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Add-ins
Style Workshop
Reviewed by Geetesh
Bajaj, June 23 2004
Introduction
About Style Workshop
Why Style Workshop?
Using Style Workshop
Elements in PowerPoint
Pricing and Support
Conclusion
Introduction
Everyone wants their PowerPoint presentations to look different.
And so do you - but where do you start? With a template? That's
part of the answer - but you also need color coordinated buttons,
icons and bullets - and nice visuals that match the look and feel
of your presentation. That's where Style Workshop comes into the
picture...
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About Style Workshop
Style Workshop is from Indigo Rose, the same company that creates
Autoplay Media Studio, Setup Factory and other products.
My contact at Indigo Rose for this review was Colin Adams, who
heads Indigo Rose - I wish to thank him for responding incessantly
to all my questions. You can learn more about Style Workshop and
other products at the Indigo
Rose site...
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Why Style Workshop?
I asked Colin about what motivated them
to create Style Workshop - here is his response:
"As for our motivation, we created Style Workshop to fill
the need for high-quality image components that could be used with
PowerPoint and other multimedia and presentation packages. While
there are a lot of companies selling stock templates for PowerPoint,
Style Workshop takes an unique approach. Rather than being plain
old background images like other products, Style Workshop is a
collection of interchangeable color-coordinated image elements.
You get over 125,000 bullets, bars, buttons, panels, abstract backgrounds
and other building blocks. You can easily drop them into PowerPoint
presentations and arrange them to complement your message. The
best part though is that they're provided in the new 32-bit PNG
format, which gives you impressive shadow effects, transparent
regions and seamless overlapping of elements. In effect, you're
not limited to working with rectangular areas, which is a real
limitation of other libraries. Style Workshop was created to give
your presentations a competitive edge!"
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Using Style Workshop
Using Style Workshop is different than using a PowerPoint template
- in fact, I'd rather call Style Workshop a collection of coordinated
design elements that actually go much further than a basic template.
Having said that, this sort of freedom and minute control means
that Style Workshop offers no one-click makeover for your PowerPoint
presentation.
The entire Style Workshop collection comprises five CDs - each
CD contains over 2800 photographs, 3500 buttons, 700 backgrounds,
1050 template-style backdrops, 3500 page panels, 3500 icons, 3500
bars and 3500 bullets. All five put together, it is an enormous
collection of style elements.
To use any of these elements, you first need
to choose them from within Style Workshop, a contained application
that runs straight off the CD. You'll find several tabs within
this browser-style application, but you need to open the Media
Browser tab to preview and save all style elements (see screenshot).
There are nice
tutorials on the Style Workshop site that show how you can
organize your content within the media browser and use it in
various applications including PowerPoint.
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Elements in PowerPoint
Look at this screenshot:
The blue background is a Style Workshop background - on the left
are five color coordinated images from the same Style Workshop
CD. You'll also find a blue vertical bar and a grey panel within
the slide. Finally, I've created an organization chart from the
buttons - this gives a sophisticated look that's different from
a conventional organization chart.
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Pricing and Support
There are five Style Workshop CDs - each CD is based on a different
theme. Individual CDs cost US$59, while the entire 5 volume collections
costs US$199.
A free trial version of Style Workshop that contains 180 images
from the entire collection of over 129,000 images is available
for you to test the product. Here's
a link to the download page...
Colin provided more info about support:
"We provide free technical support for Style Workshop though
our online support center at http://support.indigorose.com.
Additionally, free tutorial videos are provided on the Style Workshop
website at http://www.styleworkshop.com/site/tutorial.php.
The video tutorials show you how to use the Style Workshop image
elements with a variety of presentation and design packages, including
Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Flash, AutoPlay
Media Studio and about ten other applications."
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Conclusion
For what it does at its price point, Style Workshop is a good
investment. It is important that you remember that you cannot just
open Style Workshop and get it working within PowerPoint - you'll
need to choose the style elements you need and then get them into
PowerPoint or any other application. That in itself is a good thing
since you have the freedom of choosing and mixing your own style
elements and creating a design that entirely individual.
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