Lucas Cohen

3 Little-Known Keynote Design Features I Use All the Time

I’ve been using Apple Keynote for design for the past 10 years or so, and it’s held up surprisingly well.

The creative constraints of the platform helped me get pretty good at testing its limits.

So, here are a few design features that took me a while to discover, which I now use all the time:
  1. Image-Fill for Text. Enhance the quality of text and make it stand out. Gradient fill for text is similar.

  2. The Pen Tool. Make custom shapes. I often use this for cropping out irregular sections of images.

  3. Copy/Paste Style. The keyboard shortcut for this is “Option Command C” (⌥ ⌘ C) to Copy or “Option Command V” (⌥ ⌘ V) to Paste. Very helpful for matching styles while designing.
And that’s it.

I initially thought this post was going to be longer but that’s the thing about Keynote.

A lot of the design features are fairly basic, so those are three easily overlooked but valuable tools.

– Mar. 30, 2022