The Adobe Creative Cloud font library is vast, with a much larger offering of font options than Microsoft provides. The question is, can an Adobe Creative Cloud font be used in a PowerPoint presentation? 

The quick answer is “yes”, but there are some gotchas to know about. The first gotcha is that to use Adobe fonts (anywhere) an Adobe Creative Cloud account is needed. Once you have signed up for the Adobe CC service, download and install the Adobe Creative Cloud app from the website. Then login using your credentials. To find fonts, you can use the Adobe Creative Cloud app.  From the menu on the CC homepage, click the “f” icon to navigate to Adobe Fonts: 

Once here, you can see the Adobe fonts you have added to your CC account or have installed on your computer. “Added Fonts” are all fonts you have simply added to your CC account. “Installed Fonts” are fonts you’ve added AND installed on your computer (this is an important distinction).  

To find more fonts to use, you can browse fonts via the Adobe Fonts website by clicking on the “BROWSE MORE FONTS” button: 

You can find all fonts in the Adobe library here. Filter fonts by tags like “calligraphic”, “clean”, “rounded”, along with serif, sans serif and other properties.  

Once you find a font you’d like to use, click “ADD FAMILY”. This will add the font to your CC account: 

You’ll be prompted to open the CC app back up. Then you can find the font(s) that you’ve added there. And here is the second gotcha: you can’t use the new fonts in PowerPoint until you click “install family”. This will allow you to not only use the font in PowerPoint, but across other apps on your computer!  

The computer now has the installed Adobe fonts available to ALL apps, including PowerPoint! However, you’ll need to restart PowerPoint for the fonts to be recognized. 

On the list of gotchas – PowerPoint does not have a warning when fonts are used in a presentation but not installed on that computer. So, knowing an Adobe font is needed, is not obvious when a presentation is opened. 

And one final gotcha: anyone wanting to view or edit a presentation using an Adobe font must have an Adobe CC account and install the font on their computer through that CC account. For designers and some corporate users this won’t be much of an issue. This is because the Adobe CC suite is widely in use by this group (just remember to install the Adobe CC font). However, for many corporate users, using a presentation with Adobe CC fonts will be an issue if they do not have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. 

-Jake @ TLC

Aptos is one of the newest fonts from Microsoft. We talked about Aptos in detail in this post from last year, August 2023, HERE.  

The Aptos font is now the default font for Windows OS and all Microsoft apps, and we’re pretty sure that everyone has seen and probably used this new font. The previous default font, Calibri, is a nice font and still available, but Aptos has much more design appeal. 

Aptos is not a single font; it is a font family. A font family is a collection of fonts that share a common design aesthetic and typeface, but may differ in style, weight, or slant. The Aptos font family has 28 variations that all have the same aesthetic across the many different weights and styles.  

A font weight is the overall thickness, also called the typeface stroke. The most common weights are regular and bold, but weights can be thin, condensed, extra bold, and heavy to name a few.  

REAL VS FAKE 

As much as designers love font families with multiple fonts and styling options, PowerPoint does not always show all the options. As example, Aptos has “Aptos Bold”, but in the PowerPoint font list, “Aptos Bold” is not seen. However, when the “B” bold button is applied to “Aptos” in the PPT font ribbon, PowerPoint uses “Aptos Bold” – a real font.  

The same applies to italics. Making text italicized with the “I” italics key, PowerPoint uses the real font, Aptos Italics. In contrast, the font Papyrus does not have an italics version, so when text is italicized with the “I” italics key, PowerPoint applies a “fake” auto-generated right angle to the text.  

TYPOGRAPHY CREATIVITY 

Aptos provides design creativity when mixing different versions of the font to create a dynamic slide layout.  

CONCLUSION 

The Aptos font family, with its 28 styles, provides a lot for presentation designers to work with. Its range of weights and styles allows for creative flexibility, whether aiming for a professional, formal look or a more casual, approachable feel. The font’s flexibility ensures that it can meet the aesthetic and functional needs of any presentation, making it an asset in any designer’s toolkit. 

~Thanks to Amber on the TLC Creative presentation design team for assisting with this blog post and designing the demo slide. 

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