How do I use Presentation?
Presentation makes it easy and quick to create awesome decks. Here are a few tips to get the most out of the tool.
Pick from beautiful themes with the freedom to customize
You’ll start by picking a theme for your presentation. A window will open to browse our gallery of custom-crafted templates to inspire your presentation. They're fully customizable, professionally designed, and easy to use. Each theme comes with its own unique style including font family, color palette, layout, photography, and more. What makes Presentation themes different than typical presentation software is that every theme has completely different slide layouts, which will give you greater opportunity for telling your story. And don’t worry about choosing the right theme as you can always switch themes later, even minutes before your big keynote!
Tell your story with a variety of well-structured slides
The heart of every presentation is the collection of slide templates you can pick from to share your vision. Each theme comes with the same variety of slides curated specifically for designers and crafted to add your assets to XD and keep every presentation elegantly consistent. At first glance, you’ll see a scrolling list of useful slide layouts but it doesn’t stop there. The real secret is in the variants! By either clicking one of the arrows under the slide thumbnail or by selecting a slide artboard, the variant options are shown for every slide type. For example, the Minimal Dark theme comes with four different cover slides. Slide variants give you the creative freedom to experiment with the content layout in your decks as you’ve never seen before.
Get visual with a collection of vector-based elements
If slides are the heart of a presentation, elements are the bones it is built on top of. Try to imagine a presentation app that has beautiful icons, shapes, photography, illustrations, and charts. Now imagine that you’ll never have to go hunting endlessly online for these visuals again! Presentation over-indexes on visual elements to bring you the building blocks to craft your story quickly and visually. All elements are dynamic — just add one to a slide and then select it to open the element panel to choose another. Taking photos as example, you choose a photo added to the slide and then easily search and replace it with other free stock photos in the plugin. Also, the graphic elements are all vector-based to make it easy for you to change fill and stroke colors, something you normally would have to do in another app. There is such a variety of elements that it makes presentation making actually fun!
Customization
One thing heard over and over in our interviews with designers was whether Presentation will allow them to customize their decks. Presentation and XD together make it easy to take one of our themes and make it yours to stay on brand. All you have to do is use the Asset Panel on the left and change the fonts and colors to be consistent with your company’s brand to see it change across your slides.
Step 1: Set up your fonts
With the Document Assets panel open, right-click on a text that you’d like to change and choose “Reveal Character Style in Assets”. You will see which Character Style is highlighted on the left. Then right-click that particular character style in the plugin panel and choose “Edit”. Then pick a new font and weight from the font selector. Continue doing this with the other text in your slides.
Step 2: Change the color palette
Setting your color palette is done the exact same way as changing character styles. Just modify the theme colors in the Document Assets panel. Simply go through the list of colors in the assets panel until the deck style suits your needs.
It’s important to follow the order of first changing fonts and second change the colors. This is necessary for the font assets to maintain their linkage so that all text can restyle across the document.
