Resources and Inspiration

Quick reference

• 00:04 Now before we dive into creating our first PowerPoint presentation, which is very
• 00:10 exciting, it is important for you to know where you can go for some free resources.
• 00:16 So I'm going to show you all of the resources that I use for images, icons,
• 00:20 videos, things like that.
• 00:23 Because contrary to popular belief, if you're putting together a PowerPoint
• 00:27 presentation and you want a nice image in the background, you can't really just jump
• 00:31 onto Google, search for the image, and then use whatever you like on there.
• 00:35 Most images these days have some kind of copyright or license attached to them.
• 00:39 And you do have to be a little bit careful when you're using them in personal or
• 00:43 commercial projects.
• 00:45 So I like to just avoid that whole minefield altogether and
• 00:49 go somewhere where I know I have images that I can use.
• 00:53 So let me show you a few of my favorites.
• 00:56 Now the first website, I always go to, and this is if I'm looking for
• 01:00 inspiration if I want some ideas as to different layouts,
• 01:04 if I want to see what other people are designing or what's new,
• 01:08 what's modern, a lot of the time I'll jump on to Pinterest.
• 01:12 And this may seem a little bit of a strange site, but believe it or not,
• 01:16 there are 1000s of PowerPoint templates and design ideas on Pinterest.
• 01:21 So fire up a web browser and go to pinterest.co.uk or.com if
• 01:25 you're in the US, and from the search bar I'm just going to search for
• 01:30 let's say PowerPoint design ideas and hit Enter.
• 01:35 And look what that pulls back.
• 01:36 We have hundreds of these on here.
• 01:38 And all of these will link through to different sites, but
• 01:42 the way that I like to use this is I just like to click on them and
• 01:45 just take a look at the way these slides are designed.
• 01:49 If you want to,
• 01:50 you can click through to the original site that this came from to get a closer look.
• 01:54 But as I said, if I'm just looking for a little bit of inspiration,
• 01:58 I can come onto here and I can see all different slide layouts.
• 02:01 And then I can go away and maybe try and recreate these in my own style.
• 02:06 And I always use these just as a guide, so I won't directly copy them,
• 02:10 but I might do something that looks reasonably similar.
• 02:13 But I'll obviously be using different images, different icons, different texts,
• 02:17 so on and so forth.
• 02:18 So Pinterest in general is where I will come if I'm looking for
• 02:22 a dash of inspiration.
• 02:23 Then when it comes to images in my presentation I
• 02:26 have two different websites that I like to use.
• 02:30 The first one is a site called pexels.com.
• 02:33 Now you don't necessarily have to join this site, it is completely free.
• 02:37 And it's very user friendly as well.
• 02:39 So when you go onto the website, you can just search for
• 02:42 the image that you're looking for and it will pull back a whole bunch of royalty
• 02:47 free super high quality images that you can download.
• 02:50 So for example, if I was looking for a landscape background, I just type it in,
• 02:55 hit Enter, and I'm presented with all of the images that match that keyword.
• 03:00 If I want to download one of these images, it's a very simple process.
• 03:04 I just need to click on the image and
• 03:06 in the top corner we have a free download button.
• 03:09 When you download it that's going to go into the Downloads folder on your PC.
• 03:14 And you can just pick it up from within PowerPoint from there.
• 03:17 The other website I use is very similar in many ways.
• 03:20 It's called Unsplash.
• 03:22 And it looks pretty much very similar to Pexels.
• 03:26 So if we do the same search in here, I'm going to search for
• 03:29 landscape and hit Enter.
• 03:30 Again, we get a whole bunch of really high quality images to use.
• 03:35 And if I click on them, I have the download free button at the top, and
• 03:39 I can even choose what size I want to download this photo in.
• 03:42 So both of those websites are fantastic for free images.
• 03:46 Now, when it comes to icons PowerPoint has its own icon library.
• 03:51 So quite often I'll find the icon that I'm looking for from within there.
• 03:55 But if I want a much wider range of icons, I always go to the noun project.
• 04:02 Now you can download free icons from here.
• 04:04 But there are some limitations.
• 04:07 For example,
• 04:07 one of the big limitations is that you can't change the color of the icon.
• 04:12 So the icons normally are black on this website and
• 04:14 it just means that you can't change it to another color.
• 04:18 However, if you pay for the paid version of the noun project,
• 04:22 then you can change the color of those icons and download as many as you like.
• 04:26 Now the paid version is very inexpensive.
• 04:28 It's roughly $40 a year.
• 04:30 So if you do a lot of PowerPoint design,
• 04:32 it's probably going to be worth your time investing in a noun project subscription.
• 04:37 But let me just show you how this works.
• 04:39 Again, we have a very simple search facility.
• 04:42 So if I was looking for an icon related to a chart, I just type it in,
• 04:45 hit Enter, and it pulls back all of these different icons.
• 04:49 Choose your icon by clicking on it and
• 04:52 then you have a choice of downloading as a PNG file or an SVG file.
• 04:56 Once again, those will download to your local drives and
• 04:59 you can then pick them up from with inside PowerPoint.
• 05:02 And finally, templates.
• 05:04 If I'm looking for templates for PowerPoint, more
• 05:07 often than not the ones that are inbuilt into PowerPoint do a really good job.
• 05:12 But another website that I like to use is Slides Carnival.
• 05:16 So you'll find 1000s and 1000s of different PowerPoint templates in here.
• 05:20 Now most of the time I find that the inbuilt templates in PowerPoint normally
• 05:25 do the job for me.
• 05:27 But if I want to branch out a little bad or see a wider selection,
• 05:31 I quite often will come on to Slides Carnival,
• 05:34 all of the templates on here are free and you can download as many as you like.
• 05:39 All of the templates are divided down into different categories to make them super
• 05:44 easy to search form.
• 05:45 And once again, it's just a case of finding one that takes your fancy and
• 05:49 then you can preview it and then download.
• 05:52 So those are the free resources that I use.
• 05:55 There's many more out there, but these are the ones that I'm going to be using
• 05:58 throughout the balance of this course.
• 06:00 So if you want to, now is a really great time to go to those different websites and
• 06:04 just bookmark them in your browser so that they're easy for you to get to.
• 06:09 That's it for now.
• 06:10 I will see you in the next lesson.

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