A Moultrie Creek Guide

Digital Storytelling

Sketchbook Bio

Denise Barrett Olson

Its not a photo album and its not a biographical sketch either. So, I gave it my own name. I call it a sketchbook bio and your presentation graphics app is the perfect tool for creating one. Im using Keynote but PowerPoint or OpenOffice.orgs Impress will work just as well. The techniques are the same, but the actual commands will be different. Im using the Letterpress theme - one of the standard themes that comes with Keynote. I chose it because of the sage green color and the canvas textured background. Although Keynote themes come with a number of different layouts for title slides, text slides and image slides, Im using only the blank slide for this project. It takes more time to build a slide, but I have more flexibility with fonts, image styles and element placement. Most of the content in this project is created using either a text box or an image. Id like you to meet my Uncle Tom. He taught me how to pick cotton and drive a tractor. And his straw Stetson is one of my prized possessions.

This slide contains both an image and a text box. The challenge here was the photo. Unfortunately its permanently attached to the photographers frame and the edges of the frame werent in the best of shape. The image is selected on the slide and you see Keynotes Inspector with the Graphic pane open. I chose to use the blurred edge frame with its rounded corners and scaled it to blur the worst of the frames damaged corners. I then tilted the photo a bit and added a shadow - also on the Graphic pane, just not visible here to add dimension. A simple text box holds the journaling associated with this slide.

Here Im using a grungy line around the image to help camouflage the rough edges on this class picture. Choosing a color found in the photo for the line helps it blend in with the photo and doesnt draw attention to my edge camouflaging effort. To select a color from the image, follow these steps: 1) Click on the color block for the stroke element. 2) Use the color wheel option, then click on the magnifying glass icon to activate the color selector. 3) Move the color selector magnifying glass over the image until you find the color you want. Click to select it.

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Notice I used a darker color from the image to spotlight Toms picture in the photo.

In this project, I kept to a limited number of fonts: Enview for titles, Monaco for journaling text and Kiev for the photo captions. There was one exception . . .

Of course a wedding photo needs an appropriate font.

I used my last slide to present the sources used in my story. I didnt want them detracting from the page designs.

Resources
Because there are no multimedia components in this project, distribution options include exporting to PDF or exporting to images. If you choose the image option, you can then display them using a digital frame. Software: Keynote from Apples iWork suite Fonts used in the Barker sketch: Enview, Bickham Script Pro, Monaco and Kiev. Fonts used in this presentation: Calisto MT, Mistral, American Typewriter and Alien League. Moultrie Creek Books has a Digital Storytelling section with a growing collection of inspirational titles. Photo credit:Onawumi Jean Moss of Amherst, Ma. Photo by Dennis Vandal at Flickr.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionNoncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. For more information regarding this publication contact me at http://moultriecreek.us or by email at moultriecreek@yahoo.com.