Keynote Tutorial Character Style , How to use a character style in Keynote

I have a quote to present. By the way I want to emphasize specific text in the quote. Also, I don’t like a font for the quotation mark of the base font of the quote text. So in this case I need two different styles for specific text or a character. How can we solve this problem?

Keynote provides a style function that you can create a pre-defined style format for all kinds of objects. And we can use three styles related to text objects in Keynote.

One is a style for a text object.
Second one is a style for a character.
Last one is a style for a bullet text.

Through this tutorial we are going to create two different styles as a character style. And we will adopt them into our sample quote in a slide.

See you the result of the tutorial below,

What you will learn through this tutorial

You are going to learn how to create a character style in Keynote and how to adopt the styles into your texts in an object. Also, you will get acknowleged how overriding a style is worked in Keynote.

Animate them with a Keynote animation

Through this tutorial I try to create a sample animation for practical use in your presentation. So in this tutorial you are going to see how an animation with character styles will work as a practical way.

What is ‘Final Keynote’ ?

Final Keynote is a tutorial for Apple Keynote application. Since 2007 I have taught people how to use Keynote. So I am trying to make a comprehensive tutorial for Keynote use.
So stay tuned.

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Keynote Tutorial , How to make an embossed or an engraved text effect with Keynote

Design in presentation is not a decoration. Design is taking care of your audience. One message in a slide has been frequently told in many presentation books or trainings. So how can we make the sentence which tell the message remarkable? Because the text should be impressive to the audience.

In Keynote we can use a shadow effect to text objects. Actually the shadow effect is not the only one. There is one more shadow effect which you can adopt into your text object at the same time. So you can make a special effect for your text.

The first effect is adopting it into text object. The other one is adopting it into each character of texts. That is a difference between two shadow effects which are able to be adopted into text objects.

See the sample of the shadow effects.

Keynote doesn’t have an inner shadow effect.

An engraved text effect in Keynote is a little hard to create. Because Keynoe doesn’t have a function to add an inner shadow effect in a text object.

Through this tutorial we are going to make a difference a border color and a fill color of text with Keynote’s shadow effect.

Keynote7 , give me a function to convert from text to shape object

Keynote is a vector based graphic tool. By the way, it’s not fully functional if we compare Keynote with Sketch or illustrator. But, the reason that Keynote is very powreful is that Keynote is really easy to use.

Therefore normal users who are not related to graphic fields can easily learn and use Keynote to design something. So I hope that Apple add a new Keynote feature which we can convert from a text object to a shape object.

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Keynote Tutorial , Sound is a design,too

When Steve Jobs unveiled iPad at the first, everyone expected that the price of iPad would be over 999 dollar. And then Steve Jobs broke the expectation with 499 dollars. But, it wasn’t stop with that. Steve Jobs dramatically showed the price of iPad at Keynote event.

When he firstly showed the price, he used a sound effect breaking a glass with visual animation on the slide. And the direction of the show was so dramatic and made it sense to the audience. I think that the sound engraved the moment on the brain of audience.

Through this tutorial we will learn how to use a sound effect in Keynote and then we will make a dramatic effect with a sample sound that I provide for you.

As a result, you will get the idea that we don’t have to limit our design with jus visual graphics. A sound is invisible. But, sometimes it is more effective than a visible thing.

Watch the trailer of this tutorial below

How should we use a sound clip on presentation design?

Using a sound clip on your presentation shouldn’t be frequent. Too many sound effects could be bad to the audience’s attention.

Always be careful to use a sound clip with animations or transitions in Keynote.

The sound clip should have a right meaning of your scene.

Think about Steve Jobs. His message was ‘The expectation of the price is broken.’ So the message , the animations and the sound clip shared a consistent theme to direct the scene.

Keynote can control your sound clip with animations.

Keynote provides two animations to control your sound clip.

First one is starting a sound clip and the other one is stopping a sound clip. If you have more sound clips than the only one sound clip in your slide , you can create a sound sequence with those animations.

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Keynote Tutorial Text Format - Make your font consistent

Text is essential for your presentation. There is no presentation which does not have a text. By the way the gap between ideal presentation and real presentation is too big. Still many presentations are conquered by texts. Too many texts make people boring and gone from your presentation. So I would like to suggest a practical way to make your presentation better. Selecting a right font is very important to make your text better to read.

Select a sans serif type font than serif type font. And secondly don’t select too many fonts for your presentation. I prefer 1 or 2 fonts. One more thing is Keynote supports a special effect which calls ‘Text morphing’ and it is great to use a different type of font between slides.

Make a paragraph style in Keynote

Keynote provides a style function which you can use a pre-defined paragraph style to text objects in Keynote. The great reason to use the style is because you can easily manage multiple texts at once and also it helps you to keep your text format consistent.

Select a right font in Keynote

When you select a font, you have to think about the audience at the first. Sometimes people like to use a font to present his/her personality. But, that’s not a first priority. Think about it is a readable font for your audience. Is the audience far from the screen able to read the text? That’s the point.

Text morphing in Keynote

Keynote’s magic move provide a special effect which calls text morphing. It automatically putting a smooth animation between slides. Each slide’s text object should be set up different fonts to maximize the effect.

As I mentioned above, a text is the essential for your presentation. There is no presentation without texts. To make your text better, try the steps above in Keynote. It will make your presentation solid, legible and consistent.

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Time machine gives error "can't connect to a current time machine backup disk"

I suddenly faced this error. But, my time machine’s backup process was fine. The problem was occurred when I tried to run the time machine app to restore a data from previous backups. And the error message always came up.

can’t connect to a current time machine backup disk

So I tried to fix it by rebooting my mac and it doesn’t work. I thought that the networking wouldn’t be an issue to cause this problem. because my time machine was wired to my iMac through thunderbolt.

Folder’s Permission issue

I noticed that the time machine backup folder was not accessible. I tried to change the permission of the folder on Finder. But, it wasn’t possible. So I tried other way which is using Pathfinder app.

And I changed the permission to read the folder and owner of the folder from root to my account. After that the time machine data was finally accessible.

It was great because I could restore my backup which meant I didn’t lose my data. So if you have a problem like this, try to change the permission and the owner of the folder.
I think that if you don’t have Pathfinder app, you can use a command line tool to change them.

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Keynote Tutorial Text Outline - Make your animation meaningful

When people see Keynote at first, mostly they are impressed by Keynote’s fantastic animation effects. I did that, too. But, you have to be careful before you use an animation, because an animation which doesn’t have a clear reason to use could cause a bad experience for your audience.

So through this tutorial I would like to engage you into implementing a meaningful animation with a text outline function of Keynote. In this case the core message of this animation is ‘we need to break a stereotype of our business model’.

Check out the trailer video below,

As you saw, the animation has a clear meaning to use. So I hope that you think it again when you try to create an animation in your slide.

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Keynote Tutorial How to improve your bullets

Keynote Tutorial - How to improve your bullets by using Keynote

A bullet point based text is widely used on the presentation. But, the problem of the use is that a whole text of the bullet points are suddenly shown to the audience. And then the audience would feel burden to the amount of texts on the slide. So we need to improve the way to deliver the bullet text. And with Keynote you can easily improve the bullets.

So here is a trick that you can practically use on your future presentation. When you deliver several bullet points, you can animate them with Keynote’s bullet images. As a result, your audience will follow each bullet animation. This gives us a power to control the audience’s attention.

I always have thought about how the design should be worked on a presentation. Most people never think about it seriously. We have various design elements on Keynote such as text , shape , image , video , table , chart and animation. These elements should be designed with a clear objective. In this example you can learn how you design bullets better on your presentation.

This is a brief introduction of my video tutorial which calls ‘Final Keynote’ and I will put my experience and knowlege of Keynote presentation design into the tutorials.

So stay tuned!

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