Monthly Archives: October 2024

Jake Seelye, part of the TLC Creative Presentation Design Team and Showsite GFX Lead, created this mini Halloween themed PowerPoint movie!

Halloween is a favorite holiday for my family, so I was thrilled to be asked to create a Halloween themed animation using only PowerPoint for this year. One of my favorite memories around this time of year was when my friends and I would go to Knott’s Scary Farm and experience all the haunted houses and mazes.

Click play and turn on sound!

Haunted houses are certainly iconic for this holiday, and this was the inspiration behind this animation. First, I found a fun haunted mansion style stock art, along with some clouds in the background, to setup the main art and focal point of the animation:

PowerPoint’s amazing Morph transition was then used to zoom into the house, keeping the elements of the background as separate graphics to create a subtle “parallax effect.”

The seamless animation that morph provides worked well to give the feeling of walking up to an old creepy house on top of a hill. The screen capture above highlights how thinking “outside the slide” when setting up Morph animations is needed to create cinematic effects.

The next scene was the most complex, as there were many moving parts to create a fun cinematic visual animation. The lightning and simultaneous flashes of the environment here were created using simple PPT animations and graphic editing. The lightning bolts themselves were setup using “Wipe Down” and set to be quick, much like actual lightning. The “lit up” landscape was created by adding in a duplicate background graphic over the top of the house, with the brightness and contrast turned up quite a bit to simulate how lightning lights up the land around it.

A small but fun detail of this scene is the Jack-O-Lantern on the porch, with the “Pulse” animation on the eyes and mouth to make them appear to glow and flicker, set to repeat until the next slide/scene.

Finally, to add to the eerie atmosphere, I added some fall leaves to blow through the scene, using motion paths, and duplicating them while randomizing the timing:

This is a lot of animations and elements on one slide, all for about 8 seconds of actual animation, which really makes you appreciate the real animation artists out there who make full 2-hour animated films.

The final act of the animation features a Witch soaring into the skies above the haunted mansion and creating a “Happy Halloween” visual across the starlit background. The first part of this was achieved with morph once again, as a way to move from the mansion background to the starry sky background, in an upwards motion, and to also move the Witch across the screen as if she was flying.

Almost counterintuitive is the animation pane on this slide is empty, but the slide is full of animation (Morph transition at work).

Finally, the Happy Halloween ending was created using a motion path for the witch, and a “wipe right” animation for the letters, as if the Witch were creating the greeting with her magical broom.

And that’s it! With some time, trial and error, and creative usage of PowerPoint’s animation tools, you can actually create pretty fun movie without ever having to leave PowerPoint!

-Jake

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.