Designing Effective PowerPoint Presentations

Setup for Success using Themes and Slide Masters

A Microsoft Office Theme is a key branding tool. A Theme allows you to store Fonts, your preferred or corporate colours and a set of graphical effects into a single file (*.thmx). A Theme file can reinforce your branding, provide consistency in the presentation of all documents. and of course, improves efficiency. With a custom Theme file, you can quickly and easily apply your brand identity to every document, presentation, and even spreadsheet by attaching a single file.  You are not limited to using one Theme - create them for different purposes and apply with a simple selection.  Let's take a look at the contents of a Theme and how you create one.  A Theme can be created in Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

In PowerPoint

Click the Design tab.
This tab contains Themes, Variants and Customize
Click on the bottom of the scroll bar on the right of Variants

Choose the option you wish to set

Colours:

Every Theme has a total of 60 colours.  This sounds like a lot, but there’s actually only 10 ‘main’ Theme Colours – the rest are shade variants of those 10 base colours.
To create your own Theme, select a colour set and click Customize Colors...

Fonts:
Themes consist of two fonts - one for Headings, Titles and Subtitles.  The second for the body text. You can save this collection of fonts with a name. To create a new font collection, customize an existing Font group with the desired fonts.  Custom font schemes will be placed at the top of the list in the Custom groups.

Effects:

 Inside of PowerPoint themes, you'll find layouts, which are custom slide designs. Most themes will include a selection of content layouts that you can use as a starting point for your own slide designs. You can leverage slide master PowerPoint 2022 designs with the help of layouts.