How to Become a Pinterest Pin Making Machine with PowerPoint

1. Introduction and Course Objective: Hi, and welcome to the course. My name is John Williams. And with this course, I aim to teach you how to use a convenient but surprisingly powerful design tool you've probably already possessed access to. By using Microsoft PowerPoint. I will show you a simple but attractive formula for making Pinterest pins. And lastly, I'll show you some techniques for how to mass produce your Pinterest pins all in one sitting, saving you time and money. So let's get to it. 2. Why PowerPoint?: This course covers Pinterest marketing. And you, like me, have probably done other Pinterest marketing courses before this one. Or at least to follow some experts on the topic. You're here because you understand that Pinterest is a great visual search tool that you can help drive traffic to your blog, business or service. You've learned how to pin and how to set up your boards. You've probably also heard of tailwind. You should have a strategy to spread your pins across your Boards, Group boards, and to space them out over time. But above all, having a daily pinning strategy is really useless if you can't create enough quality pins to embed a new blog posts. You boards, and spread around the Pinterest network. So you have to make lots of pins. But you're a blogger or an entrepreneur, not a designer, who has the time to spin on graphic design or figuring out which software applications are out there, let alone how to use them. Second obstacle is money. Some design applications you can get are rather limited free versions. But to truly unlock these applications, you have to buy the full version. Then you have to learn how to use it. Or you can outsource your pin making to another designer, and this will cost you lots of money. The answer to these obstacles brings us to PowerPoint. My original impression of PowerPoint was that it was only for slide shows. But now that's all changed. Let's look at some reasons that turned my head towards PowerPoint as my design tool of choice. The biggest reason for me was I already had access to PowerPoint. When I first joined skill share, I did a course called How to Make explainer videos with PowerPoint. And I was blown away with what a person could create on PowerPoint. Now that was four months ago. And my resulting training has led me here producing this course exclusively in PowerPoint. For those who don't have a current version, older version, or 365 subscription, Microsoft Office. There is still a free web browser version. If you sign up for one drive, you can open PowerPoint in your browser, just as you would Google slides. And you have a free and powerful tool right at your fingertips. Now if you're familiar with Microsoft Word and Excel, then you are already familiar with the layout in dashboard for PowerPoint. Learning a new user interface can be a big turnoff because PowerPoint is already familiar in its interface. This will shorten the learning curve for you immensely. Also, you don't need to purchase per learn any other design tools except for PowerPoint. Because it comes with all the design tools you need to make your Pinterest pins fast and easy. And finally, once you're comfortable with the basic principles of designing your pins, that PowerPoint. You can take them to the next level with animation and video. This course we'll touch on the basics. And I will save the animation tutorial for Pinterest pins for a follow-up course. But with the tools I'm going to show you today, you will get to making lots of pins without spending too much time and no additional money out of pocket. 3. How many Pins should I make?: In this video, I will summarize how many pins you should be making with this graphic metaphor. Think of a pen like a thread. If you have one thread out there looking for traffic, it won't do much for you. Look at this thread. It's lonely, it needs help. It needs multiple threads. And the board's group ports and tribes Japan to have an area of effect. More pins you create for your content spreading between the many boards were boards and tribes have a much wider area of effect with multiple pens spreading throughout the network. This creates a web for you to capture engagement and send them back to your content. We should be creating pins for each and every piece of content or marketing. That means blogs, landing pages, product pages, and video. Any content we are promoting, we need to make a number of pins. For speaking of quantity, we should plant on a ten to 12 pins on average. Not just once, but on a regular basis. That could mean monthly in the beginning and over time, monthly might turn into Quarterly. The important thing to remember is for as long as you are selling products, you cannot rely on older pins. So being able to quickly make or refresh your pins quickly allows you to employ a long-term strategy. 4. The Image Creation Formula: When it comes to the recipe for success for a well-designed pin, there are a few ingredients that you have to get right. For starters, you need verticality. As you can see from the graphic, the mobile phone is in portrait mode. You would need to set your pins to be viewed in this format, not landscape. The next ingredient you need is a layered approach to your images. Specifically three layers, image, overlay and texts. And finally, you will need to apply some principles of visual hierarchy throughout those three layers. If you get these three ingredients right, you will be in business creating great prints for all to see on Pinterest platform. 5. Verticality - Setting up Canvas area: We know the formula now. So let's take a closer look. According to an article on influencer marketing hub.com called 15 Pinterest statistics. Every marketeer should know somewhere around 85% of Pinterest users access to platform from their mobile phones, the majority of which are in portrait view. Therefore, long, tall, thin, pinned are the preferred format for Pinterest. If you observe the screenshot, Pinterest aims to get four portrait pins in a two by three ratio on the screen at any one time, while users scroll up looking for ideas and inspiration. The standard dimensions have changed a few times over the years. But as of now, the standard dimensions are 600 pixels or 6.25 inches in width, by 900 pixels, or 9.375 inches in height. Now let's head to the screencasts to demonstrate how to set up our canvas area in PowerPoint. Here we are in PowerPoint and I'm going to demonstrate for you how to quickly set up your canvas area to work with Pinterest size images. So first thing I'm gonna do is delete these boxes and then head over to the design tab. On the far right, you can see slide size, click the drop-down, custom slide size, and then just type in the width. Screen 600 Px by 900 p x. We're going to click enter and it will automatically convert to portrait mode. Ensure fit. And we can see our slide size is now good for working with Pinterest images. Now, one other thing I just want to show you how to also do this in a browser form. So if I bring open my Chrome browser, you can see I am open to both office.com where you have these web applications that you can open. Also from the app launcher, You can see PowerPoint here, N from one drive. So if you sign up for free OneDrive account, as you can see, I've got five gigabytes of cloud storage space. And from the app launcher, I can open PowerPoint. So this is not from my 365 subscriber account. This is just from another account that I use for my language teaching business. So you can launch PowerPoint right in your browser. And we wanted to just follow the same procedures. Go to the Design tab. Slide size, click the drop-down custom slides size. Now here, the 600 Px by 900 px won't work. You need to actually type in the inch parameters. So 6. Actually, I'm just gonna do six by 96 inches by nine inches and ensure fit. And as you can see from PowerPoint in the web browser, I can work with pendulous size canvas area from the web browser and use PowerPoint for free if you not break 65 user. Okay, so that does it for the demonstration. I'll see you in the next video. 6. Layer 1 - The Background Photo: We have covered the first ingredient. Now let's take a closer look at the layers of imagery. Our second ingredient, we need our images and making up our image will include three layers. Layer one would be your feature image or a background photo. Layer two would be an overlay shape with some transparency applied to it. This will help us to do one of the following frame or feature, the image, blend the image or contrast against the image and the text. And then the third layer would be your text. Let's jump straight into working with images. Working with images will cover two areas, sources and sizing. If you're into real estate photography or food and recipe blogs, you might be taking your own photos already. If you plan to use your own photos on Pinterest, either as a background or feature images. Do yourself a favor and take an equal amount of pictures in both landscape and portrait. Besides using your personal collection, there are stock photo websites you can use as your sources. They are both free and paid stock photo sites. Paid ones include Shutterstock and others. While free sites include places like Paxos.com and pixabay.com. Personally, I use Pixabay a bit more than pixels, but both are free and don't require any attribution. And when it comes to size in your photos, you want to get comfortable learning how to crop your images in PowerPoint. This is easily done and we will use a two by three aspect ratio. Unless you want to feature your image within a shape, then you can learn how to crop your photos also into shapes. Then stick them inside another shape to frame it. With background images, we will fit to the canvas area. And by cropping, we can avoid that unsightly stretched effect. Let's head over to the screencasts while I demonstrate how to work with background images. Okay, here we are back in PowerPoint. And in this video I'm going to demonstrate for you how to work with images. Set them as the background to our canvas area. So for starters, what I want to do is create some additional slides to host each image. To do that, I'm going to click on this slide in the left pane area and click Control D and do this for as many slides as you need. So I want to start with six. And now I can bring in my images. And let's start importing them one by one into the canvas area. So here's our first one. And we can do the next. Okay. And now I'm just going to skip ahead a little bit. Okay. I've jumped ahead a little bit. In order to save some time. You don't need to see me import all those images into each slide. So now that all our images are set, you can notice right away some of these images are in landscape size and some were in portrait. Now if your picture is in portrait, then powerpoint will go ahead and set it to the background for you, saving us step. But three of these, we're going to need to crop. So let's start with the first one. Alright. Notice with any image or shape, you click on the image in our tab area we have picture format. If this was a shape, it would be shaped format. So let's click on it. In this area on the right, we can see the dimensions of our shape. And we can crop this image manually. And you can see we can work with the sides and crop it to the size that we'd like. We can also crop to shape our example diamond shape. Or let me just back out of that. We can crop to aspect ratio two by three. And now we can reposition our image right to the center just the way we want. Hit the Crop button one more time to finish it. And now let's resize this to the canvas area. So again, hold Control Shift and just drag one of the corners right to the edge. Holding control shift will drag all the sides out in equal measure at the same time. So let's do that for our other two photos is click on the photo. Crop to shape crop. The aspect ratio to three. Reposition is try and get as much as a woman as we can in the center doing her artistic thing. Crop again. And let's control shift, drag the corner, right the edge. And now we have our background set. One more to go. Click on the picture. Picture format, crop, aspect ratio, two by three. Let's reposition. Try and get as much of a woman as we can. Looking like she's trying to think about what she's creating and control shift, drag the agile. And our backgrounds are set. So now we can see we have six images all fit to the slide area. I try to use images that capture the theme of what I'm trying to convey to the viewer. So this time our glass to show, but the time you will save creating your own pins using my method as opposed to doing one image at a time to create one pin. Here we have several images connected with artistic and design. They have woman working on a computer from the comfort of Rome bed. Here we have a bit of a clash here we have a woman with a hard hat and construction area because we're building or creating or making something. So I just want to have a rhombic picture. This photo here deals with the theme of, you know, kind of being stuck. In creation mode. Sometimes you get stuck, you don't know where to start. My course can give you a starting point. And then here we have a nice and another nice design-related image. Now the final step saved this PowerPoint as you're kind of starting point. Save it for examples, images. And then what you wanna do is save it six times. So for example, I'm gonna say pin creation image. And then time. And then I'm going to save this one. Pin creation image, artist, pen creation images, and then Woman on bed, pin creation image, hardhat, right? So you want to save six PowerPoints so that you have one image per PowerPoint. So I'll just imagine that we've saved all of these are ready. And I'm just going to delete this, these. And now this is my pin image creation time. And I'm going to duplicate this several times. And now I've got one image and I can test multiple shapes against it. So when I start working with layer two, which are the overlay images, now, I'm going to test some of these different shapes against this image and see how they look. And if I can come up with for five or six different designs from one image. Now you can see I have the foundation to create multiple pins from one image. And I've got six images. So let's say if I can create four or five pins off of each image. So six times four, that's 24 pins. I can make enough pins for two months worth of Pinterest pending. So that's my process for working with images. So I'll see you in the next video where we'll begin working with layer two. 7. Layer 2 - The Overlay: We've covered the first layer. Now let's talk about making some shapes as templates. One of the first principles of an overlay is that it should have a bit of transparency applied the overlay shape. So some of our background image shows through. But we also want to add text over this overlaid shapes. So this is essentially the middle layers job. To provide contrast. We do that with transparency as mentioned before. And the colors we choose. They, the colors should be dark enough or light enough to contrast against the image beneath. Then the text will be dark or bright enough to contrast against the colour of the overlay shape. And finally, making shapes is quite easy in PowerPoint. All you really need to get started is one. Then we can duplicate the slide and change the shape. In the duplicate slide. Repeat as many times as there are available shapes. And you will have yourself an arsenal of templates that you can use. This is where you can quickly turn a few images into ten or 15 pins quickly and efficiently. Let's go back to the screencasts for a demonstration of how to create some shapes and then templates out of those shapes so that we can use our middle layer. Okay, we're back in PowerPoint once again in this video, I'm going to show you and demonstrate exactly how to create templates of shapes using PowerPoint. So before we begin making shapes, let's set PowerPoint up for ourselves for success long-term by adding some quick access links. As you can see here, PowerPoint has many different tabs in the front toolbar area. So we want to find the most useful action buttons and put them in this top area here. So first thing we wanna do is start with shapes. So on the Insert tab, let's find shapes. Right-click Add to Quick Access toolbar. So now from here, we can just click the dropdown and at any shape that we want. And we want to do the same thing for textboxes. So again, insert text box, right-click, Add to Quick Access toolbar. So now we've got shapes. Draw a textbox, We can do that. We don't need to find the Insert tab to find those action buttons. Next is the selection pane. Now this is going to be for a little bit later on, but we want to add it here now. But in order to reach it, we need some kind of shape on screen. So let's not have we have a shape on the canvas area less flying home. Arrange, click the dropdown. And along the way at the bottom, see Selection Pane. Let's right-click and add that to quick access. Ok. We don't need that shape any longer. Custom slide size, that's the next one we want to add. So remember design. So by having this here, you want to have to find the Design tab. You can just quickly access custom slides I. So let's say when you open PowerPoint and you want to start making Pinterest pans right away. Either just look all the way to top custom slide size. And right here you can reset your design. Now, just as a note, you can reformat PowerPoint to any slide design. So if you wanna make thumbnail images for your blog posts or images in a square aspect ratio for Instagram. Then you can change this aspect one-to-one ratio, for example, 600 by 600. However, you need to make different slide sizes of K Edit Shape. So we've gotta shape on here. So let's click on it. Go to Shape Format all the way on the right. And then on the left side where it says Edit Shape, We want to right-click Add to Quick Access. This is going to be very useful in the next minute or so. And then finally, we want to add a color palette. So let's go back to the design tab, variance. Find this drop-down colors. Unless add that to the Quick Access Toolbar. So now we're set up to use PowerPoint for making our images. So let's get started. Let's delete this original image. Unless you start with the square. So Edit, Shape, rectangle, hold shift when making this. And it will be aspect ratio one-to-one. Let's position it right in the center. Use PowerPoints, guide tools. And now let's Shape, Format, Shape, outline, notes, outline. But of course you can change this if you do want outlines on your overlays, that's fine. Shape filled, let's give it a generic dark gray color. Okay, and now let's right-click on our Shape. Format Shape. Bring up this Format Shape, pain area. Now notice to Phil says solid field. Now from the pain bucket solid fill, you have transparency. If you click no fill or gradient or something else, then you can find the transparency or it's a little bit cluttered, you have to look for it. So from solid fill, let's make the transparency 20% as a kind of starting point. And we can make this more transparent or less so that it sees through to the other side, but start with 20. And from there with each image, you can change the transparency to suit your needs. And now begins the template making. So we have our first template. So let's duplicate this. And let's use our quick access. Edit shape, change shape. Alright, we can make a parallelogram. Let's drag to the edges. For example. We can make this a little bit thicker. Now find is aren't edit point and we can change the angle. So what I would do is I will take this parallelogram and fit it to the size of the canvas area. And name just changed the angle to have as much design area as you need. Now, let's go ahead and duplicate. And now, when we click on this shape, you're going to get very comfortable using the arrange button on the home screen. Click the drop-down, find Rotate. And now let's just flip this vertical. And so now we have a slightly different template Control D. We wanna keep our parallelogram. But now we wanted to go across the width. So arrange, Rotate, Flip 90 degrees. And Let's zoom out just a little bit. And let's replace this. Remember I held control and shift and just dragged into edges. And now I can move this however I like. Again, I can use the Edit Points. I can make this a square. I can make this very narrow. I think we want something like this. I can duplicate this. And again, I can have this going in another direction all by rotating vertical. And now it goes from top left to bottom right. I can duplicate this next slide. Then I can duplicate this shape. And Space, this hold Shift, grab both boxes and then resize. So now I've got a double strip across eigenspace this as much as I like. And I can duplicate this. I can take this and let's flip this vertical. And you just see what I'm doing is by making these overlays, shapes and duplicating and creating for myself a lot of different possibilities for overlays, shapes that can fit in contrast or frame against my background images. Let's do a few more. Control. The, I want to change this shape into a trapezoid. Let's change the shape of a trapezoid. Delete this second one here. And now I've got the foundation for a different way of framing. Arrange, rotate, vertigo. Didn't work. Flavored vertical. Sorry, flip horizontal. Or I can rotate these 90 degrees. Let's delete that strokes to fit the duplicate this. Drag it up. Let's rotate. So let's do a few more. There's one shape. Let's change the shape. We can add things like thought bubbles. These are the editors shape. We can change the angle of the drawback. We can stretch it. Ok. And let's also added this shape. Let's introduce at ten points Dar, drag the dropdown and you can see we can play with this. And we've got a lot of different possibilities for these, right? So we've got ourself, ten overlay shapes. Now, I've made 59 of these that you can find on my website or I can share them with you here. So in the resources and projects tab for this course, find the 59 templates. And you can use those to help you create overlays. And you can test these overlays against your images. So this will save you some time with a free resource that does it for this demonstration. And the next video, we're going to work with layer three. 8. Layer 3 - The Text: The third layer to consider is your text. Let's examine how we should approach it. When it comes to text, there are two things we need to consider. Most obvious is your approach to the headline and how much text you want to include. Additionally, how compelling your text is. It's an obvious consideration. More sensibly, is to apply some principles of visual hierarchy to get your text noticed. And in the order that you want it noticed, we want to catch the eye, then make a quick and compelling case to draw the Pinterest user into the ping and to read the description. Ultimately, if they're interested, they will click through to your site. Now, before we move on to aesthetics, I want to go deeper into some useful formulas for writing headlines. One formula for writing a good headline would be to project the end result plus the period of time. Basically, this is what you'll be able to do and how long it will take you to do it. Another type of attention-grabbing formula would be the problem followed by the solution or pain avoidance. And thirdly, there are a number of emotional triggers that your headline can touch upon. The include triggers such as curiosity, pain and anger, convenience, or laziness, greed, pride, power, or ego. Now these are just a few examples of emotional triggers, but there are plenty more. If this is something you feel you need to improve on or get some ideas and examples. I recommend taking a class on writing headlines and copywriting to get you thinking with empathy for the viewers experience in how to connect with them through your headlines. Now, let's move on to the number of sections of text and the layering of that text. When preparing your texts, I mentioned the need to write the headline. But I headline is not enough. You want to add some details and maybe even a sneak peek into what's waiting for the viewer on the other side of your pin. Therefore, you will want to add a subsection or sub-heading. And maybe even another subheading after that water layer are text from heading to heading, as you can see from the graphic. And this provides the order in which the viewer should read the texts. Finally, we may want to add some further details or even branding to our pen image. At this point. Let's go back to our graphic and see some ideas how we can use aesthetics to get our headlines noticed. We will be using all of the principles of visual hierarchy here. So it will be a preview to the next layer. Sides and prominence. The bigger the text, the better. But if you have different levels of texts, we should reduce the size at each level. Color. We can apply color to the text and we can also apply a highlighter effect. So in fact, we can have two layers of color on and around our texts, helping it to stand out more. Contrast. Bark works great against light backgrounds and white or yellow work well against darker backgrounds. Alignment, pinto notice top-down and generally left to right. But we can stagger or zigzag different levels of texts. And if we use an overlay with angles, we can also align our text to the angle of the shape. Now these are just some tips and ideas that you can use when working with your texts. In the next lecture, we will see some examples of fluid design pins and see how visual hierarchy is intertwine into all three layers of the pin, including the text. Let's observe some example pans and show how the text works at each level. 9. Visual Hierarchy and Examples: We'd have covered verticality and the layers of imagery. Now let's examine the final ingredient of visual hierarchy. When the viewer sees our pin, there was a split second vote that happens if they want to view more as a viewer is pulled in. We want text, imagery and visual aesthetics to take the viewer further and further down the rabbit hole. Our initial headline should scream out to the viewer. Read me. Our second headline, or sub-headline should scream out. Read me next. Then the viewer is drawn to some intriguing details of what they will find on our page. And finally, they can make their decision to click or not to click. The aesthetics that will help us achieve this outcome are called visual hierarchy. And an element of this hierarchy are size, color, contrast, and alignment. Let's start with size. Since it matters most. We want the main elements of our background image to be prominent and visible. I prefer some parts of the image to be covered and some left exposed. We can increase the size of our image or the main element within our background image. You're cropping and repositioning. The size of the overlay matters in two ways. Number one, it acts as a cover over our background image. We want the size to be enough to cover what we want covered, but to leave it exposed, what we want left exposed to. Our overlay also acts as a container for the text. We may have to make some small adjustments to our overlay to let the text fit inside the overlay. Trust me, I've seen Pins where the text has spilled out of the overlay and it looks tacky. As mentioned in the previous lecture, sides also matters for the text. The larger the text, the more reader-friendly It is. The size of the text also suddenly impresses upon the viewer the importance of that layer of texts in relation to the other texts underpin image. Let's analyze an example pen and see how size and prominence plays out in all three layers of the pin image. On the left-hand side, we can see a finished image are created from one of my downloading images from pixels.com. The original image was landscape sized, so our cropped it down to a two by three aspect ratio and enlarge the feature element within the image. The woman deep in her work or study from the comfort of our own Bay. The cropping help to achieve the prominence of the background photo. The overlay was large enough to contain the texts and yet not too big that it covered the woman. The text sizes are varied with a big headline displayed at an angle, to smaller subheadings, and then to appendages with details protruding out from the original shape. Now let's compare with the photo on the right. And you can see immediately that the woman was covered by the shape. By using the crop function, I reposition the woman more to the right of the photo, allowing her to be more visible in the image. In this case, a central positioning isn't always best when working with angle shapes. Here, we will do color and contrast together. As they go hand in hand. The color of our background image sets the baseline. And we may choose images based on the color contrast already contained within the background image. The color choice and shade of our overlay will either help the overlaid to contrast or blend into the background shape. We can use primary colors as contrast to other primary colors. Blue, red, red, yellow or gold or yellow or gold over blue or red. Or primary colors, blending or contrasting against secondary colors like blue and green. Earthy colors, red and pink, or purple and pink blends. Additionally, transparency aids in the blending of all three layers. Adjust transparency anywhere from 15 to 50%. Lower transparency makes smaller text more readable. So keep this in mind when it comes to text, the color combinations we choose can make the text more visible or invisible. The text is, without question, the most important aspect of your PIN. So play with the shades and combinations until your text is clearly reader-friendly. Lastly, we can change the color of individual words or phrases in our pin to add emphasis on those words and phrases. Let's head back to our same example PIN, and see how color and contrast aesthetics worked throughout Japan image. Once you have your initial design, you can try out different color combinations. The photo on the left has a dark overlaid, which creates a sharp contrast to the light earthy colors of the woman's hair, clothes, and bed linens. Whereas on the right, I use a golden 400% lighter shade. Also, an earthy color to blend in with the woman. And then another contrasting earth tone color, green for the text. The golden text over the dart overlay on the left complements the earth tone of the background image, but contrast against a dark overlay. Whereas the green text contrast the other earth tones on an image to the right, making it reader-friendly. And notice how the smaller overlays have less transparency applied to them because they contain smaller texts. That's transparency makes that smaller text more readable. The final element of visual hierarchy is alignment in position. We can use the crop function to reposition elements in our image to make it stand out more. Additionally, we can use the positioning of our main image to create dead space that we can cover. When it comes to the overlay, we can position in US angles to cover parts of our image or empty space within the image and leave exposed parts of our background image. Make use of smaller, complimentary shapes to further cover empty space and add framing to elements within our background photo. In regard to the text, keep in mind the justification of the text. Left, center, right. And I will teach you a trick to break a text box with one line of text into several text boxes containing one word, each or short phrases. This will help you to work with shapes like parallelograms, trapezoids, and triangles. So you aren't stuck with vanilla squares and rectangles. At this point, let's jump into some further examples. In this final comparison, I've removed the overlay to show the empty spaces in the background image. By repositioning the woman from center to right, we created a big empty space and can use a trapezoid parallelogram or triangle to fill that space. Looking back at the image on the left and justified the texts coming from the left edge. The text coming from the bottom right edge. I change the justification to step the text down from the opposite direction. The small parallelograms protruding out from the trapezoid fills a second void of empty space and also locks in our featured image element, creating a nice visual frame. At this point, we have covered all the ingredients of image creation for Pinterest. Now it's time to fire a PowerPoint and get to turning out Pinterest images and a fast and efficient manner. 10. Workflow - Templates and Background Images: Here we are back in PowerPoint and in this lecture we're going to bring it all together. All the things that I've shown you before during the course, we're going to put together and build several Pinterest pins from this one image. So we have our canvas area set two by three ratio, six inches by nine inches. So let's go ahead and duplicate this slide several times. Multiple images. And let's go into side-by-side view. And I just want to show you some of the templates how I would work with this. Well, these are the 59 templates that I created. These are premade overlay shapes. You notice they have some transparency, are ready applied to them. You can find image placeholder underneath each overlay shape so you get a feel for how to work with these. If you wanted to import a, let's say an image into one of the templates. Just, I'll just go ahead and duplicate this and paste it into one of my templates. I will send to back and delete the placeholder. In there, you have it. So this is one way you can test your templates against the images. Or you can go on side-by-side view and then choose some templates that you feel could work with this image. So I have a few that I already like. So I'm just going to jump ahead and pick some of these and copy and paste over. Okay, so I jumped ahead a little bit and just went ahead and important all the images. A, overlays shapes onto my images that I want it. And now I'm going to work with a few of these just for your benefit. Let's start with this parallelogram. Actually, I want to have a double strip, so I'm going to start by selecting on this overlay shape and I'm going to duplicate it. And then now let's look over at the arrange and aligned tools. So in the Home section, arrange, there's a line tools and then there's the rotate tool. So I'm gonna flip this vertically. And then I'm going to flip this horizontal. And you get an idea of what it is I'm trying to do. I want to make a double strip here. And let me just position these others get. And now I also want to work with this triangle. What I'm gonna do is just show you this orange edit point. I'm going to drag it over to my right and make it into a right angle, resize and reposition it. Now I wanted to duplicate this and I'm going to flip this one as well. So let's rotate vertically and then arrange, rotate horizontal. And now you get an idea what I'm trying to do with this. So I want to make this more symmetrical. So I have a nice visible strip diagonally between the two triangles. So this is, these are some things that you'll be doing in each shape. You can see here I have double trapezoid. Here I have a frame. And of course, we can edit this frame to make it thicker or more narrow as we'd like. Here, I duplicated this object, wrote, flipped it around so that 2.5 diagonals drips. I have one large diagonal strip and of course I can also change the angle. Here. It's a little bit more of an hour glass sticking out the top and the bottom. And this original shape, I don't this original image I don't really need, but we'll keep it from now until we start working in other places. So as you can see, we have five working models. And in the next video we're going to start working with the colors and the settings for these transparency overlaid shapes. 11. Workflow 2 - Overlay Color Settings: In this lecture, we're going to look at how to format the color and settings for our overlay shapes. So for starters, I want to teach you a little bit about the color palette. Remember beforehand, when we were setting up PowerPoint, I advised you to add color palette to your Quick Access toolbar. So let's go there now. Now typically I like to use blues against bread. And since our image contains a nice, healthy bit of red right down the center, I want to contrast it with a blue color. So I just changed the color palette to blue. And this will change the color palette for all the slides in this PowerPoint. So if you find some color ideas from this palette that you like, go ahead and save this. And maybe in the name save as for example, our glass blue palette. And then if you want to test other color palettes, then open it, save as something different, and then test different color palettes under a different file. Because if I change this to read, any of my blue settings will be moved over to the red color palette and I will have lost those saved settings. So, so now that I know what palette I want to use, let's go and test some of the color. So with the objects selected, Let's go to Shape Format. And now this doesn't work another farmer because for example, we can have the Format Shape box. And if I want to test the color again, under the pain bucket, click solid fill color. Now if I look over at the different colors, I have to pick one to see what it looks like. But if I close out of that and I go to Shape Format and the top toolbar and then shape fill. I can just hover over some different colors and just test, see what they look like. Now, I'm gonna go with blue accent one darker Tony 5%. And now with the color selected. And we go back to my formats shape pain. And this is where you will find the transparency settings. So I wanted to change this 20%. This is kinda the basic and make it a little bit stronger, 40% transparency. Now, we can also, while we're here, go down to the line, solid line, and we can test different lines. So since we're using primary colors, red and the primary image blue on the overlay. I think a yellow trim would be nice as an outline, but that's very weak. So we can make this two or three points. Let's go at three. And now we have a nice outline for webinar overlay shape contrasting against the primary color from the image. So these are the settings that I am going to apply to all of the other slides, the overlay boxes in those slides. Okay, let's have a look now at all of our Format settings and see how they just look against our background image. Okay, so in the next lecture, we're going to show you how to design your text. 12. Workflow 3 - Working with Text: Back in PowerPoint again, in this lecture, we're going to start adding some text to our image. So for starters, I'm going to show you how to create a text box. The PowerPoint we have added in our Quick Access Toolbar, create textbox, but you can also find it in the search screen right there. So let's just go ahead and insert a text box. Now usually I like to work in the margins with textboxes simply because the text will be visible against the background. Not always will the textbook visible against your overlay, especially good text box. And the text is white or OK. So let's start with our first headline. So you can see, i'm going with a headline for pride. Alright, I'm challenging this person. You take my course. And how many pins will you make and how much time will you save after using this course? So going with a bit of pride here, now, I want to make this a little bit bigger. So this is holds us control shift and then write carrot key. If I wanted to make a textbox smaller than control shift and the left carrot. So let's just make this bigger so I know what I'm working with. Now. How am I going to take this text and put it in this diagonal area along this parallelogram, right? Even if I store in this text box, this will be a bit awkward. It would be better to have, for example, one text box for each word. And I'm just going to show you how we can do that. So if I stress this out, what I wanna do is I want to have one line or one word per line. So how much time you save your designs? Ok, so might teach you a little trick here. From the home screen. If you have a textbox, You can go over to create smart arc. Smartart graphics will convert this first-line texts into different types of smart art that we can then break apart and use however we want. So I'm just gonna go with the basic vertical bullet list. As my choice. And now I want to Ungroup this in order to break apart a smart art, you have to ungroup it twice. So click somewhere on the edges and right-click. Find group ungroup. And now we have a shape with multiple free form boxes in it. And we in the end going to ungrouped as again. But before we do so let's change some of the settings for each box all at once. So let's start with the text home. Let's give this a nice big font to start with. Will stretch these boxes out, make them a little bit bigger. Let's give the text a yellow color. Bowled. Now, oftentimes I'll like to use lotto. Also. Rowboat Oh, or Palatino Leno type is another design that I like. But I'm going to stick with lotto. Alright. And now let's go to shape format. I want to remove the outline. No outline. Removed the fill. Fill. And now clicked on the edge, right click Ungroup. And now we have individual boxes. So I'm teaching a little bit of alignment tools, right? So if I want to align these vertically, I can do so quite easily. So hold shift and select on each box, each object and, and the home screen. And arrange. Now you have a line, right? If I want all these to be straight center, I can, for example, a line left and it will find the left-most box and align them according to that. Or I can align center. So we'll find the center point between all the boxes and the line them right down the middle. But here I want the distribution to be vertical. So now I have a perfect vertical distribution from my first-line texts. And for each box I'm just going to hold shift. Click on the box, and then just move it manually so that it's a nice angle going down the line. Now holding shift when you move these boxes will move them in a straight line. So since we did the work of having a perfect vertical spacing, I don't want to accidentally upset that spacing. So by holding Shift and dragging the box, you can do so at a nice angle without upsetting your spacing. Okay, let's do the last one. And now our text is set. Now these aren't actually text boxes. These are what we would call free form shape. So if I show the display screen, these are free form shapes. Now, how does that differ from a textbox? Textboxes have some additional effects in I can make a textbox. The text go and an arch or in a circle, or different effects applied to text boxes. These more fall under shapes that have texted them. So there's a little bit different here. Okay, in the next video, we're going to add some final touches to this first Pinterest image, and then we're going to just fill in the blanks for the rest and wrap up this course. 13. Workflow 4 - Final Touches Save and Export: Here we are back in PowerPoint and in this lecture we're going to put the final touches on this pinterest pen image. So we have our overlays shape. This one is a parallelogram. It's diagonal strip from top left to bottom right. And we have arranged our vis-a-vis text boxes right down the center and an angle to fit our shaped overlay. So I want to make a bit of use of this space here and this space here by creating kind of secondary headline of sorts. So what I wanna do is I want to make another parallelogram. And rather than creating a new shape parallelogram and then applying onto settings, I'm just going to duplicate this. May 1 be big, but we can always resize it. And now we have a shape that we can use. Notice the angle isn't quite right. So this orange edit point, I can drag it in such a way to make that shape a little bit better for what I'm looking for. And now I'm just going to duplicate these two and just drag them along here. And now we have a little bit of extra design. Now, I don't need to create any new textboxes. I can just take one of these textboxes are already exists, duplicate. And now I don't want this to be the same size as my headline text, which is size 40. So I'm just gonna control shift and the left carried to downsize this a little bit. And now video. If we position do bouquet, just dragging back course. Now I'm just gonna do this again. Drag it down. Design. Templates. I need this to be a little bit bigger. Which means I need to raise base my parallelogram. Reposition the text inside. Okay, that looks about right. So now the last step is to just import information into our other pens. Now, what I'm recommending is that you just use the same variations of the texts that you already have here. You'd just be positioning them in different ways. So you might have, for example, headline one. For me, Headline One was, how much time will you save on your designs? Headline two might be social media, graphic design in PowerPoint. And headline three will, might be some details like design templates, video course available on skill share. I, from advertising my cores on a Pinterest. Then I want to have different levels of text at different sizes. So at this point, I'm just going to import the information into the other templates and then you'll just see how they all look from there. Okay, so I'm back now and I have just imported all of the texts into the other template designs. And we can just see how they look. Notice this one is a bit bigger textboxes with a whole line of text, so you don't have to use one word. Textboxes and all of these, only the ones like these parallelograms. And maybe a little bit of these triangles. Will we be using one word textboxes? When you have more space, you can include more words in the line of texts. But we don't want the text to wrap around into a second line, just make a separate box by that. So these would be my finished images. So at the next stage, we will export these. I'll just show you how to do that. When I go to File, Export, Change File Type. And then down here you can choose either PNG or JPEG. Now pinch us off, said I suggest you use a J peg. And they have a reason for it is because JPEGS are smaller files with a little bit lower quality. So it's a lot easier on Pinterest system to use jpegs. P&g has bigger file and better quality. So, you know, it's up to you if you want to do Pinterest to favor and give them smaller file sizes used JPEG, if you want your pins to have a little bit better, picture quality, use PNG. So let's do that. I can save as now, I'm just gonna choose a folder. And this is important for how you save these. So let's just go to where I keep my course content images. So it's creating images to save. And I can choose to do this just as one slide or all the slides here. Let's do all the slides at once. And pictures will, sorry, PowerPoint will convert these into our PNG images. So let me just go to find where these images are. And just, let's just see what they look like. Extra large icon. So we can see that PowerPoint made these. Notice that the slide names are just slide one, slide to slide three, psi four, slide five. We want to add some keywords into our file names. So I'm just going to select all of these, right-click and rename. Now, just pick one of these, will pick one of these and you rename one, and they will rename the others. So how to create Pinterest images? In Power Point? Graphic design, social media, marketing, right? So for me there's a time is the identifier which kind of pin it is. And all the recipes are just key words. And you want these keywords in your file name because it's the first line of SEO in Pinterest system. The next line of SEO is the pin descriptions that you give them. And the next line of SEO is description that you give the boards that you put these on. So start the way you mean to go on by making sure that the file name has the appropriate number of keywords in them. So I'll just click enter and let Microsoft do the work of renaming my images. And you can see if I stretch this out, how to create Pinterest images and PowerPoint graphic design course, Social Media Marketing time. And then 12345. For me, the numbers don't really matter. What matters are these keywords. That's it for this lecture. And the next one, we're going to set up your project. 14. Your Project and Outro: Now it's time for your project. Your mission should you choose to accept it. And you will, is to create and publish a for image collage of Pinterest pins of your own making. The resources at your disposal and occludes the Pinterest pin deck, 59, basic overlays and their mobile phone mock-up preset. For your needs. Step one, you will need to download the mobile phone mock-up photo from the projects and resources tab. Step to import your created Pinterest images into PowerPoint. You will need to resize them and then position them into the quadrants inside the mockup area. Three, once all the images are aligned and in position, select all the objects together and could control plus G to group them all as one object. Then right-click on the grouped object and select Save As picture. Step five, the final step is to upload the class project. If you've made it this far. Congratulations. Let me just give my sincere thanks to you for watching. I hope this course in the resources provided to you will prove to be helpful for you. I'd love to see what creation is you're able to come up with. So I encourage you all to complete the project and post it to the class page. I'm looking forward to seeing some of your future creations on Pinterest myself. When I'm scrolling defeat John Williams, signing off.