As promised, here’s the tutorial on using a picture as a PowerPoint background. This also works for anyone like me who uses Apple’s Keynote.
Why should you do this?

Well, if your slides stand out from normal presentation slides, your presentation will stick better in the audience’s mind.

In the video below, you’ll see the following…

  1. Slides from a real presentation that I fixed and added pictures for the backgrounds.
  2. You’ll see the Before, then I’ll show you how to get from the Before to the After.

If YouTube is unavailable in your area, please click the following link to view or right-click to download the video: Tutorial – How to use a picture as a PowerPoint background

Video length 3:48

The steps I took can be done in PowerPoint or Keynote. The slides in the example presentation were all made in PowerPoint for Mac. Don’t worry, as pretty much everything in the PC version of PowerPoint does the same thing.

So here are the six steps I took:

  1. Alignment is a fast way to make a presentation more professional looking; use a left-align as your default to avoid design faults.
  2. Use pictures that are relevant to your topic; make sure the picture size is the same or bigger than your slide size.
  3. If a picture doesn’t have good colours, change it to black and white.
  4. Make your titles bigger to create contrast and to help the audience see better.
  5. Don’t trap text in a bordered text box… Set it free!
  6. Use a black box set at 75% transparency to use as a background for your text.

And here are the before and after slides from the video with what I did to change the slides…

This first one has a core design principal…

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This second was has most of what I did…

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This third one shows how adding a black box can work really well…

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In number four, it’s alignment again…

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In number five, it’s putting together what’s been taught…

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And finally, in six it’s the black box once again…

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I believe anyone can do this. It does take a bit of practice, but if you know some basic techniques like the ones I’ve shown you here, anyone can get great results.

So go out there and give it a shot! If you want feedback on something you’ve done, leave a comment below with a link to your file or use the Contact page to get in touch with me.

Thanks and talk to you again soon!

Carl