High Impact text for banners and posters from PowerPoint

Here is a great way to make high impact banners from Microsoft PowerPoint.

To make fancy background or outline headings you are told that you
need a graphics app like InDesign, Photoshop or Illustrator or a custom text generator. It still seems to take a lot of skill to master layers paths and all that go with them. Fortunately PowerPoint has a really straight forward way of handling text and banner images.




In my example I am going to make a speed banner from a picture of a cheetah. Before starting I found a royalty free image on the internet of a cheetah to use as a background and saved it to my machine.

Open PowerPoint and make a blank presentation. Now clear the opening slide by deleting everything as we are using PowerPoint as a drawing canvas

From the Insert Menu Insert the picture by selecting Pictures and browsing to the picture and open it.

Resize this picture using the handles so that it fills the slide

Now from the insert menu insert a text box and type the words that you wish to use. I am using speed

Select all the text and make it much bigger so that it covers the picture, adjusting its position as needed.

Change the text font to get the best impact that you want. I used Breezed Caps which I downloaded from here at FontSC

You are ready to make the fancy text but this is where I tripped up myself....


Make sure that NOTHING is selected on the slide (click in a border or pasteboard)
Select the background image
Hold shift and select the text
Both are now showing their handles
Look for the picture Format menu and make sure it is selected
Now look for merge shapes in the insert shapes panel and drop down the menu
choose Intersect and be amazed at the result

You can copy and paste the graphic for use in any Microsoft office application or right click to save as an image to file.