I am a high school person. I have a lot of homework, I do many things for school and I try to take many good marks thanks to the momentum that I created over time. Many times I came across little school seminaries that required a power point presentation for the subject that was discussed.

I am one of those people who always try to get involved, and I must say that I made a few cool power point presentations that made my point of view clear. The secret is not only the way I write my ideas it also is the way I chose or create the presentation visual elements.
In this post, I will show you how to create an appealing power point presentation skeleton, which you will easily use in your power point presentation and that will definitely be a useful yet simple Photoshop experience for you.

One of the first thing that you must consider the dimensions of the Photoshop file that you will use to draw the elements. If for example you want to show your presentation on a large large screen or via a video projector then you should chose a high-resolution image. Don’t believe me! Try to make a 600x400 background and then put it on a huge video projector. The quality will suck!

In this example we will make a 1024x768 presentation background, a page title, a simple presentation page and another two custom pages to get you going, and near the end we will create a few ‘icons’, if we can call them that way, after which we will see how to export the final pieces into jpg files. The part where you import the elements into power point is up to you. It should not be a hard task to set a background to a slide page. That is all that it takes from the Power Point side.

For a faster loading of this tutorial, I will show only lower size images, however if you think you can’t work it out without a full view make sure to check the source file that is included at the end of this article.

Let’s get started!

The first thing that we are going to do is create a new document and draw a gradient with the gradient fill ( That’s G or Shift G if you have the Paint Bucket Tool set as default ) from top to bottom. #66cc00 and #006699 are the colors that I used for this gradient.





Now we will create a new Layer ( Control/Command + N ). The new layer will be automatically selected, so we will edit It directly. This time we will draw the same gradient from left to right, or from right to left, it does not really matter.



We will now change the Layer Blending Mode to Soft Light. You can do that by going to Layer->Layer Style->Blending Options.



The Background is ready. Now we can organize a bit and group the two layers together in a group called “Background”. We need to double-click the background layer. This layer is blocked by default, but my double-clicking it and then hitting ok on the dialog box that will show we will transform it into a normal editable and groupable layer.

After Groping the two layer (That’s done by selected them holding Control / Command and clicking both of them and then pressing Control / Command G). We will create new layer (Control / Command + N, remember this one! I won’t mention it again in this tutorial).



The problem is that the new layer is not for the background. It is for the normal slide page. We have to get it out of the Background Group. In order to do that we have to drag it up, and drop it above the group icon.


Now on the new layer we will make a rectangular selection using the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and then fill it with white. Btw, filling a selection can be done by right clicking on the selection with the M tool selected, and then choosing “Fill…” or by going into the Edit Menu -> Fill… .





We will now add some effects. First, we will set the fill opacity to 20% then we will add a drop shadow and a border stroke.







And the normal page is ready. :D!



We will now move on to the tile page. This one will be very similar to the normal page. The only thing that it will need new is a different rectangle.

We will start with creating a new layer. Then again, we will draw a rectangular selection with the Rectangular Marquee Tool.



In order to work easier, we will hide the layer that contains the title bar that we created earlier, and then fill the new selection with white.



We will apply the same layer effects to this element as well. In order to spare some time, we will use the Copy & Paste Layer Style Command that is found under the Right Click menu of the layers. Simply right click layer 2 and chose Copy Layer Style, then Paste Layer Styles on layer 3. Simple isn’t it?





Now we can play with this technique and get more versions of this effect. For example we can make a vertical glass bar and make it overleap the title bar that we made earlier, or we can make the merge.



In the example above I duplicated the title bar layer (Layer 2 in my layer panel) I rotated it and scaled it (Control / Command T and then using the mouse to scale and rotate, at the end, enter to finish the editing.).

So far so good! We finished the background part of this tutorial. No it’s time to focus on one last element: Icons. Icons can do magic for power point presentations. Exclamation marks, Question Marks, “i” Signs, you name it. Those elements make presentations stand out.

We will draw a little Exclamation Icon. With this procedure you will be able to draw multiple icons, depending on what kind of icons you want.

First we will create a new layer. Then we will take the Marquee Tool and draw a square. Hold shift while drawing the selection. It will help a lot ;). Start drawing, THEN PRESS SHIFT, not the other way around.

After making the selection, we will fill it with the foreground color.



I used the Bucket Fill Tool because I wanted to show you that there are more ways to fill a selection than necessary ;). Now a simple gradient effect will go great! In order to apply a gradient fill we will go to Layer>Layer Style->Gradient Overlay.



We are doing this because the background of our presentation is not plain. If we don’t give our button a solid background, we won’t be able to move it around in PowerPoint without damaging the overall style.

Since we decided to draw a “!” we will just take the Type Tool (T) , chose “#006699” as the foreground and click on the button, then press “!” and then the Right Enter to finish the typing. Pressing the Normal Enter will create a new line in the text field, so make sure you press the Left Enter ;).

If for some reason you want to create a more appealing icon, or add a cool text effect, make sure you check my text effect tutorials. Photoshop Xtreme Text Effect and Smooth Photoshop Text Effect tutorials could help you a lot here.



You can play a bit with the fonts and the size until you get something appealing. After you finished with the exclamation mark, copy and paste the style of the button to the text layer. And you are DONE!

Now there is one thing left: Exporting the images to be ready to use in PowerPoint. The first thing we’re going to do is learn about the Crop Tool. We will draw a rectangle around the button and hit enter. This will destroy all the data around the button leaving a small button in the document.



The resulting icon should be this one:



Now we will go to File->Save For Web and chose JPG the hit save. This procedure can be done for all the icons that you created. After saving all the icons, press Control/Command Z to undo the Crop and go back to the full size document.

The only thing that is left is to save each presentation page. First of all we will hide the icon, then go to File-Save For Web, then we will make the right side bar invisible, and save again and so on.
This is it. You’ve done it! If you have any questions, or something to say, fell free to post a comment. ;)

Labels: Icons, Step-by-step, Tutorials