It sounds like we’re trying to talk ourselves out of business, right? In a way we are but only for ongoing changes to documents. Our passion is hooking you up with great designs the first time around.
We understand the need to reduce ongoing spend, as well as the time and effort to go back to the original agency to make a small text change. And what if you can’t remember which agency created your marvelous interactive PDF or info-graphic?
PowerPoint to the rescue. This Microsoft program is very powerful now days and best of all, it’s dead easy to use. You won’t have to go through three years to study graphic design to figure out how to use the Adobe Suite either. That’s still our cross to bear!
How does it work?
Based on the requirements of the design asset, we’ll determine whether the solution will work in PowerPoint or not at the start. Not everything can be recreated in PowerPoint and have the same functionality, so that’s part of the briefing discussion to see if you can live without some of the frills for the benefit of having an editable document.
Assuming we decide the end-product will be an editable PowerPoint document, we follow the same design process as usual creating your artwork in the Adobe Creative Suite. This is the software where we generate the graphics – all the stuff PowerPoint can’t do from scratch. Once you’ve reviewed and approved the PDF artwork, we recreate it in PowerPoint so that all the elements are editable. And voila! You now have a document you can update in the future.
PowerPoint documents can save to a PDF at a good enough standard for online use but can’t it be used for professional printing. Why? Because you can’t add a bleed in PowerPoint or the printers’ marks and bleeds required for the trim. The PDF resolution is also not high enough for print.
PowerPoint can also include animation, sound and links either to other web pages or as a navigation to click from one slide to the next or another part of the same document.
What’s the catch?
There is an extra cost for the step to convert your artwork into PowerPoint but it’s an investment if you think long term knowing you can make the changes to text, links and most elements yourself. If you want to redesign the document you’re probably out of luck but for assets that don’t need to change layout or imagery often, it’s the perfect solution.
Things that don’t work in PowerPoint:
- Digital newsletters: these we provide as Outlook templates – our very own custom solution where images are embedded into the body of the message and don’t need to be downloaded. Or as EMS templates depending on the system you prefer to work with.
- Anything for professional printing as mentioned.
- Anything larger than A3 would also need to remain as a professionally created PDF.
Examples of the types of things we can convert:
- PowerPoint Animation
Very similar to a proper animation done in After Effects. Artwork is done in Adobe, taken into PowerPoint and then the animation is built in PowerPoint including insert sound per slide (which we slice in another professional program), movement and transitions.
- Interactive PowerPoint exported into PDF if the navigation is simple.
- Poster Template up to A3 size – nifty for communications being rolled out across countries where they need to either localise the message or translate it.
- Info-graphics
What you’ll need? A good working knowledge of PowerPoint.