PowerPoint Hack: How to Create Hand-Drawn Letters & Shapes

Here’s a cool PowerPoint hack. I had an illustrated character and needed a font style that matched the illustration style. To get the effect I used PowerPoint to create a title font and changed the format. In this post, I’ll show you how.

Free Illustrations for E-Learning

I used one of the free illustrations from Blush which is a great site for illustrations. The paid account gives you a bunch of options to customize. As you can see, the illustration style is organic and looks a little hand-drawn.

Creating Matching Font Style in PowerPoint

As you can see below, I added a big, bold font for effect. It’s OK. But how do I get a font to match the illustration style?

Convert Font into Vector Graphics

The first step is to convert the type into separate graphics. In PowerPoint, you need at least two objects selected. I created a temporary oval shape.

Then go to Shape Format > Merge Shapes > select Fragment. That converts each letter into a shape that can be modified and edited.

Assign Colors to the Objects

Once the letters are individual shapes, you can fill them with any color and change the line stroke. In this case I color picked the blue from the illustration for the fill and color picked the hair for the line color.

Then I used the format painter to apply the colors to the other letters.

Apply a Sketched Line

Adding the organic, hand-drawn effect is a matter of using one of the sketched line options in PowerPoint. I applied a line style that works.

Then made the line size larger to match the illustration. And format painted onto the other shapes.

Whatever you create can be saved as an image. To do so, select the object and right-click to save as image. Or got to the file saves as options and save the slide itself as an image.

PowerPoint Tutorial

Here’s a video tutorial that walks through these steps in more detail.

There you go: a really easy way to convert the regular type to individual vector shapes that can be edited to match the original illustration.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.