PowerPoint

Back in 2020, we wrote this post about gradient text. We picked this topic today because PowerPoint users are still sticking to basic solid colors in their text! So, if you weren’t hanging out with us here at the blog in 2020, allow us to add another design tool to your toolbox. 

Looking at this tutorial five years later, we see that it’s still just as relevant today. PowerPoint’s gradient fill process is exactly the same (not necessarily great, but consistent), and it can be used to create great visual styling and visually dynamic designs – all directly within PowerPoint.  

Creating a Gradient Text Fill 

We used a simple two-word phrase as our example. We transformed this: 

Into this: 

Here’s how we did it: 

• Select the text 

• Go to (A) SHAPE FORMAT > (B) TEXT FILL > (C) GRADIENT > (D) VARIATIONS > pick a preset gradient style, or  

• If you want more control and options, click (F) MORE GRADIENTS to open the Format Shape pane 

Customizing Your Gradient 

Now, let’s refine the gradient in the Format Shape pane where we get creative control of the gradient styling: 

A. Preset Gradients: Ready-made styles based on your theme colors 

B. Type: Let’s you choose from a number of gradients: 

• Linear (meaning the gradient is horizontal, vertical, or diagonal) 

• Radial (a circular gradient starting from the center, or from any of the 4 corners) 

• Rectangular (similar to the circular gradient, but rectangular) 

• Path (a gradient in the shape of the object it is filling) 

C. Direction: Adjust what direction the colors blend 

D. Angle: Adjust the angle at which the colors are blended 

E. Gradient Stops: Add, remove, and customize colors along the gradient – you can also add or remove gradient stops (points along the line) to really make it your own 

F. Color: Select the color for your gradient stop 

G. Position: Change the position of the gradient stop 

H. Transparency: Alter the opacity of the gradient 

I. Brightness: Fine-tune the brightness of the gradient  

For our example, the fire gradient effect is a 5-color stop gradient (E), each with the default Transparency (0%, or solid), default brightness (0%, or the color as selected), but a custom angle of 45 degrees (D). This all combines to create a dramatic, glowing look. 

Want to see it in action? Download the FIRE & ICE gradient fill sample slide here! 

-The TLC Creative Design Team 

…

Fourteen years ago, we created this custom 4th of July-themed PowerPoint template and made it available for anyone to use (for personal use), free! Now, a decade and a half later, we still think it’s a great design to use!

This full-featured PowerPoint template is perfect for PowerPoint presentations and holiday event notices. Whether you’re prepping slides for a festive gathering, a company event, or just want to add some flair to your next presentation, this FREE template has you covered! 

What’s included in this template: 

• 16:9 aspect ratio 

• Uses Microsoft Cloud fonts 

• 1 Master Slide with theme, title, and content layouts (along with all standard Microsoft  layouts)

Download the template here and get a head start on next year’s 4th of July! Speaking of, Happy 4th of July from the team at TLC Creative Services!  

– Troy @ TLC 

PowerPoint’s animation features are built for linear presentations, and that includes not being able to loop animation sequences. Meanwhile, video and interactive apps make the ability to loop a sequence of animated elements easy. Of course, within PowerPoint, we can make individual animations repeat a set number of times or loop until the end of a slide, but this does not lend itself to making a sequence of animated elements loop.  

That said, there’s a clever workaround that allows a PowerPoint animation sequence to be looped. The hack involves using a silent audio track! 

The issue is that PowerPoint does not have a way to restart an animation sequence. But an audio file, set to loop, with a clever use of trigger animations based on bookmarks set on the audio track is the hack. It’s a bit of work to set up this hack, but it allows you to achieve what PowerPoint is missing! 

Here’s a breakdown of the process:  

Create your animation sequence: add animations to all the elements along with animation timings (eg. to create pauses), using any combination of “With Previous” and “After Previous” animations, and animation duration settings for each animation. The key is to this hack is starting the animation sequence with an “On Click” animation. Multiple animation sequences can be set up on the same slide, each just needs to start with an “On Click” animation.  Here is our example slide with 3, “On-Click” animations and several “With Previous” animations.

The TLC Creative team uses a generic, blank audio file we created outside of PowerPoint, but let’s go through an “all PowerPoint” workflow to create an audio file to use to trigger the animation sequence. Go to Insert >> Audio >> Record Audio.  

Click record (red dot) and remain silent, recording the length you want the looping animation to be (note: the audio length needs to be a little longer in duration than the animation loop timing). Click the square to stop.

The recorded audio is automatically added to the slide. Set the audio to “Loop until Stopped” in the Playback tab. Also select Start: “Automatically”, Volume: “Mute”, and “Hide During Show” (or move off the slide so the speaker icon is not seen).  

Now we will add bookmarks. These bookmarks are added to the audio file (this works with a video file as well if needed) and are the key feature in making an animation sequence loop. 

1. Select the audio (the audio icon on your slide).   

2. Go to the “Playback” tab. 

3. Click “Add Bookmark” – you will see a yellow circle appear on the audio playback timeline. As you add additional bookmarks, previously added bookmarks will turn white. 

You want to add the bookmark(s) based on when each animation sequence needs to start.  

TIP: Once you add a bookmark, you cannot move it. So, plan ahead, then simply pause the audio at the points you want to add a bookmark and click “Add Bookmark.” And if you go back to edit your bookmarks and don’t see them, simply click anywhere in the audio timeline bar itself. 

Because our sample slide has 3 animation sequences, we added 3 bookmarks to the audio timeline. 

TIP: Remember to MUTE the audio in the audio settings (we are using the audio file as an animation timer, not to be heard). 

To join your bookmarks to the animation sequences, use Animation Triggers:

1. Open the Animation Pane

2. Confirm the audio clip is at the top of the animation sequence (eg. the first animation on the slide) 

3. FOR EACH “On Click” animation sequence, right-click on the “On Click” animation and select “Timing”

4. In the popup menu, go to the “Timing” tab 

5. Click the “Triggers” button to expand and see the options (1) 

6. Choose “Start effect on play of” (2) 

7. In the drop-down select the audio file and corresponding bookmark (3)

NOTE: This post isn’t about trigger animations. But, when you add a trigger animation, that element will move to the end of the sequence in the animation pane (it’s a pain!). You will need to manually move the additional parts of the animation sequences to align behind their corresponding triggers.  

TIP: Add triggers one by one and in order, moving the additional animation elements to follow each trigger as you go. 

Once you are happy with the timing and everything is animating in sequence, be sure to play the slide in show mode to verify a clean repeat. If there is too much time between the end of the last animation and the restart of the first animation, you can trim the end of the audio file to adjust. 

For our example slide, this process was repeated 3 times to set the 3 trigger animations. The slide animation is now a single loop of the 3 animation sequences, animating in time with the audio file…and because the audio file is set to loop until the end of the slide, the 3 animation sequences will continue to animate in a loop until you move on to the next slide.

Done! As the audio file “plays” (remember, there is no audio heard from the audio file, it is being used as our animation sequence timer) the bookmarks trigger the start of each animation sequence. And because PowerPoint can loop a single element (the audio file), the slide animation sequences will trigger exactly as needed, indefinitely! 

To test the looping animation, run the slideshow and verify that the animation sequence loops as expected with the audio. 

Here is the animation sequence without using the audio trigger hack. It won’t loop: 

Here is the animation sequence using the audio trigger hack. The animation sequences now loop: 

Yes, this can be a tedious process. However, by setting up an animation sequence, adding a muted audio file set to loop, adding bookmarks to the audio, and then setting triggers to start the animations, dynamic looping animation sequences can be added to slides! 

-Amber and the TLC Creative Design team 

This animation is from 2014, 2 years before PowerPoint introduced Morph.

Because this was created before Morph, by necessity we needed to create a more complex animation setup using on-slide animations with motion paths. Ultimately, the PowerPoint results were great, especially as this animation was seen by event attendees on a nice big 45’ wide screen!

Today, we decided to recreate the same animation visual using Morph. Here is the recreated slide deck – it’s the same 20 slides (in half the design time)!

But now there are zero PowerPoint animations on each slide.

After the layout and design phase, we let the Morph transition take care of the rest to create this animation!

-The TLC Creative design team

Every once in while, TLC Creative gets to work on some really cool (pun intended) PowerPoint presentations. We recently teamed up with a client to help them make a big, bold statement about the rapidly growing global fanbase of a certain penguin. 

Who is this cute penguin, you ask? He is a stop-motion show with a huge cult following. His cute, quirky charm has fans from all over the world saying “Noot! Noot!” Originally intended for children aged 3-6, this show has also attracted parents and caregivers from all over the world who often watch the show along with their kids. The show is simple, funny, and relatable to any age, which helped the global fanbase explode. 

Our job was to create a unique and creative Microsoft PowerPoint slide segment that emphasizes this penguin’s popularity around the world. Once we brainstormed our idea, we had to find the right look by going through a ton of client-supplied art assets (one of the more fun aspects of our job for sure), locating a suitable background image of the show’s setting, and just the right image of our little black-and-white hero. 

Note: for our post here and to respect confidentiality, we changed out some of the art due to proprietary rights. However, we made the swap quickly with this AI-generated image from Adobe Firefly:

Next, we added a claymation-style globe and some “pop” icons, and our penguin character was ready to be placed all over the planet.  

For the animation, we kept it simple. Just zooms, appears, and disappears. Once the animation was dialed in on the first penguin character, we used the PowerPoint Animation Painter tool (a huge time saver) to duplicate the animation sequence to the other character images.  

Finally, the timing of each penguin pop was adjusted in the Animation Panel, and a single audio clip was added and timed to play again and again, every time our penguin appeared. It was a little trial-and-error, but the result was totally worth it. 

In the end, we were able to create something super fun that did more than just look good. The result was a quick, eye-catching moment to clearly communicate that fans all over the world love this little black-and-white guy. And at TLC Creative, we think he’s going places for sure. Noot! Noot! 

-Mike and the TLC Creative Design team 

At TLC, we love to morph! This transition is one of the most powerful features in PowerPoint and is an amazing tool for setting up the visual part of a story. Morph gives us the ability to seamlessly animate shapes and objects from one form to another. Morph can be used on photos, text and shapes, and objects, however, this blog post focuses on shapes. Specifically, an internal question we have asked ourselves: which is better for PowerPoint Morph, SVG or PowerPoint Shapes? 

PowerPoint has the ability for presentation designers to use both built-in PowerPoint shapes and imported .SVG objects (Scalable Vector Graphics) to create these animations.  

Let’s take a look. 

Note: these slide examples are from an ultrawide project, so the slides are not the default 16×9 aspect ratio. They are 3840 x 1080px (vs. the common 1920 x 1080px). As example: 

Let’s first look at the quality of PowerPoint shapes, that shape shift from a star to a heart, using a Morph transition: 

Notice how the star does a true shape shift to a heart – this looks good! 

But, here is an example of the same Morph using imported .SVG vector art (shape color fills changed for easy comparison).  

Did you see it? The SVG objects can’t quite do a true shape shifting morph. The shapes change, but it is more of a fade – this is good, but not great.  

So our internal design team asked the question: what happens if the .SVG art is ungrouped to become a PowerPoint shape? We took the .SVG art from the previous example and converted it to a PowerPoint shape by: selecting the star > right click > choose Convert to Shape.

PowerPoint now sees the star as a PowerPoint object, not imported art. For this demonstration the color of the converted star was changed to blue to clearly differentiate.  

Here is the same animation with the imported .SVG graphic converted to a PowerPoint shape. 

And we’re back! Once converted to a shape, PowerPoint now recognizes it differently and goes back to a true shape shift. 

Although SVG and PowerPoint shapes are both vector objects, when using morph, there are very slight differences. While the basic movements and sizing of PowerPoint and SVG vector shapes are the same during a morph, SVG objects might not perform as desired when changing from shape to shape. 

-The TLC Creative Design Team 

We pulled the original PowerPoint slides from our archives and did a makeover to the animation. In 2014, we posted 4 slides we designed as part of a client presentation. Great layouts, clean messaging, and engaging animation!

Here is the 2019 version of the slides and animation:

For 2025, the first thing was updating the social media logos and icons to companies that are still available (that is a good history lesson!).

Next was revising some aspects of the animation – although the original motion was great (!) it was a complex combination of motion paths and other animations. Morph was introduced in 2016 – 2 years after we created this animation. So our updated version leverages morph for almost all of the motion and animation.

Because we are continuously integrating video into presentations as design elements, we updated the slide styling with 2 embedded videos that are seamlessly integrated into the design (eg. the videos are part of the graphics and not seen as a “video”).

And here is our 2025 version of “It’s a Small Social Media World”:

-The TLC Creative design team