Alright, let's add some pizzazz to our images with overlays, icons and embellishments. I'm going to start by using that image we cropped a few videos ago. So I'm going to drag that right into the blank PowerPoint template. I'm going to insert text box, draw my text box and type in my text. As you can see, the text is black and so I need to make that another color so I can see it. And then I'm gonna increase the font size, make it real big.
The next thing I'm going to do is go to my overlays and decorations folder. And I'm going to grab a banner and drag it in. So that's way too big. I'm gonna grab the corner and make that a little smaller. Design wise I wouldn't use this banner for this image. This is just a demonstration.
So now I want to add text on top of that banner. Again, I'll go to insert text box and draw a text box right on top of that. And I'm going to go ahead and type in my text. I'm going to highlight that and I'm going to use this nice, interesting font, go ahead and increase the size of that and reposition that. I think I'll make that white also. Alright, so you get the idea.
You can add different things. There's ribbons and hearts and paper clips and all kinds of other shapes and sizes. I've just used this overlay from the folder of overlays that I've created, but you can actually create them directly into PowerPoint. So let me To show you how to do that. So you go up here and choose any shape you want. There's lots of them.
How about a smiley face. Now let's not do that. How about just a rectangle, I can create this rectangle, just draw the shape. And then I'm going to right click and click Format shape. That brings up the format shape options, I can change the fill color to any color I want. I'm going to choose white.
You can also choose a gradient, a picture patterns, just about anything you want. And then the line I want no line. So now I have this shape that's opaque and I want it to be somewhat transparent. So I'll go to the little slider right here. I can make that much lighter in color. Okay, so I might want to use this as an overlay and put my text on top of that.
So I to drag that right on top of that, gonna grab that resize the corner. It's not really beautiful, but you get the idea. And then there's all kinds of things we can do with the shape to make it a little bit nicer for whatever image we're working on. We have shape fill, which we've done, you've got outline, we've also done that, but there's also a fax, we could add a shadow or reflection glow. But what I like to do with these is add a little soft edge. I'm going to go down and pick the 10 point soft edge, and you can see how that's changed.
As I made that selection, we've now got a much softer, smoother edge kind of fades into the background a little better. So every shape, you can do that with any of these shapes. You've got stars and call outs and banners and everything you can think of really, so you can create these directly in PowerPoint as you go. Here's a hot tip. After you've created one of these, you can actually save it. So if I right click, and I can go to save as picture and I can save that asset so I can use it over and over again in different images.
These kind of overlays are very handy when you're working on an image with a complex background and you want the text to pop. You can add any other icon or embellishment that you want to add interest or break up the text. I'll show you more of those in a future video. A couple things you need to know. These files need to be a transparent PNG. They could also be a transparent GIF, PNG is the preferred type.
Remember in the last video I showed you the dingbat fonts. You can also use those as decorations in your images. Then finally, we can add a frame to this if we want. So I'm going to go to my frame folder and choose a frame and go ahead and drag it right into the image and Now, of course, we got to resize that. Just drag the corners. And there we go, we have a nice frame.
Now. Again, I'm just doing this for demonstration purposes. I wouldn't actually create this image this way, but I wanted you to understand all the different possibilities you can do besides just adding plain text. Of course often just plain text is just what you want. That's it for overlays, icons and embellishments. I'll see you in the next video.