In an increasingly, visually cluttered world, recognition is key. From your website to your business card, when someone looks at marketing materials from your business you want the visual association to immediately lead back to you.

When creating a presentation with one of our native shape-based Keynote themes, you can easily recolor the master slides with your brand’s palette. If you have typographic specifications in your brand guidelines, you can change the default typeface(s) to match as well. If your font isn’t in the list of system and iWork installed fonts, make sure it’s installed on your machine and, please note, if you’re passing a Keynote file to someone else, they will get a warning if that font is not installed on their system as well.

We have several themes that are great candidates for this treatment, but for this exercise, we'll be recoloring OM '08, a print-inspired favorite. If you don’t have OM ’08 handy, jump over to our Trial Editions page and download OM ’08 LE so you’ll have a theme to follow along with.

Put your palette close at hand. 

It's not as if everyone viewing your presentation has a color meter on hand, checking to make sure you used the exact color of red in your presentation, but if you can get it right every time, why not? Before you start recoloring your theme, put your brand palette in the Color Well so it's easy to access. 

Though it’s perfectly acceptable to use the Magnifying glass to pick colors from a palette or image when you’re prototyping, it’s best to input the actual numbers, RGB or CMYK, when creating a presentation for your company: color sampling will not result in a true color, but rather the closest match for your machine's color profile setting, so you’ll want to stick to the specific color values outlined in your branding guidelines rather than sampling them with the magnifier.  After you've entered a color, drag the swatch from the Color Fill to your Color Well. 

Once you’ve added all of the relevant colors, expand the navigator in your keynote file to show the Master Slides (or click on View > Show Master Slides in the Keynote menu).

Recoloring the Master Slides

There are two ways to recolor shapes in Keynote: from the Graphic nib in the Inspector, or via Drag and Drop from the Color Well. Drag and Drop works well for everything except stroke and shadow;  if you’re recoloring objects that have no stroke or shadow, Drag and Drop is a quick method. Simply drag a color from your palette and drop it onto the object or text you wish to recolor.

For more extensive changes, you’ll want to use the Inspector.  From the Inspector, you have access to edit everything from your document’s resolution to Quicktime control. To open the Inspector, go to View > Show Inspector (Alt+Cmd+I), or click on the Inspector icon in the Keynote toolbar. 

Select the Graphic nib in the Inspector - it’s between the Type Inspector icon and the Metrics Inspector ruler icon. Select the object to be changed, then select the Fill, Stroke, or Shadow as needed and click the new color in the Color Well. With this process, if you’re changing the color of multiple objects on a slide to the same color, you can group-select them and change them all with a single modification.

Repeat this process to recolor the remaining master slides. If you choose to just alter the slides you are using for your presentation, remember if you decide to use another layout, you’ll have to go back into the Masters and alter that slide before using it in your presentation. If you’re using charts, tables, shapes and additional text other than Title, Body, and Slide Number, be sure to recolor those items accordingly.  You can find more information about modifying the extended theme defaults in the Keynote User’s Guide, available on Apple’s Support site.  

This technique works well with nearly any of our print-inspired themes, including Sonoma ’08, Palo Alto ’08 and Tribeca.  Color customization is just one of the many options enabled by the latest Keynote architecture.  We’ll be providing more useful tips and tricks on getting the most out of Keynote here in the near future, so stay tuned for more Keynote Basics :)

You can now try some of our most popular Keynote Themes absolutely free: our new Trial Edition themes are feature-limited versions of their expanded retail-edition namesakes that give you an easy way to try some of our crowd favorites first-hand without spending a dime. Each LE theme includes a sample of the master slides included in the full retail versions, in a specialized 1024x768 theme file that's ready to use - no installation required.  Pick from some of our most popular themes - including the vibrant color and motion of the Fuse* Kinetic themes, the soothing sophistication of OM '08, or the production-driven versatility of PitchBoards '08 - and see what the fuss has been about for yourself.

You can find out more and download our LE Themes at our Trial Editions page.

Yes, yes - timely updates and whatnot.  We really didn’t forget about you guys - just another one of those years where we get to go dark for a while and work on deliciously interesting secret projects we can’t tell you a word about until next year ;)

While we’re not quite back to a normal schedule, we have been busy the last few weeks getting ramped back up, with new themes heading your way soon and a few important updates starting to go online today.

The biggest question we’ve received the last few months - as you might have guessed - is what’s up with your themes and iWork for iPad?  The answer to that question is a bit more involved than you might have guessed, but we’ve prepped an overview for both Keynote and Pages users here that you’ll want to have a look at if you’ve been wondering about exporting your presentations and documents to the iPad.

We’ve started posting the first of our iPad Export-Optimized theme updates today and will keep those coming over the next few weeks - keep an eye on our homepage for the latest updates as they arrive.

More to come soon. 

We have big news.  :)

As KeynotePro begins its 7th year of business we are expanding into new territories, bringing our stylish and functional themes to PowerPoint.  If you’re one of the many customers who has asked over the years if we also made themes for PowerPoint, felt hamstrung by the limitations of exporting your presentation or are a lone Keynote user in a company full of PowerPoint enthusiasts, we invite you to take a short trip to OfficeDocsPro.com and see what PowerPoint is truly capable of.  We’re very pleased with the PPT-optimized versions of some of our most popular themes, and think you will be too.

Our PowerPoint journey began in an unexpected way.  Over the past few years, our studio has had the good fortune to work directly with Microsoft on Office:Mac 2008 and the Office 2010 Beta, developing a number of the themes and templates included in the Office applications themselves.  It was a fantastic opportunity to work directly with developers as we learned the new THMX format from the inside out. 

If you’re used to the classic 3-Master-Slide model that still dominates the off-the-shelf PowerPoint market, you might not be aware that Microsoft Office 2007 ushered in a newer theme architecture: THMX.  

THMX is an advanced document theme system that Microsoft created to make it easier to apply presentation or document-wide settings - such as fonts, colors and effects – to any compatible document type. You might think of it a bit like you would of a style-sheet applied to a website, except that you could also apply the particular fonts and color scheme details from that style-sheet to a presentation to investors, or to your latest letter to shareholders, too - and the style details would remain absolutely consistent between all of those documents.

In short, it’s a big evolution over the old-school design templates metaphor, and it’s at the heart of every one of our themes at OfficeDocsPro. 

Now, all of that said – we are by no means ceasing, or even slowing, our development for iWork: it just means that our themes are now available in even more ways than they were before.  That, and you guys now have a better idea of why we kept getting really quiet the last couple of years ;)  We feel incredibly lucky to do what we do – now we’re simply able to do it on a larger scale than ever before.  

We have big things planned for both sites in the coming months… stay tuned.

We've rolled out a few additional features this week: Point Update functionality was announced earlier today, and new Complete Edition packages are rolling into place right now. There's not much to explain on either, but I wanted to take a moment and fill you in on how Point Updates in particular will change the process on our end moving forward.

Point Updates
Point Updates will appear on the Theme Library page for any theme that has an available update, directly underneath the Core downloads. Unless there's been a cumulative item refresh, like the shift from MagnetBoard to MagnetBoard R1, updates should be applied in addition to the core download listed - the updates in these cases will include only the files that have been changed from the original download and are meant to replace only those files, so think of these as "in addition to" downloads like a minor system update (as opposed to "full replacement" downloads like an R1 or full-point upgrade file). This will allow us to address minor additions or any bug fixes as they arise, rather than waiting for the next major edition or a sort of "critical mass" issue to arise that would trigger one of the old R1-type cumulative refreshes. We're still catching up on pulling some of the updates together, but moving forward this should allow us to address issues in a more timely manner than the old infrastructure/process allowed.

Complete Editions
Complete Edition is a new purchasing option present on any of our product lines that have both a Keynote and Pages option available - OM '08, Sonoma '08 and Tokyo RPG '08 at the moment (with more on the way). These function a bit like a product-specific bundle, giving you all of the available options for a given theme without having to find another page, add another item to your cart, etc. We've been receiving requests on this one for quite a while, and it should go a long way toward making the crossover theme families a bit easier to identify.

Point Updates have (finally) arrived at KeynotePro.com.  We've started rolling point updates into the system - Sonoma for Pages '08 2.1 updates and Fuse* 1.0.1 updates are available now, with more coming throughout the next few weeks.  The latest point updates added will appear on the homepage for easy reference - follow the sign-in link from there, or sign-in to your account and navigate to the Theme Detail page for any theme you'd like to check for updates: updates are listed immediately underneath the Core Downloads whenever they're available.

The new KeynotePro.com is the most comprehensive reboot this site has ever seen. We've spent the better part of the last two years planning, re-thinking and evolving nearly every part of the site - and while some portions of the 3.0 site are still being brought online (we'll be addressing those as warranted on the blog as they roll out), we thought we'd take a few to walk you through a virtual tour of what's new or different so you have a better idea of how things have, and will continue to, change at the new site.

Clarity, transparency, and more clarity.
As KeynotePro.com grew, and the themes themselves expanded and evolved to what they are today, the sheer amount of information that needed to be expressed to explain the minutiae of the themes / product editions / supporting information pushed the old format toward utter chaos. The number one goal of the 3.0 build was clarity, and the tangles of information regarding the different product packages on the old site are a great example of how we've approached this concept elsewhere on the site.

While there is no way for us to decomplicate the thick web of product numbers, variations and versions that build our catalog, there was no reason whatsoever to make our customers try to sort through the noise to figure out which specific package for each theme was going to fit their particular needs. Why should you, the customer, need to understand or even know that there are different names for the product tiers when the tiers themselves can be more simply addressed as an abstract of what's contained in them? In other words, if you know you need to put a presentation on your iPod Touch, you shouldn't have to know that we catalog that option as Pro+Mobile: we should. You only need to be able to tell us, in as few steps as possible, exactly what you need with a theme when you're adding it to your cart.

The new product pages on KeynotePro.com do just that. When you're ready to add a theme to your cart, just select what you need with it - add HD or Mobile themes for Keynote or Extended Templates for Pages, for example - and we'll do all the rest, showing you the revised price and details about the package before it's ever added to the cart. That information carries with you through the entire cart/checkout process, so you have a near-constant visual cue alongside every item in your cart reminding you which options you've selected for each item in your order.

It's a simple change for sure, but one we think will go a long way toward making it as easy as possible to get just what you're looking for without having to understand the complexity of our catalog just to find your way - and it sets the tone perfectly for how we approached every other portion of the new KeynotePro.com

Support
Our Customer Support pages and supporting systems have seen vast improvements in the transition to 3.0, and we're still underway with changes that will make it even better. The FAQ system infrastructure has been expanded to make it easier for our crew to add new FAQs to the system, change them as more relevant information becomes available, or get rid of the dead weight when information is no longer timely.

You can see that in play on the FAQs page now, but what you don't see on that page is that the same system is in play over in Your Account, allowing us to add theme-specific FAQs or bulletins to the system that can be displayed when you're on a particular themes' page in the Theme Library. There are only a few theme-specific FAQs in the system at the moment, but that should be expanding greatly over the coming weeks - if you have a question about a particular theme, just sign in to Your Account, click on a theme, and have a look to see if there are any new FAQs in the system.

Your Account
Speaking of Your Account, we've made significant changes to almost every aspect of this part of the site. Under the hood, we've undergone a complete architectural change that enabled massive improvements to the speed and reliability of basic operations (can you say 2000%+ improvement on processor load in some cases? because I sure can - with a smile), which enabled us to open the section up a bit more and address some key functionality you've been asking for the past few years like easy Account Preferences management.

One of the biggest changes here, though, is how we've addressed access to your available downloads. For those of you who've been with us for a long time, the downloads page on the old site could be another information tangle of epic proportions - with multiple generations of a theme family or multiple versions all thrown into a long and winding list for you to make sense of. Clarity is the order of the day, so we split things up a bit in the new Theme Library. Current, for-sale themes are listed by icon in your Theme Library - clicking on one of those will take you to a complete Library page on the theme, including the most current downloads, point updates and FAQs. The back-catalog is all tucked away in your Archival Downloads - they're still available for download if you ever need to pull an old version, but they're no longer going to get in your way when you're pulling the latest + greatest. If one of your favorites isn't showing up by icon in your Theme Library, you know right away that you're not on the most current version - jump to the updated Version Upgrades page to see what's available whenever you want to get a theme current.

And Beyond
There are many more changes in place all over the site, but that should get you up to speed on the biggest changes so far and our thinking behind this new generation of KeynotePro.com There's at least one more new feature we'll be rolling in this week that should make most (if not all) of you quite happy - stay tuned to the blog and we'll post a note just as soon as we're ready to make it all public.

More soon, and hope you're enjoying the changes thusfar :)