Creating the Custom Color Theme

Creating the Custom Color Theme

In this lesson we'll look at creating a custom color theme for our projects.

Creating your own color themes not only helps you work more efficiently, they help ensure consistency across slides. It's a good idea to create a color theme for any new project you're designing. PowerPoint's color themes aren't the best documented feature, but they are powerful and easy to set up.

If you're following along, I'm working in Lesson Files > Chapter_03 > Custom_Colors.pptx.

Step 1: Documenting your custom colors

It's always a good idea to create a PowerPoint slide documenting your project's RGB values. This means including a visual swatch and the actual RGB numbers.

Here are the four custom colors used in the DIYTC course:

Step 2: Creating a new color theme

Now that we have the color values, we can create the custom color theme.

  1. In the PowerPoint menu, click the Design tab
  2. Click the Theme Colors button and select Create New Theme Colors at the bottom
  3. In the Create New Theme Colors window, click Accent 1's color swatch and select More Colors... from the menu
  4. Enter the values for the first custom color: R:194 G: 72 B: 55
  5. Click OK to apply the new color to Accent 1
  6. Repeat for Accent 2 through Accent 4
  7. Enter a new name for your new color theme: DIYTC-Colors

Applying theme colors

To apply the DIYTC-Colors theme to your project, go to the Design tab and click the Theme Colors button and then select it from the menu.

What's next?

In the next lesson, you'll learn to create page curl effects to design the chapter label graphic.

7 Comments
Carolyn Daughtry Krill
David Anderson

Hi Carolyn! You can "save" your custom themes to the location of your choice. You're right that PowerPoint doesn't automatically add your custom projects into a shared location. It's a bummer and makes share a little tricky sometimes. If you open any custom themed PowerPoint file and click the Design tab, you'll see a small drop down arrow in the bottom right corner of the themes tab. Click that and you can Save Current Theme... That will wrap your layouts and colors into a design template that you can apply to other projects. There are probably some better screencasts but I just shared this example with someone and it uses the same process. You'll just need to skip to about 4:15 into the movie to see the final step LOL http://www.screenr.com/IoH I just upgraded my system to... Expand

David Anderson

Hi Alex - There are a couple ways you can share your Quizmaker templates. One way is to copy the actual source files from one location to another. Here are the two places you can look: C:\Documents and Settings\david\Application Data\Articulate\Shared\1.0\PlayerTemplates\SmoothFrame or, C:\ Users\david\AppData\Roaming\Articulate\Shared \1.0\Player Templates\SmoothFrame That's a little messy for some users, which is why creating a .quiztemplate is usually the best way. Open the quiz file you want to share and apply the custom template or design theme > click the Articulate icon in the top left corner and select Save As > Quizmaker Template (Save as type). Send the .quiztemplate file to another user or place in a shared file location. When a user opens the quiztemplate... Expand