Powerpoint Banners

Making the Banners

Here we are, trying to resurrect the Powerpoint Banners Project. What I have done is create a format for quickly creating custom banners using Powerpoint. The idea is to first create a large number of common elements and banner templates. To make a banner, a number of elements are selected and then grouped, resized, and recolored in powerpoint to create a banner. Finished banners can be printed at home or taken to Kinkos for color printing.

Once the banner elements exist, they can be combined to make any number banner combinations. Here is a step by step breakdown of the process:

If you want all of your units to have common elements or a common theme, it's easy. The same banner, once created, can be copied many time and only have certain aspect, like a chapter number, changed so that all the banners are identical, except for a single distinguishing decoration for each individual unit.

The possiblities are endless. Once you have a nice set of base elements, you can do one of three things with them:

1. Either print them right off a color printer, cut out, and use the banners as they come off the printer.
2. Ungroup the banners, change colors, and create your own banners and color schemes to print.
3. Ungroup and swap images around, then print out the black and white wireframes to paint your own banners.
4. Reduce them even more and print them as waterslide decals.

When I make my banner bearers, I often use socketed banner poles so I can swap out banners whenever I want. This capability is further enhanced by having an easy banner generation process.

The same process can be applied to other, more whimsical projects like these Skavenbrew and Bugman's beer labels. Do you home brew? Why bring the Skavenbrew card when you can bring a real bottle.

Making banner elements

Great, now you know how to make banners - once you have a nice set of banner elements to work with. So the next obvious question is, "how do I make banner elements?" Here it is in a nutshell:

1. First, sketch out a picture of the element you want to make and see if you can break it up into a set of simple geometric shapes. In this example, I'm going to draw a hammer, which consists of 4 basic geometric shapes - I count 4, because one of the two trapazoids (hammer ends) is simply a flipped copy of the first. I start off with everything at about 4-500% of the final size. Check out the basic shapes in the Autoshapes menu for pre-existing templates. YOu'll be surprised at what you find.
2. Arrange your polygons in the way you want them. Useful PowerPoint tools to get familiar with are the Order, Align, and Rotate functions in the Draw menu.
3. Apply color to your polygons. Use the Fill Color, More Colors, and Fill Effects functions. Sometimes you will also want to play around with line color too.
4. Once the polygons, colors, and textures are to your satisfaction, go to the Draw menu and group and resize them to about 1/4. Grouping will ensure they resize as a single graphic and not as a collection of shapes - you can always ungroup later on.
5. There, you have a finished banner element. This can now be further resized, rotated, copied, etc. to make your banners.

Where can I get your files?

I'm still trying to figure out what to do with the source files and how to organize them. If you're interested, e-mail me

Here are a couple of my sample banners.