PowerPoint’s Morph transition is just about to turn 10! Ever since it was introduced back in 2016, the TLC Creative team has written dozens of posts on The PowerPoint Blog, and Troy has covered it in many speaking sessions and trainings. Go ahead – search “Morph” on our blog for several tutorials and demos of PowerPoint morph transition.
But the real post today is about one issue Morph has (and spoiler alert: it’s STILL not fixed). Content displays low-res when growing during the transition (ugh!)
Option 1 – Imported .SVG Graphics
Although your icon or shape might be vector, PowerPoint will substitute a pixelized .PNG during the tweening of the transition. This is why it looks a little fuzzy.
In the above example, notice how the icon starts crisp and ends with no quality loss when sized larger. However, during the morph, it goes a little fuzzy.
So why is this? An .SVG has a .PNG placeholder for display. The animation is animating the smaller .PNG image to the larger, and then updated to the actual .SVG again after the transition – hence a low res appearance of the small image growing to much larger.
Option 2 – PowerPoint Shapes
So, let’s try another technique. Create a shape directly from PowerPoint. In this case, the Not Allowed symbol.
We know these shapes are vector based and that they will resize larger with no distortion. However, the morph transition still does not like that. You’ll get the same distorted animation process going vector, to raster, and back to vector.
So, what else can we try?
Option 3 – Grow-Shrink Animation
This technique example will use one of PowerPoint pre-set animations – the Grow and Shrink.
Unfortunately, this result is even worse when applied. As you can see from the above example, even though it is a vector shape, the tweening and end result are very distorted. And stays that way! The Grow-Shrink animation does not convert the shape back into a vector when finished. You’re stuck with a fuzzy image.
Option 4 – Ungrouped .SVG Shapes
As we discovered, a solid .SVG file will distort when growing larger during a morph. What about breaking up, or ungrouping an .SVG that is made from several elements? In the example below, there are two ungrouped vector items. You’ll notice that the virus icon on the left morphs fairly smoothly. There is still distortion during the transition, but the shapes generally stay intact. The robot on the right is a different story. It’s not as symmetrical and contains some unique shapes. The head shape especially, and PowerPoint does not quite know how to convert it properly.
Overall, there really is not a perfect solution to avoid a fuzzy morph. When designing these types of transitions, just keep in mind you’re going to have some subtle distortion. Speeding up the timing of the transition will help visually, but in reality, it still doesn’t solve the overall issue.
-Troy and the TLC Creative design team