How to Make Brush Shaped Image Placeholders in PowerPoint

Last Updated on October 18, 2023 by Slideson

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create custom brush-shaped image placeholders in PowerPoint.

Previously I’ve made a tutorial on how to make basic custom placeholders in PowerPoint such as circles, if you are interested to learn that as well, view this tutorial: How to Create Basic Custom Picture Placeholders in PowerPoint

Let’s get started. First, you are going to need a brush font, it can be any font but for this tutorial, I have selected Grunge Strokes 01. Another similar for by the same maker is Under. You can find more cool dingbat/shape fonts here. Make your pick and install the font.

Open PowerPoint and a blank slide. Draw a text box and select the brush font. I’m using the letter Y for this demo (on Grunge Strokes 01 only capital letters will produce brush strokes) and making the font bigger, around 199pt.

Next draw a rectangle and remove the outline, align the brush stroke and rectangle on top of each other so that the stroke is on top.

Have both elements selected and go to the Format tab and click on the Merge Shapes and select Intersect from the dropdown. Now the stroke has been turned into a shape and you can rotate it, stretch it, and color it.

What I’ll do next is duplicate the stroke (CTRL + D), and rotate and stretch the stroke to create a whole new shape. Then select all the edited brush strokes and Merge Shapes -> Union to make it one.

(Alternative Option) Next, we are going to turn this into an image placeholder but before that, I want to briefly show you another way to add an image to this shape. Right-click the shape, select Format Picture, and select ‘Picture or Texture Fill’. I’m putting the ‘Solid Fill’ back on so that I can show you how to turn this shape into a placeholder. While this method works, your image might sometimes be distorted so I find the image placeholder method better.

Creating the brush-shaped image placeholder

Cut (CTRL + X) the brush stroke and go to slide master (View -> Slide Master) paste the shape and from the Slide Master tab select -> Insert Placeholder -> Picture and do the same as before, draw a rectangle placeholder size of the stroke. Send it back, lay them on top of each other and go to the Format tab -> Merge Shapes -> Intersect and there you have it, custom shaped image placeholder.

With the help of this tutorial, you can turn any font into a custom image placeholder. Combine fonts and shapes to create your unique image placeholder.

The above 2 slides are from the SWOT Analysis PowerPoint template. I hope you enjoyed the tutorial and if you have questions, comment below.

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