Animations and slide transitions are something that fall into the “just because you can doesn’t mean you should” category. However, when used well they can bring focus to the right things and add a degree of polish that can make your designs feel a bit more polished and professional. The key is to use animation for a purpose and avoid “decorative” animations.

This week, David Anderson is crossing the 200 mark for his popular Weekly Challenge series over in the Articulate Elearning Heroes community by challenging designers to share an example of practical entrance and exit animations for slide content.

Morph Transitions For the Win!

One of my favorite animation examples is this Before & After sequence, I created for an Analyst & Investor Meeting with American Electric Power.

This deck was created for a Wall Street investors meeting back in 2016. The key message AEP wanted to convey included some key things that had taken place since their previous meeting. The focus of this before and after sequence is to illustrate the changes and progress that had taken place.

PowerPoint’s awesome Morph transition is the key to this animation sequence. Morph makes it super easy to animate smooth movement from one slide to the next. If you haven’t tried it out yet, you should go and do that right now. It is a must-have trick for anyone who builds PowerPoint slides and would like an easy way to let their creativity loose.

Morph is available in the PowerPoint 2016 and Office 365 versions.

This deck by InScale is a really nice example of the types of things you can do with Morph.

Want to get your hands on another one of these to take a look under the hood?  Download this free Morph template from SlideSalad. (Requires a free user account.)

Bonus Example + Free Animated Template

As I went looking for my favorite animation example I found this deck of animation ideas that were ultimately never used, so I thought I’d share them with you in case you might be able to use them for one of your projects.  As you can see below there are a couple of animated title slides and a few more animated lower-thirds options.

Note: There is some font wonkiness this embedded version.

Download a copy of these animated PowerPoint slides

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