Banners have a wide range of applications, from advertisements to website sections and even email signatures. The purpose of your banner is yours to decide, but the real question is: how do you design one?
You might think that creating banners requires expensive software, but that’s not the case. At GreatPPT, our expertise in presentations and programs like PowerPoint has shown us that PowerPoint alone is all you need to craft your own design. Continue reading to discover how!
Creating a Banner in PowerPoint
First things first, you need to run PowerPoint and open a blank presentation. Of course, this size won’t work, so we have to change it. To do so, go to the Design tab and click “Slide Size”, located in the Customize group. In the drop-down menu, select “Custom Slide Size”.
In this dialog box, you can choose the dimensions for your banner. Instead of looking on the internet for the exact size, there’s a little trick. Drop down the “Slides sized for” box and select the Banner preset. Voilà, now you have the optimal dimensions for a banner! Now, click OK.
A new dialog box will appear, asking you whether to re-scale the contents of the slide (if any) so that it fits the new slide size or not. We recommend that you choose “Ensure Fit”.
Perfect! You have now a blank banner, so… let’s start filling it! First, we need to do something with the background (unless you want it fully white). To change it, right click on any part of the screen and select “Format Background”.
There are several options at your disposal:
- Solid fill: This will apply a solid color to the background. You can choose the one you want and set how much transparency it will have.
- Gradient fill: This allows you to have a gradient. Not only can you choose the colors, but also the type of gradient, direction, angle and how many gradient stops you want to have.
- Picture or texture fill: This will insert a picture or a texture into your banner. You can either choose from a list of preset textures or you can upload your own image.
- Pattern fill: This will apply a pattern to the banner. You’ll need to choose one of the patterns from the list and then select the foreground and background colors.
In our example, we’ll add an image from our hard drive. To do this, select “Picture or texture fill”, then click the “Insert” button and then “From a File”. Then, locate your image and click Open.
All right! Now we’ll add some text to complete it. Go to the Insert tab and click “Text Box”. Now, click on the banner and drag to create a text box. Then, type the text.
It’s that simple! To save your creation, just go to the File tab and click “Save As”. Select the folder where you want to save the banner, enter the name for your file, select “JPG” or “PNG” in “Type” and click Save.
Of course, we’ve just shown you the basic steps. Now you can modify the text to your liking, or even add animations. For more information about this, you can check our “How to Format the Text” and “How to Add Animations and Transitions” tutorials. Ready to begin creating your own banner? There’s another alternative that will save you some time. You can download, for example, our Banners for Middle School Virtual Classroom template, pick one of the designs and customize it to your liking. The size is already optimized!