How to Create Infographic Elements in PowerPoint [00:00:00.91] INSTRUCTOR: OK, so let's go ahead and get started creating the people icon-- the people graphic. Now really the secret to creating these is starting to just get familiar or learning to see the basic shapes that when combined create that final shape. And since we're not really going-- we're not going to illustrate or trace these graphics, we're actually just going to combine all some of the basic shapes in PowerPoint. The really trick here is just kind of identifying and knowing what the shapes are, what shapes are available, and how they can be creatively combined or arranged to create new shapes. And that's kind of how we're bringing this together. [00:00:39.70] So real quick, I did set this-- a quick access toolbar up a little bit. I customize it based on my most frequently used tasks. And so like the align and then the shape tools, and then some of the combines that we'll get into in a little bit. These are all down here for me. If you want to customize this yourself, you can do that by choosing the menu. You can show that-- by default you're used to seeing this up here with the Save and the Undo. Well I just added some of these different features to it. And you do that by just really right clicking anything and choosing Add to Quick Access Toolbar, and then I just move the toolbar down below. So just makes it a little bit easier, since this is kind of the task that I'm performing most often, so I'm going to try to work from here as much as possible but I'll try to also call out where you can find those from the default ribbon. [00:01:31.52] All right, so let's go ahead. I'm just going to start by creating a new slide, and let's go ahead and create our head. Notice that when I hold the Shift key down, it constrains this to a perfect circle, so if you want to give your character a little bit more of a melon head you can do that, but I'm going to hold the Shift key down to get that initial graphic set up. [00:01:54.50] Now when I created, this you notice that there's a little outline around my shape, and that just happens by default in PowerPoint. But I'm going to turn that off. And just so I don't have to have to do that every time I insert a new shape, I'm going to right click the shape and then just choose Set as Default Shape. And what that enables me to do is each time I insert a new shape or a circle or any other shape, it's actually going to retain the properties-- and that's like the color and the effects and whether or not it has an outline, things like that. So just a good time saver if you're going to be performing the same task over and over. [00:02:32.71] All right so I'll go ahead now and let's bring in the shoulders. And that is this one, which is the-- I hover over it, you'll see the caption-- the round side, round same side corner rectangle. So one side is rounded, the other side is flat, and that works for us. So let's drag that over. And if I want to increase the roundness of the shoulders, I can just drag that in a little bit, and that should be OK. [00:03:00.48] Let's see how I'm doing here on my canvas. Might be a little big. I'm going to bring that up a little, and I'm going to zoom in. Another quick tip for zooming in and out is to press and hold your Control key and then use the wheel-- the wheel button on your mouse, and then you can scroll and zoom that way. It's pretty helpful. [00:03:21.25] So shoulders in place I'm going to go ahead now and insert an arm, and we'll find that with the rounded rectangle. If I zoom in here, you can see that I should round this up. It's not as round right here, but if I grab this little yellow square handle, drag it over, now I've got a perfect pill shape for the arms. And also the-- you can see as I start to nudge this in place, you can see how the two objects align. They get those little guides that appear. That's real helpful for dragging this around. [00:03:57.61] Now I want to duplicate this, and a couple of different ways you can duplicate. One way that I really like is just to press and hold the Control key and click and drag the object, and that'll create a duplicate of the object. Drag it over to the other side, and let's go ahead and bring in the torso which is just a good old rectangle. See how it is. [00:04:25.41] Might need to make the arms just a little bit bigger, so I'm going to Shift-click both of them, and as I drag them it's going to obviously move this other one out. So I'll reposition it and it's a little bit better. I'm going to duplicate the arm-- one of the arms so Control, click, drag. And I'm just going to make this a little bit bigger for the leg. And there's a lot of ways that we can fiddle with this and get this a certain way, but I want to get the general idea down, and then we'll continue. If we need to make any adjustments we can do that afterwards. But essentially this is sort of how it's all coming together. [00:05:00.45] At this point that's pretty much it. What I do want to do is-- I'm going to zoom in a little bit-- I want to make sure that my-- see how my little arm isn't quite aligned with that side? There we go, that should be OK. And I'm just going to check this real quick as well. And just to make sure his arms are the same length, I'm going to Shift-click the other to have both selected, and I want to align to the bottom. [00:05:31.72] And then finally, what I should have done-- and I'm going to do it right now-- Shift-click the head, Shift-click the torso and the shoulders. I want to make sure those are all perfectly centered. So if I align the object to the center, looks like they're good. And for the most part there is our character-- move the leg over, right? Now he's got shorts. Now he's got an apron or a cape, something. So somewhere around there is fine. And if I need to make the legs a little bit bigger, I could do that too, but I think that's pretty good overall. [00:06:09.28] In the next tutorial we'll go ahead and combine these into a single shape so that our character is just one graphic object, and then we'll go into the third tutorial where we'll actually create the masking effect.