KeynotePro Blog

Composer Recap 2025

2025-12-18T12:44:09-05:00

While we're not quite though Composer's first full year, saying goodbye to 2025 gives us a good opportunity to look back on some of what we've covered so-far, and some of what we're prioritizing heading into 2026.

Composer was just starting to take shape this time last year: we knew we'd be able to use Markdown as a base-level control language that would – in theory – bring together all of the stray bits of utility AppleScript routines we'd need to get a basic automation pipeline pulled together. Whether or not we could effectively build slides any more complex than a basic Title & Bullets layout was still very much an open question.

Today, we've cleared out the last of the waitlist and moved to General Availability around a fully-updated Library and a steady, stable core. Bug & Issue Reports have dwindled over the course of the v0.5 arc, and we've had a ton of feedback that's actively shaping what we're working toward for the v0.6 wave. While priorities have shifted around a bit since the initial launch, we're still largely on track toward the same North Star we set out for earlier in the year, albeit on a few re-ordered steps.

The 10,000ft View

First off, the Fun Stuff (data). We'd originally hoped to hit the 5,000 Slides Generated threshold by the time we wrapped up the Limited Access wave: you more than doubled that by the time we'd caught up. And where we'd initially load-tested up to the 150 Slide mark, we've since seen compositions cresting above 200 slides appearing in the logs.

The Chicago family is the run-away Top Theme Target thusfar – not entirely surprising given its Pilot status during the roll-out – and accounts for more than 4,500 of total Slides Generated. Generic targets are making their move on the overall count (predictably, as we started easing access restrictions), but account for only ~2500 Slides Generated thusfar.

And while we thought the Scaffold approach would be crucial for helping novices get started authoring this way, it turns out that nearly everyone is composing in plain Markdown at the end of the day – at a 70:1 ratio to be exact (more on that twist below).

All in all, off to an honest start (we think), given the Limited-Access rollout and general proof-of-concept vibe of the v0.5 engine: we hope to have a much broader view of things by this time next year.

The Gang's All Here^*

Once Chicago was fully dialed in as a working Manual of Style for the Theme-level changes we'd need to make to bring this whole idea to life, our highest priority was getting the rest of the Library updated to Composer-Enhanced status across-the-board so we'd be iterating forward on a level baseline across the entire catalog.

We wrapped that process up in October with point updates to all but one ^*Problem Child: Aurora NXT exhibits type irregularities when some of the placeholders are manipulated with AppleScript, and we've sussed out that we'll need to rebuild the theme's core to get it working reliably: we've pulled Aurora from the shelf in the meanwhile, and will address at some point further down the road.

The remainder of our current Keynote catalog should work as intended for targeting purposes once you're up-to-date with the latest Theme Core(s) – and we've also refreshed each of the LE Themes on our Free Downloads page to ensure that Global Standard Routes are present and operable: the LE Themes are not yet integrated in the KeynotePro Theme Targeting selector, but are valid targets for the Custom Theme field if they're installed (or via Generic targeting if not).

If you're targeting one of the updated (free) LE Themes, you can target it with the Custom Theme selector if it's already installed in Keynote - otherwise, stick to Generic.

Consensus Views

We saw a few recurring themes emerge over the course of the v0.5 wave, some of which we were pretty aware of heading in, others that came as a bit of a surprise along the way.

It really is a mess of windows. In an Edit/Revision loop, the combo of a Markdown editor, Composer in the browser, Script Editor to run the output, let alone Keynote itself – there's a lot going on. We can consolidate some of that by refactoring toward a native Mac app down the road if there's sufficient demand (which would also settle the notion of Offline mode) – for now, we're forging ahead on existing infrastructure and focusing on improvements that would naturally carry forward either way.

In the near term, there's almost universal consensus around the need for a real-time indication of how Composer's seeing each slide in your Markdown before it's submitted to Build. It would not only obviate the need for Scaffold being a separate pathway altogther (that 70:1 ratio), it would likely also cut down Edit/Revision loops, and – generally speaking – bring a lot more clarity to what's going to be built before it's actioned. So a Pre-Processing View has taken the lead in priorities for the coming v0.6 wave.

On the Engine itself, where we thought there would be a louder drumbeat by now around getting to some of the missing functional holes (looking at Charting & Audio/Video there), there's been less pressure than anticipated – so we've kicked those to the back-burner for the time being and will pull them back into the queue once the v0.6 UI changes are more fully baked-in and ready to inherit.

Onto v0.6 in '26

We're going to be bringing v0.6 online in stages in the coming months, and are hoping to have it settled in by the time we hit the actual Year One mark – we'll keep you posted on that front.

In the meanwhile, we'll continue addressing any issues that might surface on the v0.5 engine from an operational standpoint – so definitely continue to loop us in if you encounter any oddities.

We'd otherwise also like to extend our graitude to everyone who's taken part in the v0.5 wave thusfar – definitely a learing expereince here (we are, after all, primarily a theme systems shop), so we've really appreciated your patience with getting the engine settled in to steady-state, and look forward to focusing on making it even more useful over the coming year.

Additional Resources

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Introducing Composer for Keynote

2025-03-24T11:04:55-04:00

Don't let the adorable robot fool you: Composer isn't some kind of random A.I. presentation builder. It's a production-grade worker for the factory floor of Keynote itself.

There's been an absolute avalanche of A.I. presentation tools announced this past year – some of it really interesting, conceptual speaking. And who doesn't want to get their next show wrapped up faster?

But it doesn't take long with any of these tools to see the downsides piling up: limited personalization and creativity, generic design sensibilities, inflexible output – not to mention data privacy concerns, subscriptions to yet another walled garden. It's tiring.

Yet there's something undeniably attractive about that premise, isn't there? It would be great if I could just write out what needed to be said and have that magically appear in Keynote – using my theme, with my own customizations, with total control over the output. Something I could actually use on Client decks and real shows, not just one-off novelties. All the upsides of process automation without the massive downsides.

That sounds... actually useful. So we made it.

Meet Composer for Keynote

At its root, Composer is an Automation Engine for Keynote. It takes Plain Text descriptions of Objects, Slides, or entire Presentations & generates AppleScript routines to automate their production in Keynote for MacOS. It's predictable, repeatable, and fully transparent.

To use it, you simply describe the contents of a slide – as native Markdown from apps like Obsidian or Ulysses, or by field through Composer's Scaffold Editor. For example, here's the first part of source script for the Intro show in Obsidian:

The source script for the Intro presentation is written in Markdown format, shown in Obsidian for Mac.

There are a few Tagged items used there (highlighted in purple) to dial in the specific output we're looking for, but it's otherwise vanilla Markdown text – it's extremely lightweight, easy to format, and allows for a complete separation of your content from the confines of any particular file-level implementation.

Composer takes that input, and analyzes your show's Title hierarchy and the types of Body matter used on each slide to map out the Latent Intent of the slide against Keynote's standard layouts – or to layouts you specify yourself with Tags – and generates the AppleScript required to build each slide in Keynote for MacOS:

Composer generates open AppleScript routines to run in MacOS Script Editor.

Composer's generated AppleScript is fully open for review – or further edit if you're handy – in MacOS Script Editor before run-time. Whenever you're ready, you simply click Play in Script Editor to generate the show:

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A live Build Script in action in Keynote for MacOS, targeting the Chicago Sans theme.

As we're still in Beta, the output is currently very much geared toward whole-show builds vs patch-ins or edits – that will evolve as we bring more of the supporting logic online.

And it should be noted that while you can target any valid theme target (Composer is 100% Theme Agnostic), we're using Chicago here for a reason: some of the item-level targeting displayed in this clip requires that each of the layout's placeholders be set a particular way to be identified by AppleScript (Keynote doesn't expose a placeholder's Tag or Display values to Applescript). At the moment, Chicago's the only system in the Library^* fully-optimized for extended Targeting – but updates are already underway to bring more of the back-catalog up to speed, and we'll have additional formatting information coming online shortly to help you dial in any Custom Themes you've built for better compatibility.

^*Update: we've been making steady progress updating the Library since the original announcement: check the Composer-Enhanced Theme Systems page if you're keeping an eye out for one of your favorites.

During the initial Limited Beta, we're staging access to Composer by Theme as each system moves from Composer-Compatible to full Composer-Enhanced status. If you'd like to get in early, Join the Waitlist and we'll do our best to accomodate – you'll otherwise receive a Notification once one of the themes in Your Library is updated for full Targeting support.

Something Old, Something New.

Composer is far from the first tool to work with Markdown this way: apps like Deckset or Hyperdeck are available for the Mac – not to mention the venerable md2key, which has bridged Markdown & Keynote for years. We actually ended up standardizing around Markdown as Composer's low-level control surface very recently, thanks to a long-time customer who loves using Deckset for drafting shows, but wished there was a faster way to upscale that to show-grade Keynote output without having to then build it again, slide-by-slide.

The idea of Markdown > Presentation pipelines isn't exactly new – nor is the notion of targeting Keynote with Markdown, for that matter. In Composer for Keynote, though, Markdown is more of a means to an end than a raison dêtre – it's something we have in common with other tools, but also the line where those similarities (mostly) end.

Composer was conceived, first and foremost, as an Author Assistive platform. Composer understands Markdown – but it specializes in Keynote, and speaks Applescript to achieve targeted production objectives. It doesn't convert Markdown to a couple of basic utility layouts and move on – it builds a manifest to understand the sort of slide you're building, and translates it to the native Keynote types required to achieve it.

There's no A.I. black-box making random decisions on your behalf at play here: it's basic deduction. We refer to it as Latent Intent, which is to say that a Layout is generally evidenced by the Content that's present in the description of a slide without it having to be specified: an h2 Title element + a List element = a Title & Bullets Layout, broadly speaking. So if you're going for one of about a dozen standard Keynote layouts, you can just focus on your content & Composer will generally handle the rest, mapping each of the consituent elements of the inferred slide layout to their respective object on the Keynote stage.

And there's nothing to install or changes you'll need to make to your Keynote theme to get that running: Composer's designed with decades of established Keynote architecture in mind, and maps output to Keynote's standard layouts – in every language Keynote supports – automatically (including a host of layouts that used to be standard but aren't anymore, if you're running an older bit of kit):

One Script, 4 Stops: Composer can build in any standard Keynote theme, illustrated here in 4 of Apple's default themes.

Engineered for Pros

In a professional setting, the defaults & standards will only get you so far, of course – and we've never been particularly restrained to Keynote's defaults around here (to put it mildly). So to build a truly Author-assistive framework, we need to be able to scale not only into the extended complexity of modern theme & template systems, but also into the lifecycle of presentations themselves as practical, tangible elements of corporate communication. That... is a mouthfull: let's walk that out.

First, theme level. When it comes to AppleScript in Keynote, it's one thing to say Apply Layout XYZ – that's the easy part. It's another matter entirely when you need to zero in on a specific item on that layout (that isn't the Title or Body). As noted above, Keynote doesn't expose a placeholder's Tag or Display values to AppleScript, so it's literally not possible in a Generic Keynote theme: at run time we can only effectively check for any remaining "empty" objects & take a chance, which isn't a great look for production.

So a bit of symbiosis between engine and theme is needed to effectively bridge targeting on the object level – particularly as those layouts scale in object volume or complexity. Hence the notion of a theme being Composer-Enhanced: the layouts needs to be able to fully declare themselves for AppleScript to precisely target whithin them.

When you're targeting a Composer-Enhanced theme, you can script changes to any placeholder on the layout with precision.

That solved, you have the makings for an actual production line taking shape – a state where the show's original script can drive any number of one-off iterations or variations on the resulting Keynote file generated, no matter the complexity of the layout.

And if we scope back out to questions of presentation lifecycle in day-to-day workflows, some obvious benefits emerge. If you run a Daily Stand-Up, for instance: once you've tuned your baseline model, it's essentially effortless to compose today's version of that deck from your latest notes over in Obsidian. You don't even need to bother saving the actual Keynote file afterwards – it's literal emphemera.

Or, as was the case last year on one of the client projects that inspired this entire initiative in the first place: the show looks great – now we also need it in French, Spanish, and Chinese. That's a significantly smaller lift if we're simply assuring the final translations are slotted into the right segment of the show script: it's just Plain Text, after all.

We've been largely focused on the Theme side of the Theme/Template equation so far: both here, and literally in terms of the Composer's current capabilities. So to talk Templates, we're going to be pushing into Roadmap territory a bit.

Long-time customers will remember a time when everything you needed could be included in the Core Theme itself (or even further back, when we had a button that would open a Theme's Extras folder). Over time, though, as the complexity of the presentation landscape itself grew ever more diverse, so too did the requirements for must-have elements to have on hand to pull a contemporary show together as quickly as possible – much of which couldn't even be defined theme-level.

Thus our Elements Templates were born – which now account for the vast majority of layout starters included with any given system. We've always tried to keep the distinction between Theme and Template as easy-to-navigate as possible given the constraints of the file-type differences, one being installed vs the others not, etc. – but from an Author-assistive perspective, there's a huge amount of un-needed complexity involved here that a framework like Composer can rise to address.

And as attractive as the idea of being able to simply declare a Timeline sounds – it also opens the door to all-new (for Keynote) possibilities, like that Timeline being generated on-the-fly according to your specs, instead of you needing to modify the closest starter you could find (in a file that itself included 5 variations because we couldn't be sure how many columns you'd actually need).

Again, this is Roadmap territory – and will take a bit of time to play out – but it should give you a pretty good sense of how we're approaching the juncture of the pre and post-Composer Landscape. There's much more to come on this front, and we'll get into more detail as we're taking each stage live – Stay Tuned.

Moving Forward

As noted above, we're going to be staggering access to Composer by theme during the Beta, as each theme moves from Compatible to Enhanced status – you'll receive a notification once one of the themes is Your Library is cleared for full Targeting Support.

Once you're in, you'll see a Blue Compose button at the top of the Composer page whenever you're signed in. At this stage of deployment, we've opened Markdown and Scaffold routes for Build a New Presentation, and we'll be adding additional routes and options as they've cleared Test.

If you'd like to dig deeper into Composer-flavored Markdown and how the scripts are formatted in the meanwhile, be sure to check out the full Formatting Guide for additional details.

Additional Resources

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Welcome to KeynotePro v40

2024-08-16T04:20:00-04:00

KeynotePro v4.0 is the most comprehensive infrastructure update we've undertaken in more than a decade.

4.0

Released August 16, 2024

Notable Changes To:

Web & Platform
Accounts & Personalization
Shopping & Checkout
Files & Downloads

KeynotePro.com v3 launched in 2009(!) – just a few short months before the iPad first debuted to put it in context – and is, by virtue of longevity, the only version of KeynotePro some of you have ever known. While it was reasonably state-of-the-art at launch, none of us could have known at the time that it would become our effective default for the next 15 years.

The world kept spinning, trends came and went, and KeynotePro v3 kept motoring along all the while, allowing us to hold focus on the Theme & Template Library almost exclusively during the transition from Classic Keynote & Pages to their modern lineage – alongside quite a few extracurricular projects we took on along the way.

Yet we're here to bury KeynotePro v3, not to praise it (as it goes).

KeynotePro v4 is a ground-up reboot of our entire platform, acknowledging the spirit of where we've been while laying the foundation for what comes next. Every layer of our stack is evolved, streamlined, and modernized – a literal leap in time consolidating decades of processes and data into something faster, smarter, and more capable.

We're finally mobile-friendly, web-app optimized, and highly personalized. Security & Privacy are buffed, Shopping & Checkout are massively improved, and it's easier than ever to keep your files up-to-date on Mac and iOS.

Major highlights for v4.0 are listed below, with more to come as we continue folding in a few additional improvements that didn't make the 4.0 cutoff.

Web & Platform

Unified Codebase

The separate standard & secure sites have been merged into a unified, interconnected whole on a modernized codebase designed for easier ongoing evolution.

Mobile-Friendly, Responsive Design

The v4 framework is (finally!) fully responsive, providing a consistent experience regardless of the type of device you're browsing with.

Light / Dark Optimization

The responsive core extends to light & dark-mode preference, adapting to whichever mode is active on your device at any given moment.

Home Screen Installable

The entire v4 platform is built to Progressive Web App (PWA) standards, enabling a more app-like expereince when added to your iOS HomeScreen.

Accounts & Personalization

Improved Data Security & Privacy

We've adopted stronger encryption protocols across the board, and have migrated our Analytics platform to an internal service for additional privacy.

Intelligently Personalized

Thanks to the unified core, the v4 platform adapts to you individually with personalized reminders, recommendations, pricing and more.

New Notification Options

We've added new notification preferences, giving you more control over the types of emails you receive – along with on-site notifications for real-time response.

Integrated Support Hub

A new in-app Support Ticket system ensures you'll never miss a reply to your questions, with a full Case History available in Your Account at any time.

Shopping & Checkout

Centralized Bags

Shopping Bags now live in the cloud, so you can pick up where you left off from any of your devices, days or even weeks later. Save items for later in a new, separate bag.

Intelligent Savings

Whenever you're Signed In, the v4 platform automatically adjusts to reflect any Upgrade Pricing or other discounts you're eligible for, in real time.

Automatic Bundles

Our signature Bundles are now automatically built whenever three items of the same tier are added to your bag – including new Complete Edition Bundles.

Improved Checkout Experience

We've migrated our defult checkout to Stripe for a faster, safer experience – including an ApplePay option (where available) – and improved the PayPal checkout flow.

Files & Downloads

Pending Downloads & Updates

New files added to Your Library appear in a Pending quick-view in the navigation menu – along with links to any files updated since your last download.

Up-to-Date for Mac

New Up-To-Date for Mac downloads are available, including all of the latest theme & template extensions for a particular family in one convenient download.

Expanded iOS Downloads

No Mac? No Problem: you can download the extended template files for our Keynote systems or individual Pages Templates directly to your iOS device.

Upgrade Indicators

A new Upgrade panel alerts you whenever a newer version of one of your themes or templates is available, making it easy to keep your entire library up to date.

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A Haus for All Seasons

2022-01-17T15:00:00-05:00

We've received a few questions since the launch of our new Haus Neue system about whether or not it's possible to customize the colors in the Bauhaus patterns driving the visual accents throughout the theme. And the good news is Yes, it absolutely is – it's very much a playground for color exploration, provided you know where to set your changes.

In some of our previous tutorials, we've taken a look at how easy it is to affect theme-wide changes in our shape-based themes through simple style changes. If this is your first time delving into this sort of customization, you can find a bit of additional background information in the Calais Brush-Up tutorial, or the more in-depth (and now slightly out-dated – duly noted) Recoloring NXT-Generation Keynote Themes Tutorial – but they're not required reading for this example.

Haus Neue takes those style-based fundamentals to an entirely new level, building on a hybrid 4-spoke color foundation to define the root-color definitions that drive all of the Bauhaus-inspired patterns that act as accents throughout the theme. Once you understand the theory behind the color application and where they're set, it's incredibly easy to tint & recolor the entire system to essentially any color you desire.

Prep & Setup

There are only a few setup steps involved in transforming the default Haus Neue style into your own coloration. Start a new presentation using Haus Neue, add a few slides you can use to reference your changes, and add 3 square shapes to the stage to get started – they'll default to the first Shape Style:

Step 1: Add a few slides for reference, and add 3 square shapes to the stage.

These shapes will act as our proxy shapes for the styles we're going to redefine. Select the first square, look to the Format > Style menu, and click over to the second panel of Shape Styles: this is where our Framework-Reserved styles are defined. Click the signature Fuchsia to apply this first style:

Step 2: Apply the first reserved Base Style we'll Re-Define later.

Repeat that step with the remaining 2 squares, selecting the Indigo and Light blue styles respectively, which will set all 3 proxies we'll focus on here. You'll notice there's a 4th, White Shape Style on the row below our 3 primaries: this is an optional "Surface" modifier, which you can use if you're transforming to a dark background (or otherwise pushing into a 4-color model) – we won't use that one in this tutorial, but it's good to know where it is if you're going for a non-white background and want to blend the white accents.

Once you're done with the 3 primaries, your slide should look this, and you're ready for next steps:

Step 3: Repeat that step for the remaining Indigo/Light Blue styles.

Redefine the Styles

Now we'll re-define each of those colors one-by-one, and let Keynote handle the application throughout the file. We're going to work up a nice Spring palette with a few near-neighbor Greens here as an example, but again, this process will apply to any palette you choose.

The Bauhaus pattern works around a highlight/contrast/highlight model – for best results, you'll generally want to key in your two key highlight colors, then define the darker contrast as a mid-point between the two highlights, or alternately a "reach" color that pushes into a neighboring color space. This can involve a bit of trial and error if you're not working with a pre-defined color or two, but as you'll see, it's easy to adjust on-the-fly from our proxy shapes.

First, we'll replace the Fuchsia with a crisp, cucumber Green. Select the Fuchsia proxy square, and set it to a new color: I'm using RGB 164,233,183 here. Once you've changed the color, we'll redefine the base style by right-clicking the original Fuchsia style and selecting "Redefine Style from Selection" as shown:

Step 4: Redefine the first reserved style using the modified proxy shape.

Keynote will prompt you with a choice to update all of the shapes referencing the style you're updating (or not): make sure "Update all objects" is selected, and click OK:

Step 4(b): Confirm that you want to apply the change throughout the presentation.

Keynote will re-define all linked instances of the Fuchsia squares and accents to our new cucumber Green, which should be immediately apparent on the active + reference slides we added at the beginning. For good measure, we can inspect the rest of the masters via the Add Slide button, which confirms the original Fuchsia is now Green throughout the file (excepting the special instances in the Supplemental masters):

Step 5: Confirm that the first change has been applied throughout the presentation.

We'll repeat that process for the remaining 2 proxy squares. If you don't have colors pre-selected, it's generally best to move to the 3rd shape to set the secondary highlight, then back to the second the balance the contrast color. Here, I'm setting the 3rd proxy square to another green (RGB 38,164,134 here) – a darker hue that plays against the spring contrast I'm going for, and re-defining the referenced Style from the selection again:

Step 6: Set the alternate Highlight color, and redefine the third root style.

We're nearly there. Now we'll redefine the Contrast color – since we're using a naturally contrasting pair of greens for our highlights, this is a good instance of where we'd use a "reach" color to push into a neighboring color to balance. I want to stick to the blue end of the spectrum for the reach, but pull it closer to the Green end of the range vs the violet default. After a bit of exploration, I'm going with RBG 10,59,84 here – closer to green, but still distinctly blue if we were to ramp luminance:

Step 7: Set the Contrast color, and redefine the second root style to finish up.

And we're done! There are a few additional steps to go through if we want to dial in charts, tables, or text Emphasis styles – but the "heavy lifting" of setting up our color conversion is largely finished for all intents & purposes. You can remove the proxy shapes, and start adding slides + building the show from here – simply use the eyedropper tool to sample your new colors wherever you want to dovetail inserted shapes, etc with your revised palette.

We're all set: remove the Proxy Shapes to finish up.

Wrapping Up

If you're going to make frequent use of your revised setup, it's worth spending a few minutes keying in the default Accent Shape Styles (the first panel of Shape Styles, vs the Reserved styles we redefined here) to align with your changes, along with the Text Emphasis styles (defined under the Character Styles drop-down when text is selected) if you tend to use those. It's generally easiest to treat Chart and Table colors as spot overrides vs going through the process of redefining all of the various tiers defined there – but if you're going the extra mile, those are the remaining styles you'll want to pay attention to.

You can otherwise save your changes as a new Theme file by selecting Save Theme from the File menu – choose Add to Theme Chooser to make your new theme appear in the My Themes section of the theme chooser, ready to start your next presentation with (and if you ever need to remove it, Right-click or Control-click the theme in My Themes and select Delete).

Additional Resources

Recoloring Shape-based KeynotePro Themes in Keynote 6+

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Beyond the Screenshot

2021-12-05T10:19:48-05:00

With the introduction of Live Video objects in the Keynote 11.2 update, it's now a snap to move beyond simple screenshots of your app concepts with an integrated, live view of an attached iOS device's screen – perfect for integrating live Prototypes or Demos directly into your presentation.

Our new Live Device Mockup Templates make this an easy, one-step process – integrating pre-scaled Live Video objects with a selection of iOS device frames designed to jumpstart the process in supported theme systems. They're available today for Disruptor, Helix, OM X, and Sonoma X, and will be expanding to other systems in the coming weeks.

To make use of these templates – or if you'd like to roll-your-own solution – you'll need to be fully up-to-date with Keynote 11.2+ on your Mac, along with a tethered iOS device you'll use to run your Prototype or Demo. If you're developing your prototypes in an app such as Adobe XD, Figma, Sketch, or Origami Studio, you'll also need to be running the respective companion app on your iOS device to mirror the prototype output from your device's screen.

The Basics

If you're working in one of the supported theme systems, the Live Device Mockup Templates function like any of the other Element Template downloads – just Copy & Paste the setup for the device you're targeting from the template file into your working presentation. You'll be prompted to manage your Live Video Sources when you open any Keynote file that includes the object – this is set on a file by file basis, so it's best to set up your file-specific source in your working file rather than the starter template, as it doesn't carry over.

Your iOS device will need to be tethered via USB to act as a Live Video source. Once connected, select the Live Video object on your slide (or add a new one via the Media button if you're rolling your own), click the Source selector in the Format > Live Video inspector, and click the Plus button in the pop-up to add a new source: select your source device, and proceed with the pairing steps noted – click Add to finish the source setup. Once your device is added as a source, it's screen should immediately be reflected on the slide, and mirror whatever's happening on the tethered device:

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Basic Integration of a live iPhone screen, previewing a live web app.

If you run into trouble getting it to work at this stage – i.e. if the on-slide Video continues to show a black screen even though it appeared to be working during the Add Source step, you'll want to have a look at the troubleshooting steps on Apple's support site: see If you can’t use live video in Keynote for more info.

Dialing In

Once your device is setup and configured correctly, it's then just a matter of rigging up your demo. In the example above, I'm running a live PWA app that's running in full-screen mode on a tethered iPhone: if your app's at the point where you have live code to show, i.e. a true Demo, you're ready to go as-is, simply start your app & be sure to wake your device before its first on-screen appearance.If you're using a design app such as Adobe XD, Figma, Sketch, or Origami Studio (among others) to develop app prototypes, you'll need to fire up the respective "mirror" app on your device to display your demo – we've linked to additional information for each of these below, otherwise see your app maker's documentation.

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Basic Integration of a live iPad screen, previewing an Adobe XD Prototype.

Additional Considerations

It always pays to rehearse, particularly when you're running a live demo – definitely run a few trial rounds to get a sense of how everything plays out in terms of transitioning in to the active slide and getting your demo started. Keynote's Presenter Display offers the option to "Always Show Live Video" which gives you a quick view of each source's status, though the preview is hidden behind the camera icon in the Play-in-Window mode's presenter display window.

If running fully live feels a bit risky, you can always swap out the Live Video object with a regular Video object. You can't, unfortunately, simply re-point the Live Video object to a local video file to make the swap, but if you delete the Live Video object from one of the template slides you'll be left with a foreground device frame that you can layer a standard video object behind – just scale to fit on-center behind the device frame and set your options in the Video inspector.

While our template starters only include a single device-per-slide to keep things easy, you're not bound to a single source, even on the same slide. It's entirely possible to set up complex, multi-device slides, provided you have enough hands available at show-time (+ enough free usb ports on the host machine).

Moving Forward

As noted, our Live Device Mockup Template add-ons are available today for Disruptor, Helix, OM X, and Sonoma X, and will be expanding to other systems in the coming weeks. If you're in a hurry for one of the others in the meanwhile, drop us a note and let us know. We'll eventually be folding the Live variants into a unified Device Mockup Templates file alongside the standard photo-oriented templates, though that's a bit further down the road.

Additional Resources

What's New in Keynote for Mac (Apple.com)
Add live video in Keynote on Mac (Apple.com)
If you can’t use live video in Keynote (Apple.com)

Adobe XD : Preview on mobile devices (Adobe.com)
Figma : Preview designs and prototypes with Figma Mirror app (Figma.com)
Sketch : Previewing and sharing prototypes (Sketch.com)
Origami Studio : Previewing & Sharing (Origami.Design)

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New ePUB Book Templates for Pages

2019-12-16T06:34:34-05:00

Our new ePUB Book Templates let you extend the styling of your favorite Pages Template system to multiple eBook formats in a snap.

Throughout 2019, ePUB Book Templates have been the most frequently requested addition to our Pages Templates systems. We’re pleased to announce that we’ve started to integrate new ePUB Template packs as Add-Ons to our template systems: downloads for Vienna for Pages and Inductor for Pages are available today, and additional systems will be coming online in the weeks ahead.

We’ve largely followed the approach Apple established in the Books sub-tab on the Pages template chooser – with Portrait-style templates designed for traditional, text-oriented reflow/adaptive ePUB books, as well as fixed-layout Landscape templates that provide a more ePUB-optimized variation of each system’s Horizontal Brochure template (available in the Pro Edition downloads).

Landscape and Portrait template options, Inductor for Pages

A system's various Cover styles are split across the starter options for the Portrait (reflow) templates: choose your favorite style and dive in. The fixed-layout Landscape template is a Page Layout-mode template, so those options are be applied as a factor of the selected/applied layout master.

The Landscape template is a Page Layout-mode setup, designed for Fixed-layout ePUB.

If you’re new to working with ePUB, you’ll want to have a look at Apple’s Support Article on Creating/Exporting ePUB Books in Pages for more detailed information on what is & isn’t supported in each format, along with tips on publishing your eBooks to your iCloud account or directly to the Apple Books Store.

Additional Resources

Creating/Exporting ePUB Books in Pages (Apple.com)
Publish your book with Pages (Apple.com)

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Better Native Photo Blends

2019-10-19T16:38:32-04:00

Using Keynote's Image Adjustment Tools to Improve Image Blends Natively.

Image Blends are one of the best ways to make a photo feel "integrated" with the theme it's being used in, particularly if a theme's design is optimized for the approach. Our latest build of the Aurora themes - Aurora NXT - uses this technique extensively, as does last year's KeyStation NXT (to a differing degree). And when the photo you're blending is a good fit for the technique without any adjustment, it's a sort of magical, one-click experience.

All photos are not created equal, however, and basic Transparency mixes like the defaults set in Aurora NXT won't produce optimal results for every photo. We can jump to a tool like Photoshop to take advantage of more advanced Layer Blending options on difficult photos, where Screen or Multiply will often make quick work of this sort of thing. But you can work a surprising bit of magic natively in Keynote 6.x-9.x itself by diving deeper into the Image Adjustment Tools built into the app itself.

The Basics

We'll be using the standard Aurora NXT theme for these examples: if you don't have the Aurora NXT themes in your library, you can download a free slide-limited Trial Edition here to follow along with: Free Keynote Themes - Aurora NXT LE

Aurora NXT includes 4 relevant Image Styles to ballpark Subtle, Moderate and Intense blends, along with an override style to disable the blend altogether. The results are quick and fairly predictable on a deep, full-color image (an Unsplash image by Vero Photoart shown here):

Default Blend Stops assigned via the Image Styles in Aurora NXT

In this case, the base image includes some deep yellows & reds and blends particularly well with the full-spectrum Aurora theme at each of the transparency "stops" defined in the base image styles. Likewise, deep blue & green photos will blend more readily in Aurora UV, as the colors are playing off the natural color ranges of the respective themes themselves.

There's not much to this basic technique: the styles correlate to different Transparency levels (the only Image Adjustment setting Keynote will hold on to when an Image Style is defined), which can be easily tweaked in the inspector to "dial in" a more pleasing transparency level if one of the defaults aren't quite right.

But some photos are more difficult to blend than others when you're relying only on Transparency, particularly if you're blending a darker photo with a more vibrant, colorful background (or a lighter studio shot with a darker, flat color a-la KeyStation NXT, for instance). Adjusting the Transparency can offer some level of improvement, but in more difficult compositions you'll want to go a few steps further and dive into Image Adjustments to achieve more pleasing results.

Image Adjustments

Let's have a look at a good example of the fundamental issue we're trying to solve, and the steps we can take to improve our Blend results. We're starting with a dark black & white image, a popular Unsplash image by Sebastian Unrau, shown here with no Blend/Transparency:

Dark, Black & White images can be difficult to Blend with color.

The lack of color and general dark nature of the photo produces somewhat "muddy" results on the Moderate or Intense stops, with the Subtle stop providing little to no detail:

None of the default Transparency Stops provide ideal results.

Making this photo a great candidate for more advanced techniques. Let's settle in around the default Moderate style, which has an Opacity setting of 38% and gives us the better mix of transparency & detail of the 3 default options in this case. Select the photo, and click on Format > Image to expose the Image Inspector.

We'll start by clicking Enhance to let Keynote's image algorithms clarify the base exposure/saturation balance. In some cases, simple adjustments to the Exposure/Saturation settings on the inspector can go a long way - but in this case, Saturation isn't going to do anything for us given the Black & White source, and Exposure will simply act as a rudimentary Lighter/Darker control atop the Transparency. We'll click on the Adjustment Toggle to expose the more Advanced Image Adjustment settings:

Enhance helps clarify the highlights - click the Toggle to open Advanced Options.

Adjusting Levels will do much of the heavy lifting in this case. Since we're trying to accommodate the darker nature of the source photo, adjusting the mid-range levels down toward Black (moving to the left) will clear up some of the muddiness right off. Adjust the slider so that the mid-range is to the left of the dominant spike:

Adjust the Midrange Levels to compensate for the darkness of the source image.

Now we can adjust the Exposure to shape the Levels curve a bit more - bumped to 70% in this case. -70% adjustments to both Temperature and Tint will help in this case by adding a splash of duotone tint to the photo in a good range to complement the red-dominant background:

Adjust the Exposure, Temperature and Tint to dial in further.

We're very nearly there. We're going to make one final adjustment - adjust the Shadows slider to balance toward the highlights more:

Adjust the Shadows slider to balance toward the highlights.

And we're done. Once you get the hang of what each adjustment does, you can effectively blend even problematic images in a few steps - and the results are a definite improvement from where we began with the default Transparency Blend:

Before and After, showing the dramatic difference between Default and Adjusted states.

While these settings are a good approach for the specific problem posed by this type of image, you'll want to apply these principles in different ways depending on the nature of your source image. Lighter images blending with darker backgrounds, for instance, will tend to work better with higher midrange Levels, less Exposure and adjustments to the Highlights slider instead of the Shadows used here. Experiment a bit and use your best judgment according to the type of image you're blending and the background you're blending with.

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Re-Mastered to Remix

2018-06-29T09:00:00-04:00

As we noted in our latest Upgrade Report, Pages 7 adopted a number of exciting new features this generation – and we're now pleased to announce the release of our first wave of updates tailored especially for the latest architectural & workflow revisions that came along with the Pages 7 release.

As we first hinted at in our Upgrade Report, the re-introduction of Page Masters is something of a seismic shift in the Template Architecture landscape, offering major improvements to authoring workflow & ease-of-use, particularly when it comes to mobile authoring & complex document types like Brochures or Newsletters. Longtime or even casual users of Keynote will find the process of constructing & editing a Page Layout document very familiar now, and Pages '09 authors will finally feel right at home in the transition back toward a more Constructive authoring paradigm.

In many ways, Pages 7 is the long-awaited true successor to Pages '09: the core workflow that made Pages such a joy to use in the first place is not just back – it's better than ever before. If you're new to Pages since version 5.x, you're going to be in for a real treat when you settle into the new workflow. But if you're one of the surprising number of Pages '09 holdouts we've heard from over the last year while we've worked to forge a way forward from the Classic-Era Pages model, Pages 7.x is the proverbial droid you've been looking for.

Today's updates include Page Layout Template updates for both Palo Alto NXT for Pages and Geneva for Pages, adopting the new Page Master model – updates to Tribeca NXT for Pages and Hyperion for Pages are underway & will be arriving in the coming weeks, with new systems adopting the model thereafter as our new default. Update: Hyperion & Tribeca NXT updates are now available, finishing up the initial transition.

Let's take a look at the changes and how we're adapting our template systems to take advantage of the underlying power of the Pages 7 approach.

A New Foundation

Pages 5.x-6.x adopted what we've previously referred to as a Flat Architecture - that is, a document created from a template included every possible page right up front, and it was up to an author to duplicate/delete from there to create something more unique or purpose-driven. It could rightly be thought of as a Destructive architecture, in that you had to chisel away the parts you didn't need to create the document containing the parts that you did - at least when it came to templates more complex than Apple's 2-page defaults.

A Pages 7.x Page Master-enhanced template, like the classic Pages '08/'09 architecture, is inherently more Constructive. That is, all of your layout options are included behind the scenes, leaving you as the author to focus on constructing your document as options are needed. It's a bit more like Keynote, now (again): you start with a default slide (or 2), and where you go from there is completely up to you - just click Add Page, and choose from a Template's available Masters:

Click Add Page to expose additional layouts.

And just like Keynote - but quite unlike Pages '09 - you can now also click Change Master to apply a different layout altogether to an existing page:

Click Change Master to swap an existing layout.

If you're just getting started with a new document, Change Master makes it much easier to dial in your document's style & structure right from the start: it's a breeze to swap the default layouts & get right to work.

If you've started to make changes or edits to a page, the Change Master functionality is best reserved for like-to-like changes, such as swapping between Cover variations or Left/Right variations of a certain style of text layout. If an object, such as Title block or Photo, is consistently tagged between two different Page Masters, all of your changes/edits will carry with the change. If an element exists on one layout but not another, however, the newly-applied Page Master takes precedent, meaning elements you've edited may disappear in the process if they're not mapped on the new layout's master - so use this functionality with care if you've already committed edits to a page, particularly on more complex Brochure or Newsletter layouts where there may be a greater diversity of individual objects present on any given page.

Curiously, Apple has thus-far implemented this functionality only on their new Book templates: none of the in-app Brochure or Newsletter templates, for instance, include additional Page Masters as of this writing. It remains to be seen how they might adapt this to model to other document archetypes throughout the broader template chooser.

For our own template systems, we've stuck with a model that should feel familiar to anyone using our Keynote systems or older Pages '09 Templates: major groupings - like Covers or Section Leaders - are organized together, with sub-groupings or variations organized within those major sections in a similar pattern. We've tried to make it as easy as possible to dial in to a page archetype > style selection, but will likely continue to evolve the meta-structure we're mapping against behind-the-scenes to better accommodate the pacing afforded by the 2-column layout selector called when you click Add Page or Change Master.

Constructive Authoring: 101

These fundamental changes come together to create what might be the easiest authoring flow ever available in Pages, far surpassing what was ever possible in the classic Pages '09 architecture. Let's look at an example, using the Trifold Brochure template from Geneva for Pages. In this case, we're starting with a single Exterior style - the default full-color Cover model:

Default state for the Trifold Brochure Template.

Right up front, we can make some decisions about the document - are we going to use the full-color Exterior, or did we have something more ink-conscious in mind? We'll ultimately add a corresponding Interior page that best fits with those decisions, but as you'll see, it's pretty easy to change your mind along the way.

For our example, we're going to stick with the full-color cover for now, and jump straight into some edits. We're adding our initial picks for the pictures we'll use, and we'll update a few of the text elements so we can see some of the other changes in action. To keep the flow moving, we're going to next add the matching full-color Interior layout via the Add Page button:

Photos and some Placeholder copy are added - next, we'll add a matching Interior.

We can stop here & simply fill out our placeholders if we want to stick with the default full-color style. But's let's say we're working with a printer that doesn't do edge-to-edge, so we'll want to switch to a more ink-conscious, inset style. We haven't edited any of the content on the Interior page yet, so we don't have to pay much attention to whether or not our content will map 1:1 at this point. With the Interior page selected, click Change Master, and we'll select the Interior - Inset layout option.

Next, we're going to switch our un-edited Interior to another page style - no changes or edits to watch at this stage.

We can pick up with Interior edits from there, but we'll also want to change the Exterior to match our new low-ink style. Since we've made a few edits to the Exterior already, this provides a good example of the sorts of things we're watching for when we Change Master on edited pages. The "Cover - W" variation is our 1:1 change option - that is, every element on the basic Cover is also present on the White variation. But going low-ink alone won't solve our Edge-to-Edge quandary, so we're going to switch to the "Inset Cover" variation instead. Simply eye-balling the constituent elements of the different layouts, we can see that the back-panel image is replaced with Callout Text on the Inset style:

We're going to change to the Inset Cover - notice the back-cover photo is not present on the new Master - we can anticipate it will be replaced.

As we might expect, then, we lose our back-cover photo in favor of the new Master's Callout Text object. But all of our other edits remain, adapting to the new Master:

As we've changed Master styles, Pages intelligently adapts elements wherever they're mapped to each other.

Likewise, we can pivot from here to the "with Mailer" variation, but we'll discard any changes to the back cover copy altogether in the process:

Changing to the Mailer variation discards our changes to the back cover entirely, replacing the panel's content with a Mailer construct.

This is a fairly simple example, but it hits the spectrum of everything you need to know to make the most of the new approach. We've started from a default template & completely transformed it, never growing past a basic 2-page document along the way. All of our updated Page Layout templates follow this basic model, so once you've got a feel for the process, you should be able to build up documents faster than ever before – as easily as putting a presentation together.

Moving Forward

As we've already noted, these updates are available today for Palo Alto NXT and Geneva for Pages, with Hyperion and Tribeca NXT for Pages coming shortly. Currently, these appear as stand-alone updaters - if you've updated to Pages 7, Sign In to download the updater file, and each of the included templates should trigger Pages to prompt you to Replace any Pages 5.x-6.x style templates you've already installed. As we transition to the new version of our website, Pages 7 will become our standard default in the core download, and we'll flip the 5.x-6.x versions out to the Supplemental download for anyone still needing them - but until then, you'll need to grab the Pages 7 updates separately and install those files over/instead of the corresponding templates in the original DMG.

The architecture change will perhaps be most pronounced in the mobile authoring space - you'll need Pages for iOS v4 or higher to use the Page Master enhancements (4.1 for Geneva, due to the Page Background color), but once you're up to date, the updated templates provide a far, far superior authoring experience to the prior Flat Architecture model on mobile, particularly on the more complex document types like Brochure or Newsletter. We've had to defer iOS Direct Install integration for our Pages Templates into the new website, but you can transfer the updated templates to your device now using the manual method we outline on the Direct Install page, provided you're running at least v4 of Pages for iOS.

A few of our Beta testers were quick to inquire about how this would impact the Proposal template in particular, which is currently a Word Processing-mode document - in Pages '09 you could Add Sections to Word Processing documents a-la the Page Master model, but we don't have that functionality at this time in Pages 7. We're going to be modeling a Page-Layout alternate version of the Proposal (and potentially other WP templates) in the near future & will update this page as we have more information on availability - the current wave of updates only replaces the existing Page Layout templates. And while this functionality is currently exposed in relation to Books in Apple's built-in templates, these updated Templates are not intended/suitable for eBook export (if only because they aren't the expected size) - we'll address Book-specific templates at some point in the near future.

Once Tribeca NXT and Hyperion are wrapped, we'll start pushing forward with new Template Systems (yes, we do hear you) and variations adopting the new model as our default format. Much more to come on this front - we'll update this page as appropriate with any new information as it becomes available. Update: That's a wrap, Hyperion and Tribeca NXT updates are live, and we're finished with the initial transition.

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Calais Brush-Up

2018-03-13T07:00:07-04:00

Redefine a single Shape Style to transform Calais into an organic, Brushed variation.

In some of our previous tutorials, we've taken a look at how easy it is to affect theme-wide changes in our NXT-Generation themes through simple shape-style changes. If this is your first time delving into this sort of customization, you can find a bit of additional background in the Palo Alto: Instant Classic Tip or the more in-depth Recoloring NXT-Generation Keynote Themes Tutorial, but they're not required reading for this example.

Our recent Calais theme offers an excellent insight, though, into just how much can be packed into these style definitions. We've covered the color-change side of things a few times already - so we're not going to re-tread that here. But Keynote's Shape Style Definitions don't stop at the color of the fill: they can also include stroke or effect information as well.

We can leverage that in Calais to apply one of the organic, brushed Line Styles to the Title Accent object & give it more of a hand-made feel throughout your entire presentation in just a couple of steps. These brushed shape styles are already defined for you in the Calais Supplemental file, but they're easy to set up if you want to follow along in the steps below.

The Steps

There are only a few steps involved in transforming the basic Calais look into a Brushed variation. Start a new presentation using Calais, add a few slides you can use to reference your changes, and add a Square shape to the stage to get started:

Step 1: Add a few slides for reference, and add a Square shape to the stage.

This shape will act as our proxy for the style we're going to redefine. With this new square selected, look to the Format > Style menu, and click over to the second panel of Shape Styles - this is where our Framework-Reserved styles are defined. Click the signature Yellow to apply this style:

Step 2: Apply the reserved Base Style we'll Re-Define later.

That syncs us up with the currently-applied style. Next, we'll add a Stroke to work with - expand the Border section as needed to expose the settings. Click the Line style selector, and select the Brushed style, second-from-bottom:

Step 3: Add a border, and then we'll select the Brushed line style.

Run the Line weight up to 16pt, and color-match the shape fill - on a Mac, you can do this by clicking and holding the fill color and dragging to the line color, replacing the black. Alternately, you can use the eyedropper to sample the correct color. You should end up with the following:

Step 4: Match up the colors and enlarge the line size.

With the modified shape selected, Right or Control-Click on the style definition we applied earlier, and select Redefine Style from Selection:

Step 5: Redefine the original Reserved style.

Keynote will verify that you want to redefine every shape in the presentation using that style - be sure Update All Objects is ticked before pressing OK:

Step 6: Confirm that you want to update all instances of the style.

And you're done: you should see the change happen instantly on any slides you've already added:

You're Done: remove the new Square to clean up.

And as you add new slides, you'll see that it's made the change on all of the underlying master slides throughout the presentation as well:

You'll see your changes immediately on any existing slides and new slides you add.

That's all there is to it: it's a very limited form of the whole-theme change we outline in our NXT Re-coloring Tutorial. You can save a custom version of Calais Brushed from your file if you'll be using this trick frequently: From the File menu, select Save Theme and Add to Theme Chooser to make your new theme appear in the My Themes section of the theme chooser, ready to start your next presentation with (if you ever need to remove it, Right-click or Control-click the theme in My Themes and select Delete).

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Easy Callout Contrast Charts

2017-06-20T10:47:14-04:00

Use a simple data visualization technique to bring clarity to your charts and keep your audience focused.

Every Keynote theme includes at least one - and usually several - six-color Chart Style palettes. These palettes are often signature extensions of a given theme, and are highly coordinated to present six distinct series at once - that is, they allow for visual distinction between six different series alongside each other by use of a legend element or some other labeling that distinguishes each series from each other.

This is the default behavior for all charts in Keynote, and if you're looking at a snapshot of concurrent data for two or six different regions at once, for instance, this is precisely how your data visualization should be approached. But if you're wanting to focus in on a single region, it can be difficult at times for your audience to hone in on a particular series when they're presented with so much color at once. No matter how well modeled the Style palette is, it requires some effort to "tune out" the other colors to focus on a specific series.

In these cases, it's helpful to employ the Callout/Contrast method, sometimes referred to as Series Highlighting. This visualization technique neutralizes the surrounding series colors to effectively treat the series you're focusing on as the "Callout" or highlight data that should be focused on.

Our latest theme releases include a Tonal Greyscale Style palette designed specifically for this purpose, but Apple also includes their own greyscale style defaults in Keynote 6+, so you can apply these same principles to any theme you happen to be using.

Let's take a look at the process for making your own Callout/Contrast Chart.

The Basics

We're using our Geneva theme for this example, but again, you can use Apple's default greyscale palette to employ this technique in any theme you're using. The first method we'll use works best on White backgrounds, which provides the best contrast range for the entire greyscale palette - if you're using a theme with a colored background, you'll want to use the Alternate method detailed further below.

We'll start with a simple, standard 2D Column chart setup, including six month's worth of data for four different regions, with a legend:

Starting Point: a default 2D Column Chart with six months' data for four regions.

Pretty straightforward - it's a colorful, full-spectrum palette, allowing your audience to use the legend to identify and key in on any of the six series independently. And if your focus is on all six months as aggregate data, this would be a good place to stop.

But if we change the context ever-so-slightly, and presume we're looking at any one region as a point-of-focus, suddenly all of that color becomes something of a distraction. We're simply changing the slide title here to make the point - does this feel like the clearest way of having your audience focus on July's data?:

The abundance of color makes it difficult to distinguish a single series contextually from the others.

In context, the abundance of color is incredibly distracting from the point of the slide. Fortunately, there's something we can do to easily clear this up and make July's data the apparent focus of the slide.

Select the chart, and be sure the Format > Chart tab is highlighted to make the Chart Styles palette visible:

Step 1: Select the chart, and open the Format > Chart tab to expose the Chart Styles palette.

Now, we'll apply the included Tonal Greyscale palette to neutralize the color. If the theme you're using doesn't include this palette, apply Apple's default greyscale palette via the Chart Colors selector further down (on the second panel of options that are exposed when you click):

Step 2: Apply the Tonal Greyscale palette option (or Apple's default greyscale option below) to neutralize the color.

Now, with the chart selected, we'll click into the July column and set the color fill to a Highlight color. Here, we're using the theme's signature red color, but if you're stepping through a series of each month's data using this technique, you could also sample the original color used for the series in the original color palette to keep each slide keyed to a distinct color. We're only looking at July, though, so we'll go to the signature color to keep things easy & coordinated:

Step 3: Select the focal series in question, and change to a color fill via the Style tab.

We're left with July's data being the clear point-of-focus on the slide. And since we're using a tonal palette, your audience can still distinguish between the surrounding months as needed via the legend and each series' subtly distinct color.

A finished basic setup, leaving July's data as the clear focus of the slide.

Alternate Method: Flat Neutralization

The basic conversion is a big improvement from our starting point - July is clearly the point-of-focus, and the Tonal Greyscale allows for some level of distinction to be made from each of the surrounding months. But we can actually make this even clearer, provided we're not worried about the surrounding months being strongly-typed to the legend.

This method is actually a better choice for Callouts appearing on colored backgrounds, as you can select a tonal variation that accents/contrasts the background color in situations where basic greyscale doesn't provide the proper contrast or otherwise clashes with the background color.

We're duplicating our original slide here again - select the chart, and click on the Styles tab. Then, shift-select the first & last series to select all of them at once:

Alternate Step 1: Shift-Select all of the series, and select the Style Tab.

With all of the series selected, choose a fairly light neutral color - in this case, we're using the lightest grey in the default color selections (expand by clicking on the color itself instead of the wheel icon):

Alternate Step 2: Apply a uniform neutral fill to the entire chart.

Now, like before, we can select July's column and add our Callout color to just that series:

Alternate Step 3: Apply your Callout color to the series in question.

And you're finished. This is arguably the clearest representation of July's data as a focal point - though your audience will have to do a bit of counting to determine how your Callout data compares to May, for example, that comparison would be theirs to make on their own and not the explicit point of the slide.

A finished Alternate Method example.

Additional Thoughts

This technique is an easy yet powerful way to draw your audience's attention to a specific series within your data. You can take it further by employing the Alternate Method as a baseline, and introducing a second color to work in Contrast to the first in order to visually compare the two series in context of the broader data.

Though we've only explored 2D columns here, this can be an invaluable technique when you're using other chart types - such as the 2D Line chart - where individual series are even more difficult to distinguish from the default aggregate coloration. Anywhere you'd like your audience to focus on a particular series amidst the broader data, do away with the excess color and make it easy for them to zero in on your data with a simple Highlight to draw their attention precisely where it's needed.

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KeynotePro Blog

Composer Recap 2025

The 10,000ft View

The Gang's All Here*

Consensus Views

Onto v0.6 in '26

Additional Resources

Introducing Composer for Keynote

Meet Composer for Keynote

Something Old, Something New.

Engineered for Pros

Moving Forward

Additional Resources

Welcome to KeynotePro v40

Web & Platform

Unified Codebase

Mobile-Friendly, Responsive Design

Light / Dark Optimization

Home Screen Installable

Accounts & Personalization

Improved Data Security & Privacy

Intelligently Personalized

New Notification Options

Integrated Support Hub

Shopping & Checkout

Centralized Bags

Intelligent Savings

Automatic Bundles

Improved Checkout Experience

Files & Downloads

Pending Downloads & Updates

Up-to-Date for Mac

Expanded iOS Downloads

Upgrade Indicators

A Haus for All Seasons

Prep & Setup

Redefine the Styles

Wrapping Up

Additional Resources

Beyond the Screenshot

The Basics

Dialing In

Additional Considerations

Moving Forward

Additional Resources

New ePUB Book Templates for Pages

Additional Resources

Better Native Photo Blends

The Basics

Image Adjustments

Re-Mastered to Remix

A New Foundation

Constructive Authoring: 101

Moving Forward

Calais Brush-Up

The Steps

Easy Callout Contrast Charts

The Basics

Alternate Method: Flat Neutralization

Additional Thoughts

The Gang's All Here^*