How to Create Holiday Greeting Cards Using Keynote
Tablets
Speaker 1: Hey, I'm Justin Tech and today I am designing a holiday greeting card on an iPad that animates that you can send to your family and friends using the keynote app. I'm designing holiday cards because it's the holiday season, but this can be used for any holiday or any greeting card. I'm gonna be showing you all the tools you need to know on Keynote to make that happen. So let's get into it.
Speaker 1: [00:00:30] All I need downloaded on my iPad is the keynote app, and that is a free app you can get on the app store. The first thing I'm gonna do to get started is open up keynote. I'm going to create a presentation. From there, I'm going to choose a theme and the theme is gonna be pretty basic because I'm gonna be adding a lot of assets to this. So I just need a simple white background. I don't really like this aspect ratio, I wanna change it to a square. You're gonna go to the dot, dot, dot and the top right? Then you're gonna go to document set up and here is where at the bottom it says [00:01:00] slide size. This is where I can change from a range of different dimensions. Now I'm gonna use Square, but if I wanted to, if I wanted to make it like the size for a phone, I could go into custom and make this top 1 10 80 and then I could make this 1 19 20 and that would be the perfect size for if I was gonna send this like on a cell phone and wanted that like vertical aspect ratio.
Speaker 1: But I personally want the square for this. Earlier this week we took a bunch of photos of me wearing a Santa hat for my holiday [00:01:30] card, got a bunch of different faces and actions. That way I can play around with them on the iPad and placed them into the invite. Along with that, as I went on Safari and I downloaded a bunch of different translucent images, now I got these just by searching holiday ornaments or holiday PNGs with transparent backgrounds. So with those photos I took on the photo shoot, I used the new ability on Iowas 16 on my iPhone to isolate myself [00:02:00] from those photos and then airdrop them to the iPad. That way I had pictures of myself with a transparent background and I can use them like clip art. I am ready to make this invitation. Let's go back into keynote and I have photos side by side to multitask and here I have lots of options.
Speaker 1: Now the first thing I wanna do before I start using all these images is I want to make a wallpaper. Now the wallpaper I like is this red one, but I think that it's a little bit too bright. So what I wanna do is I'm going to apply a background to this keynote [00:02:30] and I'm gonna make it black. Now I'm making it black because I'm gonna use that back black background to darken this one, right? So now I'm gonna take this photo and I'm gonna drag it into my presentation. To darken this, I'm going to click the paintbrush cuz I have that photo selected and I'm gonna make the opacity. Let's see what I like. I think I like the opacity at about probably 50, 51%. That looks good. Now it's time to start adding in some photos of yours. Truly. Let's drag that one in here.
Speaker 1: [00:03:00] And as you can see, I've got no background behind me. I can resize it like so you don't have to use the pen so I can use my finger. Let's see, I kind of like that. Put me in the center on the bottom. Let's see what other options I have. Ooh, that's a good smile. Let's use that one next. So I'm gonna drag that in. You're gonna be like, this is the most self, um, what is it when you like love when you're just like only think about yourself centered, self-centered. Yeah, so I'm try, what I'm trying to do is create the most self-centered holiday card, obviously. And next let's use this one. This is a a little [00:03:30] more serious just in look, but that'll add some contrast to these goofy ones. Go resize this one. So next up I'm gonna add some of these decorations and let's do one up here. Oh, that's very large. I'm gonna make that a little smaller. Copy that
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tap over here and paste it. Go to a range and I can flip it horizontally. Call [00:04:00] the side, let's put some ornaments, throw some there. Let's get another little batch. There we go. Now that we've got all those photos down on the card, I wanna use the pencil to draw some writing. I'm gonna click this tool. So this tool is so that I can actually draw out what I want the text to say and it will type it for me. Let's just put happy. Let's see, Holi days. There we go. Happy [00:04:30] holidays. Ooh, let's do gradient. So I'm gonna do like yellow on top and then on the bottom maybe like a white and so nice gradient. And let me, let me make this bigger because you can barely see it. So let's go to maybe 1 25.
Speaker 1: Now it's time for the fun part and that is adding animations to this. If you wanted to send out a static image, this could be good to go. And I'm gonna show you how to export this as a static image at the end. So if you're happy with just static images, skip ahead. Animating [00:05:00] is pretty simple. So I'm gonna tap on this photo of me, click that arrow and then animate. On animate, you have a few different options. I'm gonna be doing a build-in because I want all of these basically building the invitation. So I'm gonna add a build in and we have so many different effects to choose from. So I already know the effects I want to use. I'm gonna go all the way to open and I'm gonna have the flash bulb. I think that that's a fun way to have me. Come on, I've assigned that. I'm gonna click done in the top right [00:05:30] and that one is good to go. Next I'm gonna do this other photo of me animation and the same animation shows me what it's gonna look like. I'm happy with it Done. Next, I'm gonna have this animation of me. This one's going to sparkle on.
Speaker 1: Now I wanna do the same animation to the words happy holidays.
Speaker 1: As you're placing these animations, it's also important to think about when you [00:06:00] want them to play out and in what order. So I'm just gonna show you that right now. I'm gonna go back to the animate section and here we have a list of all the animations. Now, currently it's not in the in the order that I want it to be. I'm gonna want Happy Holidays to come first. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pair holidays with build one. So now together these are gonna play. So if I press play, it'll show me when I tap, those are gonna come together. Now I also want to have [00:06:30] this photo of me come on along with that. So I'm gonna click build with one. I also want these two images of me to to come on together. So I'm gonna pair this one with four. Now it would be these three coming on, then these two. But of course I have a few more images I want to have come on before we export this. Now what you could also do to make things a little faster is you can zoom out and you can select multiple images at the [00:07:00] same time.
Speaker 1: So I selected these, I'd wanna unselect the background. So now I have these two. What I'm gonna do with these two ornaments is I'm going to click group. Now these come together, they are one image. And then from there I'm going to animate these as well. Look at that. I love a good shimmer. So now we have all the animations done. Let's take a look at these animations and see what we think.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tap through them. Oh, [00:07:30] look at that. Yay. Happy holidays. Now let's get into exporting because you're not gonna wanna send someone to keynote file, right? There are a few different options. The ones I'm gonna show you are movie images and animated gif images. It's pretty straightforward. If I just wanted this to be a static image, I can go in here, export it, and then send out that picture. But what's even more fun are animated gif. So what I can do is I can have this be something you text to someone or even email to them, and it will be a moving photo. I'm going to set [00:08:00] it to a large, large works. Now I'm gonna export this. It's exporting my, my presentation. Can see the little animation here. Super fun. And then I can share it. So before I share it, I'm going to save it.
Speaker 1: Cause I just wanna take a look at it. So I'm gonna open it up in photos here. I've got it and there's my animation. Yay. And it's just gonna keep on playing on repeat. The one major downside of doing the animated gif is that when you send it, it will come out as [00:08:30] the first frame, which obviously has no information. So if you're sending out an invite and you want people to easily be able to see like the information just from like scanning at the photo, that's not gonna work with this. But I did find a workaround. So here's my little trick. I wanna make this an exported movie, but what I wanna do first is I'm gonna tap this slide and I'm gonna duplicate it. Now this is the duplicated slide that has the same animations. Now at this one, I'm going to get rid of all of the animations because I want a static option of this slide [00:09:00] for this to work.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna take that, go to the dot, dot, dot, go to animate, and I'm gonna go to this list and I'm gonna delete all of these animations that I've created. So now I have a slide on the top that has no animations, and then I have the second slide that has all the fun animations I created. Next, I'm going to export this as a movie. So now I have that image, and as you can see, it has the information I want easily scannable. And you don't have to play an animated GIF to get it. I'm gonna tap in here. [00:09:30] Now it's a ten second video and I don't want that to play too long in the in the beginning. So I'm gonna go in and edit and I'm going to cut out majority of that first slide and just keep one little frame of it and click done. And I'm gonna save that video. So now when someone receives this invite, here's how it's gonna play. So it just had that first frame, went a right away, and then it plays through. And there you go. You have a holiday greeting [00:10:00] card. I'm Justin and I'll tech you later.
