How to create a course welcome image using MS PowerPoint

Introduction

Many of our customers would love to create professional looking welcome screens for their courses, but they don't have graphic design skills or access to software or in-house graphic designers to call upon. A simple image can be elevated by adding a visual indication of the course length, plus your organisation's logo.

We've put together this short tutorial that guides you through how to make a simple welcome image or splash screen for a course using a tool that almost everyone has access to: Microsoft PowerPoint. Watch the video for a full tutorial, or read on for step-by-step instructions.

In this article, we'll show you how to combine a stock photograph, one of our course duration stopwatch images and your organisation's logo. You can of course use whichever images suit you. We have a range of stopwatch images displaying various course lengths. Please ask your customer success manager if you'd like these files.

Adding a photo to a PowerPoint slide

1. Choose a photograph that illustrates the topic of your course (in the video, we've downloaded a royalty-free photo from Unsplash; other sites that offer free images include Pixabay and Pexels). We'll use this as the basis for the welcome image.
2. In PowerPoint, open a new presentation.

3. Delete any existing elements, then navigate to the Design tab and set the slide size to match the dimensions you'd like the welcome image to be. Usually just ensuring the size is set to the standard 4:3 ratio works well, but you may have a custom size in mind.

4. Next, go to the Insert tab and choose Pictures, then select the background photograph you've chosen.

5. Now resize the image so that it fills the whole slide, centring it using the handy red guidelines.

6. Use the crop functionality if necessary, so that it matches the slide dimensions exactly, again, using the red guidelines that show where the edges of the slide are. That way nothing will get cut off later.

Creating a semi-transparent overlay

7. If you've chosen a light coloured image, you could just add the stopwatch image directly on top of the photo. However, to make it really professional looking, you can add a semi-transparent overlay. To do this, go to the Insert menu and select Add Shape.

8. Add a rectangle and drag it to fit along the bottom of your photo.

9. Next, fill the shape with white,

10. and set the outline to 'no outline'.

11. Then right click the rectangle and go to Format Shape. Here within the fill dropdown, increase the transparency to around 20%.

Now we have a great looking area to add our smaller images where they can really stand out.

Adding your course duration and logo

12. Now let's insert a stopwatch image that indicates the course duration (we have a range of these that are available on request from your Customer Success Manager).

13. Over on the right, we can add the organisation's logo. To make this look as good as possible, we'd strongly recommend that you use a logo in PNG format with a transparent background.

Saving the slide as an image

In order to use this finished welcome image in your course, you'll need to export the slide as a JPG.

14. To do this, go into the File menu and select Save As. Make sure you've selected your save location first.

15. Then go down the file types and choose the JPG file extension to create an image that you can easily add to your Nimble Author course.

16. You'll only need to save this single slide as an image.

Using the welcome image in Nimble Author

Let's see how it looks in the course.

17. In Nimble Author, navigate to the first page of the course. Add an image block, then click the pencil to edit the image.

18. Then upload the image file you just created in PowerPoint to the asset manager. Select the image to add it to your page.

Now you've created a polished looking welcome page that lets your learners know the course length! You may also wish to save your PowerPoint presentation to keep as a master for building welcome images in future.