a multi-speaker presentation. It was a presentation that will be given to nurses at a nursing school and I thought I’d share my experiences with you.

It’s quite a challenge when you get several presentations from different presenters and have to turn them into one, coherent presentation.

Not to speak of the challenge of coordinating the content–but that wasn’t my task.

When it comes to coordinating comments from all the speakers, I learned a lot. I’ll share that later in this post.

I started by creating a branded theme

The organizer warned me, “Ellen, the presentations look like a ransom note!” [Read more…]