Hey there, Jake from the TLC design team here. To me, back-to-school week always seemed like a whirlwind of emotions, from meeting new teachers, making new friends, and sometimes starting at a new school. Starting high school can be intimidating, but I was lucky to have a secret weapon: my older brother. As a junior, popular ASB student, and co-captain of the varsity baseball team, he showed me the ropes, introduced me to his friends, and helped ease my first-day jitters. Having a big brother watch out for me during half of my high school years was invaluable, and I will always be grateful for his support during that time.

When creating my Back-to-School Morph animation, I was inspired by all the after school and Saturday morning cartoons I would watch during my younger years. These wacky cartoons would always have a catchy theme song and unique intro, so this animation was certainly nostalgia driven.  

The first step would be finding cartoon style background art that matches my memory. TLC Creative has a team account for Adobe Stock and I was happily able to find this image as the core background for my back-to-school animation: 

I then used this aesthetic to find the other backgrounds and graphic assets needed for the animation.  

A big part of the back-to-school experience is ensuring you, or your kids, have everything needed to be prepared. Using this as the theme, my back-to-school animation centers around gathering all of those important school supplies before heading off to the big first day of class. Here are the final scenes in PowerPoint slide sorter view: 

One Morph effect I enjoy is creating a parallax effect where the background and foreground elements have different motion. In PowerPoint, Morph makes creating parallax effects easy – but you do need to be organized in the asset layering and names. For this animation the parallax motion is achieved by layering the background in the neighborhood scene with separate images for the sky, the background houses, the foreground houses, and the trees. As an example, here are the background layers exported from PhotoShop as separate .png images. When imported to PowerPoint, those layers were given the same naming.  

To create the effect, all a Morph transition needs is positioning each layer at different distances off the slide to create different motion timings. The school bus continuously moves to the right and all other layers move to the left throughout the Morph sequence. This visually creates each element “travelling” at different speeds through the animation.  

In total, for this scene, there are 4 elements “moving” to the left, and 1 element (the school bus) “moving” to the right. 

The parallax effect really gave the animation a cartoon style feel, which helped bring the whole thing together. Using Morph to bolster animations within PowerPoint is not only easy, but is also powerful and versatile. Just as my older brother eased my transition into high school, Morph seamlessly guides your audience from one slide to the next, making your presentation flow effortlessly. 

 

Hi from Lori.   When you say “back-to-school” my brain responds by singing that darn “wheels on the bus go round and round…” song. (And apologies if your brain is now singing along with me!)

I personally never had the school bus experience, but I did walk to and from school starting in first grade – sometimes by myself, which would not happen for today’s kids! I still remember the different neighborhood blocks, some with small colorful houses, some with large brick houses, the parks I’d walk past, and even the streets that had a crossing guard. I tell people I walked about a mile and a half to school…all by myself…in the snow (true story! but not backwards and not uphill). As I was reminiscing, I decided to take a look on Google Maps. First, my childhood home looks almost the same with the exception of a few missing trees. My elementary school also looks pretty much the same. However, apparently, I only walked .8 miles, or about 10 blocks, to school.

With all that in mind, I found a cute neighborhood map with a school bus and some adorable school kids on Adobe Stock, as editable vector art. The workflow of moving art from Adobe Illustrator to PowerPoint is easy. I was able to quickly copy each element in Illustrator and paste each directly onto the slide in PowerPoint. With a slide full of art elements, I had a fun time exploring what could be developed. 

And this is the result: 

TIP: These slides have lots of individual elements, but I opted to label in the Selection Pane only those that would be animated (actually, everything moves with Morph from slide 2 to 3, but only 6 art elements needed to be labelled and tracked across all the slides). Another reason for naming these 6 elements in the selection pane, was to easily see they were in the proper z-order and on top of the other elements (so I didn’t have to worry about a Morph “blip” as elements move under or over other elements during the animation effect).  

To give my animation some “extra credit” (Troy liked my back-to-school pun), I decided to start with the school full screen. Then, as if you’re looking back towards earth from a rocket blasting off or a child watching things disappear into the distance as the school bus drives them along, the neighborhood map comes into view with the whole neighborhood filling the next slide. 

Once I had my school, houses, trees, bushes, stoplights and other elements where I wanted them, I then duplicated the slide and adjusted the elements Morph would move. From here I continued to duplicate-adjust-duplicate-adjust to build the 62-slide seamless animation. 

Now, working with a 62-slide animation may seem overwhelming, but by duplicating and building it as I went, and making sure I didn’t change the layer order, everything came together rather quickly.  

The goal was a Morph-only animation, but I have to confess I didn’t use Morph for all of it. The final animation of the kids jumping was just faster and easier to accomplish with a series of no transition slides. Morph was not allowing me to get the “jumping kids” to jump fast enough without an awkward delay. So, I may have created my own rule for this back-to-school animation as slides 24-62 simply have a transition of “None” and auto-advance after 0 seconds. That’s 38 slides of very happy school kids! 

CONCLUSION 

Looking back at what everyone on our design team created, you can see that what started with Eli going back-to-school for the first time, morphed into reminiscing and sharing some childhood stories, which morphed into a fun and creative challenge! (See what I did there?)  There are so many ways to use PowerPoint’s Morph transition, whether you’re being subtle with your content and gently drawing the viewer’s eye to focus areas, or you’re looking to make a bold statement or big splash! 

Thanks to Amber, Christie, Mike, and Jake on our design team for taking us back-to-school! 

Lori @ TLC 

In the previous post I talked about PowerPoint retiring the QuickStarter feature. Because I created a presentation on the 2024 Paris Olympics, I wondered what Copilot would create with the same ask. Let’s compare!

In PowerPoint, start a new presentation and open the Copilot pane (note: subscription to Copilot needed to do this). Select CREATE A PRESENTATION ABOUT… > finish the statement with a presentation topic in the lower entry area.

For this example, I used the same prompt used for my QuickStarter presentation, “2024 Paris Olympics”. This is a very high-level and simple prompt for Copilot to work with. It also is not a prompt I would use (eg. don’t do as I do in this case). A prompt that is a more detailed ask to Copilot is going to produce a much better, and tailored, presentation.

Copilot provides some information about what it is creating, and prompts us to use Designer for more slide layout options.

The first thing to note about the presentation, and something I have not noted before. The presentation name is labelled “QuickStarter” – the feature that was just announced as being retired! Maybe it is more of an evolution of the feature…

The presentation created is similar to the QuickStarter generated presentation:

• A selection of on-topic slides
• Speaker notes with more information on the topic of each slide
• Design based on a Microsoft template

But the copilot presentation is different from the QuickStarter presentation, some good and some not good:

• The Copilot presentation has A LOT of text on each slide (too much)
• The Copilot presentation integrates photos onto each slide (and the QuickStarter presentation had no images)
• The Copilot presentation does not offer any formatting and use of PowerPoint hidden slides with tips

For comparison, here is the QuickStarter presentation created from the ask/prompt “2024 Paris Olympics”

Troy @ TLC

 

I received this notice from Microsoft this past week.

I did a search and never did a blog post on the PowerPoint QuickStarter feature. When it was released in 2017 I know I tested it and was not a fan of it. For posterity and future reference, QuickStarter is – was – opened by going to FILE > NEW > QUICKSTARTER

Add a presentation topic and click SEARCH

A summary of topics per slide is presented. Unselect any slide topic and click NEXT

Select a Microsoft template (and only a Microsoft template) for the presentation and click CREATE

A presentation is created with content, speaker notes, and the first 2 hidden slides are PowerPoint formatting and use tips (such as tip to open the Presenter Notes to see the added content)

Actually I was impressed with the technology and coding, but not a fan of how I saw it being used as a school report shortcut. Now in 2024, I am more impressed with how this pre-AI assembly of data feature is the OG of automated presentation creation – and in experimenting with it more this week, Quickstarter does as good a job as CoPilot in creating a presentation on a specified topic!

Troy @ TLC

 

Troy was inspired by Amber’s fun, 8-bit (see previous post) back-to-school animation and turned this into an internal design challenge for our team. He tasked everyone with creating an animation themed around back-to-school. The catch? Only Morph can be used! Today we’re going to see what Christie and Mike created…take it away Christie… 

(Christie) 

Hello everyone, this is Christie from the TLC Creative design team. Let me tell you one of my back-to-school stories. It was the first day back to school for freshman year of high school, and it happened to be my birthday. I walked into the classroom not knowing anyone, so all of this was about to be very embarrassing.  

As class started, our teacher, Mrs. Johnson, asked everyone to stand up and introduce ourselves. This was never my strong suit so speaking in front of a whole classroom full of new people was nerve-racking. For some reason I decided to introduce the conversation to let everyone know that the day was my birthday. Just then, my teacher said, “let’s all sing ‘Happy Birthday'”.  

Instantly, everyone started singing. I could feel my cheeks turning red as everyone’s eyes turned towards me. Despite my embarrassment, I managed to smile. Let’s just say that was an interesting start to freshman year of high school.  

I am not sharing photos of high school me, and luckily all the back-to-school images I used for this animation were found in a single Adobe Illustrator file sourced from Adobe Stock. I was inspired to use a traditional back-to-school look with a chalk board, but with a more adult audience (that’s you) vs an adolescent back-to-school year look. I liked the Adobe Stock image and its balanced design as is. So, no layout work; however, I did have to modify to fill a 16×9 slide area, and the challenge of how to animate with just Morph.  

The font was an editable Adobe family font, that was simple enough to activate to use.  

In Adobe Illustrator, I outlined the text in order to export it as an SVG format graphic so it was PowerPoint ready (vs. having an .svg with live text and needing the custom font installed on the computer).  

When it came to the school icon graphics, they were set as an object with a live stroke in the Adobe Illustrator file, so I outlined each and exported as .SVG PowerPoint ready images.  

After exporting all images, I was concerned that I may have created too many complex vector images for PowerPoint to deal with, ultimately causing Morph to potentially load each slide slower and delay the animation. My solution was to switch from vector graphics (.svg) to .PNG images. The file size is a bit larger, but the complexity factor for PowerPoint rendering the large number of graphics on each slide was resolved.  

For the animation, there are only 2 slides needed for Morph to create the full animation. On the first slide I adjusted all graphics and words off the edge of the slide, at different scales, placement, and rotation. 

On the second slide, all the objects are rotated, sized, and placed in their end positions. 

Here is the final result.

 

(Mike)

As a kid, younger me (Mike) always dreaded back to school. We moved a lot, and it seemed like I was always the new kid. I remember the anxiety starting to build in August and it got worse on the first day of class. I kind of forgot about all the angst, until it came to my daughter’s first day of kindergarten. Outside her new classroom, she suddenly didn’t want to go in. She latched on to my wife’s leg and started crying. For me, seeing her in that situation, I had a lot of empathy, and that nervous feeling all came flooding back to me. Eventually her teacher calmed her and was able to have her come into the classroom. By the end of the day, my daughter had made a new best friend, and all was good again. 

The inspiration for this design, and animation, comes from a video game my kids played when they were young, called Little Big Planet. The visuals in the game were a combination of paper and fabric art, illustrations, and realistic photos – a styling I really like.  

For my back-to-school animation, the background paper art images were created with Adobe Firefly’s AI software. I entered a simple prompt of “paper art of a school, wide shot, bright colors” and Firefly generated options to choose from. I then just replaced the word “school” in the prompt to “summer lake”, “countryside”, “neighborhood”, and “classroom” for the other backgrounds needed for the animation. This way, I was able to get the fantastic art, quickly, without investing time in searching a stock image library for images that worked aesthetically and all visually coordinated.

For the kid images and line art accent graphics, I was not satisfied with the AI generated art options and did invest time sourcing these from our from our stock photo resources. 

Using only the Morph transition was a challenge, mainly trying to get the timing of the animations exactly how I liked them. My solution for this project was spreading out the Morph sequences over extra slides. Also, with so many art elements, getting the correct layering to prevent visual glitches was tricky. TIP: name each element in the Selection Panel starting with the “double !!”. 

Like back-to-school time, creating a complex Morph transition can give you a little anxiety, but once you get past that initial intimidation, it can become your new best friend. When well planned, the unique animations a Morph transition can create will really grab an audience’s attention and make your slides, and message, very impactful. 

This is part 2 of our 3 part series showcasing back-to-school PowerPoint Morph animations. Look for part 3 soon! 

Choosing the right typeface for a PowerPoint template can really affect the impact it has on the message and your audience. If you dare to go beyond the Microsoft PowerPoint default font Aptos for your presentation design, you must consider which font will work, not only creatively, but technically as well.

Julie Terberg, a wonderful presentation design expert and Troy Chollar’s fellow PowerPoint MVP, recently released a must-read “white paper” covering the many factors to consider when making typography decisions for Microsoft PowerPoint templates and presentations.

The TLC Creative presentation design team has all read “Choosing fonts for PowerPoint templates – A guide for making informed font decisions”  and here are some of our top take aways:

 

Font Display on Mac vs. PC

Fonts on a Mac system vs a Windows system use different display technologies. If you look closely, there is a difference in how a font is displayed. Each OS uses a different process to render the font, and the letterforms on a Mac look subtly thicker than those on Windows. Most people wouldn’t notice the difference, but you can see it when compared side by side. This is something to be aware of, but there is not any way to control this.

The slight font difference also extends to printing, as you can see in this side-by-side PDF comparison:

 

Custom Foundry Fonts

“Foundry Fonts” are custom fonts, or fonts not supplied by Microsoft. The thought behind using Foundry fonts makes sense if used within a company or organization as it’s an opportunity to use a unique typeface for branding; however, in most scenarios the cons outweigh the pros. Every computer will need the custom fonts installed to display the font. There are distribution, purchase and licensing considerations, such as Foundry Fonts often require purchasing a license for EACH user.

In this scenario, in addition to needing to distribute and install the font on all computers, the purchase process is added to the technical hurdles. Sometimes there is a corporate, or Enterprise, license in place allowing the font use by all employees. It is also important to note that the purchased license could be for the entire font family, or just a specific style of that font. Plus, some licenses are only for temporary use and can require renewals to license for continued use. The key takeaway; be aware of the installation and licensing needs for all non-Microsoft fonts.

 

Font Compatibility

Are Microsoft and Google becoming friends with compatibility fonts? Microsoft has added some of Google’s common fonts to its Cloud Fonts library! Lato, Montserrat, Open Sans, and Poppins are a few Google fonts now automatically supported by Microsoft M365 PowerPoint. The caveat is the computer must be online. PowerPoint will detect these specific Google fonts when the presentation file opens, will automatically download, install, AND be available to PowerPoint without restarting the app. In testing, some of our design team saw this successfully happen with Lato, but others had issues (e.g. the Lato Google Font did not install, and the presentation substituted a Microsoft font). These are exciting possibilities, but still something to keep an eye on.

 

Embedded Fonts

Custom fonts can really enhance any PowerPoint design. One solution Microsoft has added to PowerPoint is the ability to embed custom fonts directly into the PowerPoint file. This is not new technology for other software. As an example, the ability to embed fonts has been available for PDF documents for many years.

Why are embedded fonts important? Because any non-Microsoft font that is not recognized by the computer, PowerPoint automatically substitutes with a standard Microsoft font, meaning you cannot control how text on slides really displays because substitute fonts may add bad line breaks, have font display sizes change and other display issues. So, in theory, embedding custom fonts into a PowerPoint file allows the fonts to travel with the file, be automatically installed, and will always display on the slide as designed.

If embedded fonts worked (spoiler alert, we are not endorsing embedded fonts for our projects), this would be the most convenient way to use custom fonts in a presentation and assure when sharing the presentation, as everything would display as designed. However, as Julie points out in the whitepaper on fonts, there can be issues when non-Microsoft fonts are embedded. In our testing, we have concluded that embedding fonts is not a best practice for TLC Creative with the current technology iteration.

Here’s a great, but technical, tip from the white paper. If the goal is to embed a font into a presentation, confirm that font is embeddable (controlled by the company that developed the font and set the file permissions and licensing options). The font file property settings list if the font has the option to be embedded. On a Windows computer go to C: > Windows > Fonts. Right-click any font and open the Properties dialog box.

On the GENERAL tab, confirm the Read Only and Hidden options are not checked. On the DETAILS tab, you can see the FONT EMBEDDABILITY property. Font developers generally set one of four permissions; Restricted, Print and Preview, Editable, or Installable. For PowerPoint to be able to embed a font correctly, the property of the font must be Editable or Installable.

 

Variable Fonts

Variable fonts are the future, and Microsoft has started to implement this newer font file type. A variable font is a font file that stores a range of design variants all within one file. Other font file types like .TTF and .OTF use separate files for each style a font has available (e.g. italic, bold, thin, heavy, etc.). Variable fonts not only contain all the font styles in a single file, but the Variable Font file type expands the number of font styles and specialty glyphs that a font can have – by a lot!

Variable fonts are still not recognized by most apps. Everything about them

Microsoft currently has implemented at least two variable Cloud fonts: Bahnschrift and Selawik. Bahnschrift offers 13 variations for use in PPT, while Selawik only offers 4. Each is a single file on your computer. If installed as an OTF file format, it would be 13 separate files.  Selawik is also a single file. If installed as an OTF file format it would be 4 separate files, one for each of the 4 styling/weight options the Selawik font offers.

FYI: Photoshop CC embraces variable fonts and not only recognizes the multiple font style options in the single Variable font file, but it allows full control with a “weight” and “width” setting offered in the Character panel to truly customize how the characters of a Variable font are displayed for that project.

Hopefully one day Microsoft will update their capabilities to allow for full use of variable fonts in PowerPoint. Currently, it is better to steer clear using variable fonts in PowerPoint as PowerPoint is unable to access most of the styling options and none of the display customization options.

 

Our Conclusion? Understanding Fonts Is Essential.

To learn more about these take aways the TLC team highlighted, and font choices in PowerPoint, download the “Choosing fonts for PowerPoint templates – A guide for making informed font decisions” whitepaper at Julie Terberg’s site here. And special note: the whitepaper is also available in a French language version.

Thanks to the TLC Creative presentation design team for their input and expertise for this post:

• Font Display on Mac vs. PC (by: Jake Seelye)
• Custom foundry fonts (by: Christie Best)
• Font compatibility (by: Lori Chollar)
• Embedded fonts (by: Mike Zinniger)
• Variable fonts (by: Amber Prince)