When designing your Prezi you might decide to use the Big Picture technique and place imagery on top of one another. It could be that you are trying to zoom into a window of a building, or onto the surface of a planet, the possibilities are pretty endless!
But how can you make sure that the images you insert on top of another look good and you don’t end up with lots of white boxes in your design?
Use .png images
Portable Network Graphics (PNG) is a raster graphics file format that supports lossless data compression.
In plain English a png image is a photograph made up of pixels, and they normally have transparent backgrounds.
The transparent backgrounds is what I want to draw your attention to. This basically means that you can use the Google image search box in Prezi to search for png images that have transparency. Once you have them you will be able to place them on top of your background image to create some really interesting looking scenes.
Here’s an example
Let’s imaging we are building a Prezi about an endangered species of Penguin. We want to show the type of environment they live in and then zoom in onto them. It would be quite difficult to find the perfect image of them in their surroundings so we are going to build our own.
First we insert a nice looking image of an iceberg onto our Prezi canvass using the Google image search. This can be a jpeg image or a png. It doesn’t really matter as this will be our background image.
Next we will search for some Penguins using the Google image search within Prezi. Notice though that we have put .png at the end of the search criteria.
When we drag the penguins in our search into the Prezi design we will see that the background image is still visible behind them.
This wouldn’t be possible if we used a jpeg or pdf image.
You can see this example in practice on the video below.
Time to get creative
Using this simple technique in your Prezi designs can really open up huge possibilities. There is literally no limit on how you can use this. We have scene Prezis that zoom into buildings to reveal office scenes, others that zoom into mountain landscapes to reveal wildlife, and even a view of the solar system that zooms into a planet surface.
Let your imagination run wild and take your audience on the most memorable journey possible.
