Here is a screen shot of the first version for my Business Plan I don’t write in Word, but in PowerPoint. I figured Investors are getting 20 Business Plans a day. They decide in the first couple of seconds if they will spend some more time with this plan or not, in the first couple of seconds the only thing that matters is the looks.

So the plan better looks great if you want to have people actually investing time in reading it.

Carved-in effect in PowerPoint 2007 or Word 2007:

Everything you see in this screen shot is entirely made in PowerPoint, no Photoshop skills required.

To actually see what I did, just click at the picture to get it in a bigger size.

Glowing Headline:

Unfortunately the “Glow -Effect” of PowerPoint 07 is… improvable.

The color selected must be the same as the letters, just brighter, to get the glowing effect. In order to get the letters glowing. Just <right click> on the text and select “Properties” then choose following settings:

Carved-in Effect

That one is tricky. I thought it would be impossible without using Photoshop, but I found a hack, here you go:

In order for this to work you have to choose a darker background.

Create a shape <right click> and select properties. Choose any “Fill-color” you want, but you must fill the shape. Then create an “inner shadow” and choose those settings:

This will give you the shadow on the top and left side.

It will not be good enough to create the carved-in effect, I am pretty proud of finding this hack to get the full cut-in effect:

The color you choose for the line must be lighter than the background (that’s why you need a dark background for this to work) the fill-color of the shape does not matter:

Actually you have to choose 3 different colors for the line.

1. same color as the background

2. a little lighter than the background

3. much lighter than the background

It will take you quite some time tweaking the “Angle”, the “Transparency” and the “Stop position” until the line is only visible on the right side and bottom of the shape.

If you look closely I did the same thing to the text of the shape “service”

Carved out effect:

I have no idea how to call this, it is the opposite of “carved-in. It is supposed to make the shape seem to pop out of the background.

To create this, you bascially do exactly the same thing as with the “carved-in” effect, just turn the “angels”

First create the “outer shadow” for the bottom and right side of the shape:

Then get a Line visible on the left side and the top of the shape:

1. “Stop 3″ should be a very bright color:

2. “Stop 2″ should be a bright color:

3. “Stop 1″ should be the same color as the background:

Cut out Text effect

This is the same effect as used on the iPhone and ever website that cares a little about design.

Just choose a color that is brighter than the background and you get a carved in effect as seen on the iPhone menu. This effect is very easy, the onlything you need is an “outer shadow”, that has a brighter color than the background.

That’s what I did the last 5 hours… playing with PowerPoint, another day well spent!

PowerPoint effects I discoverd, 4.0 out of 5 based on 1 rating