Chapter 3. Consistent Branding for Business
Now that we've had some hands-on experience with some of the mechanics native to Prezi, it's time to start thinking about how we can reuse some of the elements that we design. Most businesses, for example, have logos and color schemes that are applied consistently to media such as documents and websites.
In PowerPoint, you might create a template slide that can be reused for all business presentations. A very common template might have a bar across the bottom of the slide in one of the company colors, with the company name in the bottom-right corner.
As Prezi can be so much more dynamic than the traditional slide, we're not going to have a template that is quite that straightforward. However, there are many reusable elements that we can create to help bring consistent branding to our presentations. In this chapter, we'll discuss the following topics:
- Color schemes
- Customizing Prezi graphics through CSS
- My Content
- Custom logos
Color schemes
The first thing you'll want to tweak in your Prezi when you're tailoring it for your business is the color scheme. Clicking on the Customize button on the Prezi menu will bring up a menu on the right that allows you to select from several color themes that have already been created. For many presentations, these may work well enough:
Despite these options, you might find that none of the themes offered by Prezi match the colors that are used by your business. Luckily, we can create our own color scheme rather easily.
The steps to create our own color scheme are as follows:
- If you scroll past the generic color schemes created by Prezi, you can click on the Advanced… button that will allow you to tweak the colors for your presentation. This will bring you to the Wizard version of the advanced theme settings. On the first screen, you will be able to change the background color or upload a 3D background or custom logo. We'll come back to the custom logo a bit later.
- By clicking on the Wizard button, then selecting Next, you can access options to change the fonts and colors for text. On this Wizard screen, you can change colors by clicking on a standard menu. On the Advanced menu, you can change the colors by changing the RBG values. Clicking on Next one final time allows you to edit colors for frames, arrows, lines, and the highlighter:
- In the Theme Wizard menu, you are limited to selecting from only 30 different colors, and these will likely be sufficient for many uses. However, large businesses and organizations often specify color palettes in order to ensure consistent branding across various media. For example, my university wants to ensure that the same shade of red is used in all official material created for the university, and they specify the exact parameters of that shade on the website:
Color scheme for North Carolina State University taken from http://brand.ncsu.edu/color/
Tip
Color Selection
If your brand doesn't specifically define its colors, look at the company logo and draw color inspiration from what has been used there!
- The preceding color scheme shows the colors and then provides information about how to achieve that exact color using several different color standards such as HEX, RGB, and CMYK. If your organization has defined its branded colors in a similar way, Prezi can easily accommodate these so that your presentations can remain consistent with the brand. At the bottom-left corner of the Theme Wizard menu, you'll need to click on the Advanced button:
- This menu allows you to enter colors by their RGB value, which was one of the standards specified in the branded colors shown earlier. Here, I entered these values into the Advanced menu for the titles and frames. The basic color scheme for any text or frames in this Prezi now reflects the branded color scheme for my university.
If you really want your presentation to stand out, we can customize the standard Prezi graphics even further using the Prezi CSS editor linked at the bottom of the Theme Wizard!