Create visual interest with themes - Captivate Tutorial

- [Instructor] When you create a new project here in Captivate, it will come with a certain look and feel. Certain colors will be used throughout the slides in your project. You'll also see a set of fonts being used, all of which can be changed on each individual slide, but when you want to make changes to every slide all at once, you'll want to know how to access the theme that has been assigned to your project. You can change up the theme to something else or go in and make changes. In other words, edit the theme, which will then affect all of the slides in your project. That's what we're going to explore in this movie with our R30 speak at your peak project, R30sayp0206, if you're catching up. It doesn't matter which slide you're looking at right now because we're going to go over to the right-hand side, down near the bottom corner and click Project Properties. This will open up that panel where you'll see the theme that's being used. In my case, it's called Light, and down below you can see as we hover over that, a sample of what the project title and different slides would look like. As we go a little further down, you'll see the color palette that's being used, and if we want to change to a different theme, we have a button to change the theme, or if we just want to make changes to the one we're using, we can edit the theme. Let's go to Change Theme. Now, version 12.3 is still fresh. There's only a couple to choose from here. We have light and dark, and as we hover over these, we see samples. We also see the changes previewed in our actual project over here on the left-hand side. So if we wanted to change it to dark, we'd simply select Dark. Down the road, I'm sure we're going to see many, many more options here. You may already be seeing a number of themes that you can choose from, but we're going to stick with light. So we'll select Light, and instead we'll edit this theme, clicking the Edit Theme button, and over here on the left, you'll see, with Light selected, we have certain attributes like the color palette, the fonts that are being used, images, backgrounds and user interface components that can be adjusted. We're going to start with this color palette, and you can see the colors being used. Now, the buttons that we see in our slides, and as we scroll down these sample slides, you can see what they look like. I'm thinking maybe some reds would be better to match our logo for red 30. So we're going to go to color eight, click that color swatch and choose one of the reds. I'm going to go with this orangy red here. Now just click behind that to close it up. You can see color eight has been changed, and you can see the sample here looks a little bit different, and wherever this dark blue is being used, we're going to change it to a darker red. So we'll click here. Now, I don't see a darker red, but we can start with the same red and go up to the color wheel up here to choose a different shape. I'm going to go over here to the right and down a bit to choose a darker shade of red, and now when we click in the background, you can see it's been applied. Let's go over to the font palette to see which fonts are being used. You can see at the top here we have Georgia and Arial. So different headings will use different fonts. Same thing for body text. Let's go over here to the right where we see Georgia. Click that dropdown, and you'll see a font list to choose from. It's in alphabetical order, so you can scroll up or down. I'm thinking something more common like Calibri. We'll select that one, and you can see what that looks like. We see some samples here for our heading, at least heading one. Heading two, if we go down to heading two here on the left, looks like it's still using Georgia. So that's why we see some different options across the top. Let's change them all to Calibri so that no matter what heading or body text is being used, it's going to have Calibri, that font, applied. So we can scroll up the list until we find it and select it, and if you see another one here, they come and go Because we're using Calibri now for more than one heading. Arial, it seems to be used for some of the body text, but I think Calibri would look good there too, or we could go to a version of Calibri like Calibri Light. When we select it, you can see over here on the right we have some options like regular italics, bold italics. So we could do that. We could change the size, the alignment for all of these different types of texts that we see down the list. So there are different types, body components, subheadings and headings. With Calibri selected for all of them, we see just the one dropdown now up at the top, and all we have to do is click Apply to apply it to our project, and you can see already it looks different up here. You can see where we have a text block, and if we go to the different slides in our project, we now have new fonts being used and wherever the default button was created, like let's begin. You can see the new color there. Same thing for our quiz start. On our very first slide, we changed this to our own color. So that overrides what the theme would have applied, in this case, the new red. So that's all there is to updating a theme. You can see over here when we go to edit the theme, there are other things like images, and their attributes can be changed, slide backgrounds. So if you don't like that gray and that beigy color in the background, you can make changes over here on the right to those, and the UI components, like buttons, we already see what they look like with our new color palette, but there's check boxes, radio buttons, all of these can be adjusted, and when you click Apply, it's applied to your entire project. So you can have dozens of slides that will all be updated with these new changes much faster than going from slide to slide and making the adjustments yourself. Let's go back to the right-hand side here and click at the very top for the visual properties of the slide we're looking at. We can check out what it looks like on the different like tablets and smartphones. Looks pretty good. I think we have what we want. So we'll want to save our changes. Ctrl + S here in Windows, Command + S on a Mac, or go up to your file menu and click Save from there.