Your background is probably the most prominent design element in your presentation, and you've got
to be careful when you select your background because you got to think about things like readability
of your type, is there enough contrast to see the type?
Well?
You also have to think about things like your brand.
The colors in the background reflect your brand, or do they reflect the message you're trying to communicate
in your presentation itself?
Let's look at how to apply backgrounds in Google Slides.
I've got a brand new presentation up, and that presentation has just one slide in it, and you'll notice
first that any theme I choose has a background that is part of the theme.
So one way to select the background is to select it through your theme.
However, if I'm making my own theme, I can select the theme for any particular slide simply by either
right clicking on the slide in the panel on the right and choosing change background or with the slide
visible.
Choosing Slide from the dropdown menu and change background.
The dialogue box for the background includes a couple of different options.
I can choose a color or choose an image.
Let's choose a color.
And here you can see I can choose any of the solid colors from the array is provided or my own custom
color by clicking the plus sign under custom.
Here I can match an exact hexadecimal color that I may have from my brand, or I can use the Hue slider
and then the shade slider to select an exact formulation.
Let's choose this orange.
I can also choose a level of transparency, making the color completely opaque.
Down to completely transparent.
Or somewhere in between.
I'm going to make our background completely opaque once I click, OK?
The color is applied.
Now, if I simply click done here, the color is applied to that single slide.
And if I create a new slide.
The new slide still has the background color from the theme, if I want this background to be applied
to every slide, I've got to include it in my theme.
So let me delete the slide I just created.
And let's again go into the background option.
I'm going to show you slide and change background.
Notice the ad to theme button.
Since I don't want to change the color, I'm simply going to click add to theme.
That adds the orange background to my theme.
And now when I create new slides.
They have the same orange background color that I created for the first slide.
Now, in addition to solid color backgrounds, we can make gradient backgrounds, a gradient is a gradual
transition from one color to another.
So let's again alter our background color.
But using slide and change background.
I'm going to click the color dropdown again, but this time instead of solid at the top, we're going
to use gradients.
There are a number of built in gradients here.
For example, here is an orange and white gradient.
And you notice we have a gradual transition from a darker orange to a lighter orange.
If I don't want to use a gradient that is already displayed, I can choose custom and create my own
custom gradient.
We can create linear or radial gradients, radial gradients being rounded emanating from a center point
and linear gradients being a gradual transition.
We can change the formulation of the gradient by adding gradient stops, and those are simply additional
colors, we're adding to the gradient.
So let's add this kind of grayish green.
I now have a three color gradient, and I can adjust the positioning of the gradient by adjusting this
stop right here.
I can make the gradient radial for a different effect.
I can remove gradient stops by clicking the remove button.
I can.
Choose the colors of the gradient simply by selecting.
The colors from here, we'll click the other stop and let's choose a black, and we now have a purple
to black gradient gradients can be a lot of fun to play with.
You could spend all day trying different formulations.
It takes a little practice, but gradients are definitely a cool feature in your background.
Now, in addition to gradient backgrounds, we can create photographic backgrounds if we have an image
file.
Let's try that.
So this time for the background, I'm going to choose choose image.
And I'm going to upload an image that I have already selected by clicking, browse and selecting the
image file.
Soon, as I click open the files uploaded and it's applied to the background.
You'll notice, by the way, that this is an example of poor contrast.
I would want to change the color of my type, so it's visible against this background.
Now that, you know, the mechanics behind changing backgrounds, why don't you go into Google Slides
and create some backgrounds that you like?