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Video Transcript

Hey this is Bryan Jones from eLearningArt. Today I’m going to show you how to build a background in PowerPoint. It’s going to be this background that’s you see here and it’s going to be done all just with rectangles and a few other slight modifications.

So let me get into this right here.

You know if you can do me a favor, if you think this is a useful lesson, if you could like this video, that would be great. It helps me understand what you guys are wanting to see more of.

I will also give you the source files here so that you can actually see what this looks like and that’s helpful. You can see how I name the layers and you can actually play around with the source file. And I also have a special bonus at the end but let’s go ahead and get right into this.

So this is the slide that I’m going to create and you will see we basically have just a bunch of layers that are shapes and so let’s just re-create this.

So probably what you noticed the most was this curved line and maybe that’s the most complicated. But on the bottom we’re going to have a base color and actually I have these colors saved so I can show you how to copy and paste amongst others. So I will just grab these and bring them onto the slide we are working on.

And let’s say that our base color… actually that one is a little more complicated. It has a gradient. But let’s name this one. On the selection and visibility, pane let’s name this “background” and I am actually going to hide it for right now.

So let’s create that curved effect. And it’s actually just a rectangle to start so let’s do this. And then what we are going to do is format – edit shape – edit points and if I click on the little dot where the edit point is I can actually drag this to create the curve so let’s try that and then let me grab this curve and let’s see how that is.

Okay so now let us compare that shape to what we had before. It’s actually not too far off. So let’s go ahead and apply the color. And this one, I am going to name this “overlay bottom” and let’s actually… Let’s leave that a little bit. Oh no I am going to Ctrl + Z. I actually liked what I had there first.

All right and we had the darker color on top. Now maybe this is our top one. Let’s just apply Ctrl + Shift + C. We will pull the formatting over from this box that I had here and I’ve got that color.

Now let’s duplicate this and this is going to be our bottom color. So let’s Ctrl + Shift + C and then Ctrl + Shift + V and we will drag that up and we will send that one to the back. Okay. Maybe it’s a little too much so something like that and actually I’m going to name this one – “the top.” Okay so are we getting close here? Yeah, that’s not too bad.

So now let’s go ahead and we will add that background back in and actually this needs to be sent to the back. Send to back and there was a gradient color that was in here so let’s actually go ahead and right-click, format shape and we are going to, on the fill to gradient fill. And we only want three colors so let’s go ahead and delete one of them, drag this into the middle and actually the direction we are going to want is left to right, linear right, okay.

So… now you can’t really see the well can you? Oh, let me pull this up really quickly.

Okay we are going to use the eyedropper. Let’s just grab that exact same color from let’s say we want the color to be this background color.

For the middle one let’s just make that slightly lighter so we will choose a recent color but then we will go to more colors and we will lighten it up a little bit.

And then this final color we will do the same thing. We will do the recent color, more colors and we will lighten that up even more. Maybe that’s alittle too much. Like so.

And you can play around with these to get a different gradient effect but now let’s look back at the original. Now I have a little bit more of a gradient effect there but that’s pretty close.

Okay so when I look at this I still see that there is something a little wonky here. The outline is still on the shape and I don’t want that so let’s go to no outline. That’s looking a little bit better and we need that box along the bottom.

So let’s go ahead and grab the box, tell it no outline there and then I think we want the same color as this so we are going to do Ctrl + Shift + C, Ctrl + Shift + Ctrl + Shift + Ctrl + Shift +. And there we have it.

Now we have a background that’s pretty similar and that was all done with rectangles, edit shapes and modify colors.

So anyways this is something you can re-create yourself. I did give you the source files and as promised I do have a special bonus for you that you can download. It’s got some great PowerPoint resources for you so you can download that by clicking on the link or in the show notes if you are on mobile.

And I also included a few other videos that I think you will find useful you can click on those here and if you like more PowerPoint design tutorials please do subscribe to my channel; I am constantly putting out new content on how to design in PowerPoint.

Anyways, hope you found the lesson useful. If you did, please give me a like and you have yourselves a wonderful day!