5 Cool Text Effects in Keynote for Mac

hey everybody this is mike today we are working in keynote for mac and we're going to take a look at five interesting text effects you can accomplish all working right in keynote so let's dive right in [Music] so we'll begin by launching the keynote app and i'm going to go ahead with the basic white theme in the wide 16x9 aspect ratio let's go ahead and open that up and we'll go full screen so we can really see what we're doing here i'll begin by removing all of the placeholder text box so i have a nice blank slide to work with now this first effect we're going to actually combine text with an image to create an interesting layered effect with some depth to it so the first thing i want to do is bring in my background image so i'm just going to do shift command v and i'm going to go and grab my mountains image from my files that i have saved on my desktop here and i'm just going to grab this image and expand it so it can fill the background of the picture i'm going to pull it down a little bit and get it placed just where i want it that looks good right there and then what i'm going to do is actually duplicate this image because what i'm trying to create is this effect where i have text that is layered behind the mountains in this image so i want to have one version of the image as the background and then i'm going to create another version of it that's going to sit up on top of the text that we're going to add so i'm going to click on the image and i'm going to do command c and then command v so i have a copy of it and you can see there's my copy i'm going to leave it the exact same dimensions okay i'm just going to move it over to the side for a moment and i'm going to click on my background one and do command l to lock it in place and that way i don't move that image around by accident now with this front image that i'm creating what i want to do is i want to remove the blue sky and the reason we want to do that is because we're going to put the text back behind the mountain so all i want to see for this front layer is the mountain range and the ground i want to remove all of that background blue sky and we can do that in keynote using the instant alpha feature so with my image selected i'm going to go to format image and select instant alpha and you can see this kind of uh square target icon comes up and this is where we're going to click and drag to remove some of this blue sky so i'm just going to do it little by little i'll start up in the corner and click and then drag drag and you can see this pink area that's the part of the image that's being essentially erased or removed by the instant alpha so i'm going to gradually do it now what you'll see is that at some point it's going to start to erase some of the mountains as well which i don't want so at that point i'm just going to stop and then i'm going to go to another section and do that and essentially just do this little by little until i have removed the whole background area now of course you could also accomplish this using any number of other apps you could do it in photoshop or any number of other tools but it's nice to do it right here in keynote makes it kind of quick and easy and that looks pretty good so you'll see what i've created is this kind of masked image of the mountains with no background so i'm just going to kind of leave this over on the side for now and our next step is going to be to bring in our text so i'm going to add a text box and you can see it right here and first thing i want to do is make it much larger so i'm going to give it a font size of 400 and let's put a word in so let's say since this is mountains let's do mountains okay now we have to take this text and let's make it pretty so we're going to do a bunch of things to it the first thing we're going to do is change our font face i'm going to use enter variable and i'm going to make it the black really heavy weight and i'm seeing that it's wrapping so this is a little too big so i'm going to drop it back to a 350 font size and then i'm going to click on my options right here and capitalization and i'm going to make it all caps and again it looks a little bit big so i'm going to drop it back down to about 3 let's say 300 that should work and then i'm going to do some other tweaking to this text i'm going to drop down my advanced options and i'm going to kern it a little bit or pull the letters the characters closer together so it's a little more tightly packed i'm going to bring it in to about let's say negative 5 that looks good okay now let's work a little bit on font color or text color so i'm going to click on my text options right here and i could just change the color to whatever i want but what i'm going to do here is actually give it a subtle i want to create some depth so i'm going to give it a gradient in this case and the in i want it to be an up and down gradient so i'm going to leave the angle at 270 degrees in the top color i'm going to make just this grayish color one of the default colors within keynote but again you can customize it however you like and for the bottom i'm just going to do white so it's you see it's got a little very subtle bit of depth to it and then my next thing i want to do is give it some shadow so we're actually going to do a double shadow here and the way we can do that is by using the style options for the entire text box and then the text options for the letters themselves so we'll start with the text options i'll click on my gear and select shadow and for this shadow i want it to be directly down so i'm going to make the angle 270 and i don't want it nearly as strong as that so i'm going to drop my opacity down to about 25 and maybe offset it a little less and increase my blur so i'm going to do a blur of 5 an offset of 5 and an opacity of 25 with a 270 degree angle it just gives me a little bit of depth and then selecting the whole box i'm going to pop over to my style and here i can actually do a second shadow just to give it a little more interest now this shadow um i want it to be not offset at all but i want to have a really significant blur so i'm going to put my blur up to 25 but that's a little too much so i'm gonna drop my opacity down to 25 as well there we go now here's where the real interesting thing happens um i want to bring my mountains in um and i want them to be in front of the word so it looks like the word is kind of sitting behind the mountain peak so i'm going to line my mountains up with the background image and it should just snap into place aligned because it's the same size as the background image and then i'm going to select it and i'm going to right click and i'm going to bring it to the front and there you can see now it looks like my words are sitting behind the actual mountains it creates a really interesting depth and a neat effect to the text itself now just to give it one last little touch i want to add a little bit of shadow to the front mountains so it looks like they're kind of on top even more so on top of the text so i'm going to select the mountains and i'm going to give that a drop shadow as well and again it doesn't need to be anything too significant um maybe a yeah maybe a blur of a hundred so a really high blur um no offset and an opacity of let's see how 50 looks that looks pretty good and so i'm just going to hit play so we can see this and you see we've created a really kind of neat effect pretty quickly and easily it really adds some depth and some interest to the text and the image all right so that is our first effect okay so i've added an additional blank slide and we are going to move on now to our second effect and this effect is going to be kind of an embossed effect where we have a slightly textured background using an image and then we want to make it look like our letters are almost pressed into the image and we're going to do this with a combination of shadows and gradients and various different techniques to to kind of give us what we're looking for okay so the first thing i want to do is set my background image so i'm going to use a uh an image file that i have saved this is a seamless image of a kind of a linen texture was something that apple used to use in its early ios design and was used in web design quite a bit back in the day but it gives a kind of neat effect so i'm going to come over on my slide i'm in the format menu and i'm going to go to background and image fill and i'm going to choose this image which i have saved right here it's a linen file and again this is a seamless pattern and what that means is you can repeat it and you won't see any seams between the repeats of the image i want to set it to repeat because right now you can see it's a little blurry that's because keynote is scaling the image to fill the entire slide i don't want that so i'm going to change it from scale to fill to tile and now it actually repeats the image across the slide and i can tweak the scale of it if i want it to be a little more subtle or a little more pronounced i'm going to leave it right at 100 and so there's my linen kind of textured background now to add some more interest to this um i want to give it a bit of a kind of a gradient overlay to make it look like we have a bit of a light source here so i'm going to add a shape on top of this i'm going to bring in a rectangle or a square and i'm going to expand it to cover the entire slide all right and so now that i have that covering we're going to we're going to kind of tweak this we're going to give it an advanced gradient fill and we're going to use this radial fill and so what this does is it gives us a gradient kind of from this one point outwards so i'm gonna i'm going to grab this little green handle in the middle and bring it up to the top because i want this to be my source of light in this image so i'm going to bring it right as close to the middle as i can up towards the top now the color i want there right now it's this lighter blue color as you can see here but we're going to change that we're going to make it a white but not a fully white just a little touch of white so maybe 25 white and then the outside part which is this darker blue which you see all around the outside i don't want that to be any color whatsoever so i'm going to click on it and drag the opacity all the way down so we don't see it at all and so you'll notice what we did was we just created this very soft subtle light kind of radiating out from the top of the slide in fact i can make it a little more pronounced by changing that white gradient from 25 to let's say 35. and there you go you can see it's kind of standing out it's almost like a spotlight effect so quick and easy and very simple so now we're going to add our text so i'm going to bring in a text box and for the moment i'm just going to make it white so you can see it i'm going to switch over to my inter variable font which is what i'm using for these examples and we're going to make it the very heavy black weight and let's put another word in here so this is embossed that's the effect so that's the word i will use and let's make that text much bigger just highlight the text and we'll go up to a font size let's say 350. and again similar to what we've done on the previous example is i'm going to just kind of tweet tweak the font a little bit i'm going to start by doing all caps okay and i'm going to close i'm going to pull the characters together a little bit and maybe it's a little bit too big so i'm going to drop it down to 300 there that looks good okay excellent now we're going to start with our text color so i'm going to click on the the um the text and i'm going to highlight it and for my color i want to make it black but just barely visible so like i'm going to say a 10 opacity black and so you can see it's there but it's very subtle it's just kind of floating in the background a little bit it's you know you don't see it standing out and then what we want to do is use a combination of two shadows to make it look like these letters were actually pressed into the linen and give them a little bit of depth so if you think about this logically if my light source is coming from up here and these letters are pressed in there's going to be a lighter shadow on the bottom because that light is going to kind of reflect off the edges of the bottom of the letters so i want to give a little bit of a shadow on the bottom side of the letters that is a lighter color so i'm going to click on my text box and in the style tab i'm going to add my first drop shadow okay now that drop shadow i i want to be going directly down to the bottom so my angle should be at 270. i want it to be a light color um because this is where the light is shining off of now right now i have my blur way up high and this is just left over from my previous slide but i want that to be much lower i'm going to say about a four okay so really really subtle and my offset i'm also going to do at about a four for my opacity it's up to you how you want to do it i i like it about i don't know that looks pretty good 65 percent and already you can start to see it looks like the letters are pressed in it's very subtle but it's an interesting effect now to bring it out a little bit more we're also going to go into our text and we're going to do our second shadow using our advanced character options here so my advanced options on my text tab i'm going to add another shadow and this will be the darker one so i want to leave it as black and i want it to be straight up and down so i'm going to change my angle to 90 degrees so it's up to the top and i'm going to stick with the similar settings to the other ones so i'm going to do 4 4 and 65. and there you go um of course you can tweak these settings to to create a whole bunch of different effects but that was pretty good pretty quick and easy and if i click the play button you can really get a sense of what we're talking about here it looks like the letters were actually pressed into the background and they really kind of stand out a little bit as you can tell with the light shining down from above so kind of a neat effect okay on to effect number three and this is what i am calling neon because we want to make it look like we have a neon sign and so you don't have to do this but i'm going to start with a background so i'm going to bring an image in so i'm going to set my background to an image fill and i'm gonna choose and i have a brick wall image here which i think is pretty nice and it makes sense when you have a neon background now i'm gonna bring my text in now for this text effect um you can really go quite far with this i'm actually going to use two different layers of text to get the desired effect but you can you can tweak it and play with it as much as you like the word i'm going to use is neon okay so i don't know how well you can see it but i've typed a text box with the word neon there i'm just going to make it white for now so you can actually see that i have text there and let's begin tweaking our text so i'm going to go set it to my inter font in a black really heavy weight and we'll make it much bigger i'm going to go to a 400 for this and we're going to change it to all caps as we have been doing and i'm going to bring the letters a little bit closer together and that looks pretty good now for the neon effect if you think of a neon sign neon letters don't really have a fill they rather have just an outline so to do that we're going to use the outline effect in the keynote advanced options so i have my word um kind of highlighted here and i'm going to go to my advanced options and i'm going to give it an outline and i'm going to use let's use this bright pink color that's a good color for neon at about 3 pixels so i now have an outline in pink for 3 pixels but i don't want it to be filled with anything because i want to kind of see through so for my color my text color here i'm going to go to no fill and there we go so there are my outline letters so you can kind of start to see the the neon effect right here i'm actually going to go and make the outline a little bit more significant i'll make it five pixels that way it stands out just a little bit now with a neon light that's mounted on the wall you get this glow this kind of interesting glow from the neon light reflecting off the wall itself and so we're going to do that with a whole bunch of different shadows here to try and get that effect so the first thing i'm going to do is select this and to give it uh that initial glow i'm going to set with my advanced options a drop shadow and i want the shadow to be the same color as the text itself okay because i want to glow in that same color to get this just right i want the offset to be zero because i want it to glow from the the edges of the letters outwards in all directions not up or down or otherwise kind of out in all directions and uh to see this glow i really have to set my blur quite high so i'm just going to increase my blur increase my blur and you'll start to see that appearing around the outside okay so it's still pretty subtle at this point but you do see a little bit of the pl the pink glow around the outside now i'm going to go and add my second shadow now by clicking on the word and then on style and choosing a drop shadow and for this drop shadow i'm actually going to make this one black it's just going to add a little bit of depth to the letters themselves and it makes it look like it's sitting out off the wall just a little bit so i have my blur set to let's put it up a little bit at about six and my offset also at about six and the more you offset it i mean go up to 10 actually the more you offset it the more it looks like the letters are kind of sticking out off the wall itself my opacity is at 65 i think i can pull that up a little bit to 75 and i think that looks pretty good so right now it's actually quite a good effect if you wanted to you could go a step further and i am going to do that right now i'm going to copy and paste my word neon so i have the exact duplicate of what i just created here and i want to use this to create a layering effect i want to add more shadows basically so i'm going to pull it over to the side just so you can see what i'm doing and the first thing i'm going to do with this is i want to make my outline a little skinnier than 5 so we can hide it behind the other layer and i'm going to go into my style here and right now this is that black shadow and i'm going to make it a slightly darker pink kind of shadow so one tone darker than the letters themselves and i'm going to decrease my offset to zero and then increase my blur to let's say 30 and my opacity all the way up and that's going to give me a nice glow effect so now i'm going to line it up perfectly with the other word and i'm going to send it to the back and that looks pretty good so i'm going to click play so there is my neon sign and that's just created with a word and an outline effect and then a total of three shadows two shadows to give you a nice glow and then one shadow to make it appear as if the sign is kind of sitting off of the brick wall so pretty quick and easy okay three text effects down two to go so for this one uh this one's kind of fun uh and simple um i call it my glitch effect uh it's kind of a neat thing where you can make it look like a word has been kind of sliced in half and and kind of offset a little bit so for this one i'm not going to use an image i'm just going to set the background to black and make it kind of flat and funky looking and i'm going to bring my text in and i'm going to make my text white with my inter variable set to black and i'm going to just put my text in here we'll do the word glitch there we go and let's just format this a little bit so i'm going to make it much larger we'll go to 400 we'll go to all caps and we'll pull our kerning together and again you don't have to do these things they're just something i like to do i think it makes the typography look better and there we go now here's where this trick works we actually have to cheat a little bit here because i can't create this effect at least not easily using the text effects built into keynote so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to copy this text as an image and then i'm going to edit the images to create the effect i want all right so i'm going to just pinch out to zoom in a little bit all right and then i'm going to do a screen capture right using my built-in screen grab tool on my macbook and i'm going to grab just a little bit around the outside of this text and i'm going to save this to my clipboard so i'm basically just copying an image of this word so i'm going to capture it all right and i'm good to go now now i can take this text box and get rid of it i don't need it anymore and i'm going to command v to paste my image in so this is actually an image of the text that i just had so i can increase it and decrease it just like i would any image so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to duplicate it so i'm going to do command d and so now i have two copies of it and i'm just going to move one up to the side because i'm going to use that in a little a little while and i'm going to start with this middle one perfectly centered and what i'm going to do is i'm going to double click on it and that's going to allow me to crop this image so i'm going to crop it by pulling the top down and i'm going to try and crop it right in the middle okay and it should snap into place using your alignment guides perfectly so i've just created the bottom half of the word okay so now i need to create the top half of the word so move my bottom off and get the top in the middle and again double click this is the one that i duplicated and now i'm going to pull it up from the bottom until it snaps into place and i've created the top of my word so now that i've done this i can do all sorts of cool effects with this i can just simply have it separated a little bit but what i like to do is to pull it together and then offset it a little bit so i'm moving my top one off to the left a little bit and you can see this is where i get that the the name glitch from it looks like kind of a screen that has glitched out a little bit um and you can do all sorts of cool stuff with animation uh using the magic move and all sorts of stuff to create like really neat effects with this um i can also if i want to grab the top or the bottom i'm going to do the top now and drop a shadow in on that and obviously i don't want it this pink shadow i'm going to make it a black shadow and just offset it a little bit and i think that in itself is kind of a cool little effect and you can tweak it however you like and play around with it i think uh just a subtle offset is kind of a neat uh effect i think my my shadow is a little too much i'm going to drop it from um 100 opacity down to 25 to make it a little more subtle and uh there's the effect i i like that i think it's kind of cool and kind of fun and like i said you can do a lot with animation with this so again more just to give you the the idea you could also do angles so if you want to crop it on an angle but the basic idea is the same just add your text copy an image of it and then manipulate the image and you can create all sorts of neat things okay we've made it to example number five and this one is actually my favorite it's really subtle but but it gives a really neat effect and to do this one i'm going to bring an image in in the background of my slide so i'm going to go over my background and do image fill and it's bringing up that brick wall because that was the last one i used in one of my other examples but i'm going to choose a different one i have this kind of paint wallpaper it's actually one of the ipad pro wallpapers from a few years ago and right now it's set to scale to fill i'm going to go to original size so it doesn't get distorted at all and just make it just big enough to fill the slide okay so that looks pretty cool so now we're going to bring our text in so i have a text box it's right here and i'll make the text white for now just so you could see it and i'll write my word in i'll use the word paint for this one so there's my text and we'll begin by formatting it as we have been doing i'm going to go over to my font my inter font in black and i'm going to make it much larger go up to 400 pixels and as i've been doing i'm going to make it all caps and i'm going to pull the letters together just a little bit okay so there's my starting point now the idea behind this effect is to actually use an image to fill the letters um actually the same image that we're using to fill the background it creates a really kind of interesting look so i'm going to click on my my letters here and over in my format menu for my text fill or my text color options i'm going to click my drop down and go to image and here i'm going to choose the same image that i'm using for the background my paint image okay and you can see right off the bat it's almost like the letters disappear you can still kind of faintly see them because the the image in the background is not scaled the same way as the background image so they stand out but it's very subtle and we can tweak that a little bit using the different fill options i like to go to original size and then scale it and you can kind of play with the scaling until you get it just the way you want so i like it like that now you might say that's crazy you can't see it at all but we're going to do one more step which will make this kind of stand out and that's going to be you guessed it a drop shadow so i'm going to select my text and then head over to my style tab and add a drop shadow and right off the bat it have this very subtle kind of dark drop shadow which makes it stand out a little bit and right away you can actually make out the letters much better and you can tweak that shadow to make it stand out even more what i'm doing right now is increasing the opacity i'm going to go to about 55 percent and right there is kind of a neat effect you can also of course move the letters around to different parts of the slide i kind of like it in the middle if you wanted to remember we have the option to do a double shadow i have one shadow here on the style menu and then i can go back to the text menu and my advanced options and add a second shadow here um if i wanted to let's uh play with that a little bit so i'm going to make that go right up so 90 degrees and let's give it a blur quite a high blur and a lower opacity okay and there you have it so i'm going to click play so we can see it and so again kind of a really interesting effect you can imagine all sorts of different things you can do with this with different types of images in the background i could also um to make it stand out even more add an overlay to the background if i want to make the background maybe slightly darker or slightly lighter so i'm adding a rectangle and i'm going to send it to the back and then i'm going to tweak that rectangle to change the way it looks so maybe drop it down to a 10 opacity um or you know a little more uh let's go up to about 40 opacity and now our letters really stand out so it's kind of a neat effect and again of course you can mess around with it but um kind of a cool idea and so there are our five examples so just to recap our first one we used layered images to kind of hide or obscure part of the text our second one was our embossed text our neon our glitch and our image on image text so i hope you found these helpful i'd love to see some examples you come up with i'm going to include the entire keynote file here you can download it using the link down below in the description please note that if you do download it i've also included the files for the inter font face which is what i'm using you'd have to install that first be sure to check it out and subscribe if you like it and let me know if you want any other tips for keynote and i'll put some more videos together thanks for watching

Channel: Mike Sammartano

Views: 10,218

Rating: 4.9617834 out of 5

Keywords: Keynote, Mac, Presentation, Design, Slides, Text, Tips, Tricks, Big Sur

Id: jlfLEUj3MC8

Length: 31min 31sec (1891 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021