How I Built This Video Gallery Interaction

 View the video media gallery

The media gallery interaction is a great way to present multiple images or videos that your learners can browse through one at a time. If you work with a lot of video-based courses, this format will make a fabulous addition to your e-learning toolkit.

Creating the Theme Fonts and Colors

I always like to begin my projects by creating custom theme fonts and theme colors in PowerPoint. This helps me work from fonts and colors that can be updated with a single click rather than having to go into each slide to make the change.

Creating The Theme Fonts and Colors

Creating the Slide Master Layout and Placeholders

If there’s one development area I obsess over, it's working with text and image placeholders. Building e-learning courses in PowerPoint means working with a lot of slides, so the last thing you want to lose time on is nudging graphics in place one pixel at a time over multiple slides.

Creating The Slide Master Layout And Placeholders

Benefits of Placeholders

Why do I rely on my placeholders? Placeholders ensure consistency and make updating object alignment easy!

Even though I always use well-structured design guides to manage object alignment, objects still shift or get nudged out of place during production. Here’s a good example:

Benefits Of Placeholders

After I inserted my videos, I noticed uneven spacing between the slide titles. I forgot to account for the video playbar and that caused my template to break.

Rather than nudging the title text for seven slides, I jumped into the slide master and nudged the text placeholders up a few pixels and, like magic, my slides were updated to reflect the new alignment. Luke Skywalker used the Force; e-learning designers use placeholders.

Adding Hyperlinks and Navigation

I created the image-based navigation using PowerPoint’s hyperlinks. To apply a hyperlink, right-click an object and select Hyperlink from the drop-down menu and point the link to the target slide in your project.

Adding The Hyperlinks And Navigation

Using My Template for Your Own Projects

I’m always a little divided on how to share these types of templates.

On the one hand, I like the simple, bare-bones template where only the built-in placeholders are visible. This makes it easy to dive in and start adding my own text and graphics. The downside to this format is that the template looks really empty until I add my content.

On the other hand, I like seeing something on my slide—even if it’s just plain images added as placeholders. The template feels complete even if the graphics and text are generic placeholders.

The workflow for this approach means that I need to right-click the images to change the pictures using my own.

Using The Template For Your Own Projects

Which template style did I give you? Find out by downloading the media gallery template.

Next Steps

I’m building some variations of this template. I’d like to share a landscape version and mix up the number of video options per slide.

In the meantime, I’d really like your help testing the template and getting your feedback on how it worked for your own projects.

Tell me: Does the format work for you? Did you have enough space for your own video titles and descriptions? Let me know what works and doesn’t work—don’t hold back, I’ve got a thick skin!

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