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!