Designing with the simplest PC tools!

Originally this tutorial was posted in here. I'm happily preparing to dissolve that blog - so in celebration of that, I thought I'd move this post here!

Power Point is my main tool for graphic design when creating banners and buttons for my blog and other little projects.

If you have a Mac or photoshop I’m sure you can much much more. But if you are like me and you have a regular PC and not any kind of special photoshop software you can still make fabulous buttons or banners using your own photos.

• Open up PowerPoint
• Click Insert then click Photo; Choose your image and it will fill the entire space. If you are making a button you may only want one image or two at the most. Clicking on the corner of the image you will see that you can adjust the size to make it smaller – which is something you will want to do only if you are adding more images.

• Click Insert, click “Word Art” OR “Text Box”, click on image where you want the image to be.
• Type your text in
• Highlight your text and click on the font, size, colors, outlines – basically play around – move your text around – add a second text box for other text; and this enables you to really play with spacing, that you would not be able to if you enter all your text into the same box.

If you are creating a banner, you will want to adjust images to approx. the same height or width depending on whether or not it is a vertical or horizontal banner. And then line up your images.

• Click “Save As” and make sure you scroll down and save it as a JPEG.
• Close your powerpoint program and open the newly saved JPEG and then simply click Edit and Crop your creation into the desire shaped button or banner and Save!