Video tutorial on how to use the Expert Edition of the Proposal Pack Wizard to do a complete visual design customization of any Proposal Pack by swapping out the background photographs and images with your own, changing the color scheme to match and changing the font styles in the document text.
Watch this related video: Adding Your Logo and Matching Color Scheme
In this video we're going to demonstrate how to do a custom photo replacement of the graphics in a Proposal Pack design theme that's designed with photographs embedded in the Title Page and Back Page. We'll illustrate this video using the Architecture #3 Proposal Pack. Now we'll start with generating a stock proposal and then we'll show how to completely change out the design theme in the photographs.
Now, we've set up a project already ahead of time. We've selected a number of templates including the front Title Page, the Back Page and we're going to generate a stock document in the Architecture #3 design theme. Okay, now the document has been generated and if we take a look at it you'll see it has the Architecture #3 brown logo design and color scheme.
And these are the photographs we're going to replace. There were actually three images. If you double click into the header you can see you can actually select these as objects and we've created frames behind them using shape objects.
And we'll also show how the colors of these can be changed through the Wizard as well. Now for doing graphic and color and font changes to a design theme, Word is a word processor and it can do certain operations on shape objects and different operations on graphics. So we'll show how to apply a number of changes to completely redesign this design theme.
Now these changes will apply to all of our hundreds of Proposal Packs. Lots of our Proposal Packs are designed with photos in the backgrounds. Others have a single photo in the background.
Others will have a line art graphic in the background. The process of doing a complete design change is the same no matter what design theme you use and what it visually looks like. Underneath it's all a set of shapes and pictures.
And you can see on the Back Page where this isn't a photograph however it is a graphic image. So graphic images can be photos, they can be line art. It's all the same.
Now this just happens to be a PNG graphic that has transparency so that the underlying shape object colors will show through. Now the first thing we'll do is we need to find where all the graphics are that we're going to be changing. And we'll do that by looking in the folder on your hard drive where the graphics are kept.
So by default your install will probably on the C: drive in the ProposalKit/ProposalPack folder and then whatever Proposal Pack you've purchased you'll find a folder with that name and version number on it. So since we're using the Proposal Pack Architecture #3 we'll see we have an Architecture_3_v## folder. We go into the Graphics subfolder.
Now original artwork graphics will be in the EPS and PSD graphics files. If you use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator you might find these are easier to work with for customizing. The versions that are embedded into the documents will be in the PNG graphics folder and they'll be a combination of PNG format files and/or JPEG files.
So you'll see that the photographs we are going to be swapping out from this design theme are in this folder and they're titled TPImage1, TPImage2, and TPImage3. Other graphics that we're going to replace are called Watermark–Body Watermark–Title, Watermark–BackPage, the Accent graphic the BulletPoint, the Letterhead and we will create one version of all these other graphics. And I'll show how to do that next.
So every design theme will use the same scheme for titling the graphics. To illustrate, let's say we're looking at the Transportation #7 design theme and you'll see a similar set of graphics. And in this case there's only two photographs and they're full–page whereas in the Architecture #3 design they are smaller images and multiple images are embedded in the Title Page.
But you'll see that Watermark–BackPage. jpg and Watermark–BackPage. png the file names are the same.
The formats are different but the usage is identical. It's a graphic embedded in the Back Page. Watermark–Title.jpg here and Watermark–Title. png the same thing. Two graphics that are embedded in the Title Page.
Another design theme using only line art graphics as an example let's say Wireless #3 you'll see it has the same graphics. Here these images are not photographs this time but they are just line art graphics so the process of no matter what Proposal Pack design theme you have you'll be finding the same set of graphics with the same name, same Accent, Bullet, Watermark–Title, Watermark–BackPage, Watermark–Body and so on. You'll make your own versions of those graphics.
Now how do you get the Wizard to import these is there is a folder in the Wizard software called MyGraphics. On your computer will probably be the C: drive ProposalKit folder ProposalPack folder, then the MyGraphics sub folder. All you have to do is create your own versions of the graphics from that design theme and put them in this folder with the correct file names and the Wizard will do the rest to import them into the document when it generates the documents.
Now there are some example folders in here so you can see example sets of graphics that you can use as models. For illustration purposes ahead of time we've created a custom set of graphics. So in our fictional example here we have a company called Anderson Architecture.
They like the Proposal Pack design theme but they have their own logo they want to use and they have their own color scheme. So how do you get your look into the documents. Alright, so what we've done is we've created a custom set of graphics that will replace the versions in this Proposal Pack design theme so you can see Accent.png. This company example is using a triangular–shaped logo. The blue color scheme instead of this brown square design theme.
So we've created an Accent. png, a Bullet. pgn, a Letterhead and we've created a MyLogo–PageHeader that's going to be the graphic that gets inserted into the header of every body page in front of the chapter titles.
The MyLogo–TitlePage – that is similar to all of these named graphics and it's going to get inserted into the Title Page and then the TPImage1, TPImage2 and TPImage3 are just the replacement versions for the stock photographs. And then since this is an architectural company and they like the design, just not the exact colors and graphics they've decided to keep the Watermark–BackPage architectural diagram images. But what we've done is just simply applied a blue color scheme using Adobe Photoshop instead of the brown color scheme.
So you will have to do some graphics work in a graphics editor such as Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. So on to create your custom graphics based on your own logo or your own pictures one important thing with swapping out photographs in a design theme like this is you want to get the DPI exactly the same which is usually a 150dpi in our graphics and the dimensions identical. So you'll see we've created our own TPImage1, TPImage2 and TPImage3 that are the exact same size as the ones we're going to be replacing.
Okay, now how do we get the Wizard to insert all of our custom graphics into the document that's generated. Now that we've created the files all we have to do is move our set of custom graphics we've created and we will put them into the MyGraphics folder in the Wizard. That is all there is to it.
So now we can go back into the Wizard and we're going to recreate that document. And how we do that, and this is an iterative process where as you make design changes you can keep going back into the same project remove the files it created by it unchecking this Locked for Editing box and click the Delete Old Files. That will delete all the files it generated and when we save the project here that's going to recreate the document applying all the new changes.
In this case the only changes that'll be applying are going to be importing that set of graphics. Okay, now that we've generated the new document we'll take a look at it and we'll see that the graphics have been applied. So now you'll see that our custom blue version of the diagram has been imported, the custom logo, the three custom photographs have been overlaid, the custom logo in the chapter header.
Now you might notice the colors don't match. Custom footer logo, custom bullet points, the watermark body graphic in the background there and the letterhead graphic and the back page watermark. So all the graphics were replaced correctly but obviously we need to change the color scheme now.
So how do you do that? Now Word can change all the colors in the rest of the document since all the rest of the document are shaped objects table–cell colors and so on. So how do we do that? We go into the Document Styles button, and there'll be other videos that go into color schemes and font changes. We'll just do a complete graphic and color and font update in this video just to show everything in addition to the photos.
So we'll go into Edit Style and we want to go to the Colors tab. So you'll see the Architecture #3 design theme has this brown color scheme. Every single Proposal Pack has a different color scheme and you'll find it in this colors tab.
And you want to pay attention to light, medium and dark colors and replace the colors with something in a similar lightness. That's because different shape objects, table cells and so on are designed to work with colors of a contrasting color so that you can read everything. So we've come up with a color scheme using the exact colors in this Anderson Architecture logo and we'll just set those here.
And you can get to your RGB colors using say Photoshop or Paint and pulling up the eye drop tool and getting the exact RGB color values. And there are other videos that show how to do that if you don't know how to use Photoshop or a Paint program to get exact colors. Okay, now our color scheme is all shades of blue.
Now you might want to also make some typography changes. By default all the Proposal Pack templates use Times New Roman and Arial or Arial Black font types because everybody will have those font types on their computer. Whereas you can change the font types to any font types you have installed on your computer.
Since Proposal Kit doesn't provide font styles you will have to have the font styles installed on your computer ahead of time. So if you go into the Preferences click the Data and Display tab, the Font Styles tab. Proposal Kit has a large number of font types predefined that we've applied to all the text in all the templates.
This is a quick way for you to be able to customize the font types just by making modifications to a font style or a Word style instead of individually selecting text everywhere in the document and having to change the font types. If you want to see a sample of what the typography will look like and the colors you just click this button and this is what all the font types throughout the document will look like. Body text is going to be Times New Roman, headers sub headers will be Arial and Arial Black.
Well let's give it a cleaner more updated look. And instead of having to individually change every single one of these we will use the Mass Font Name Change. We only have three font types to find across all of our Proposal Kit styles so everything in Times New Roman we'll make Open Sans.
Open Sans is a common font type used currently and you can probably even download a free copy of it somewhere. Now you'll see that changed 14 different Proposal Kit font styles. Now everything in Arial Black these are going to be your main headers.
Let's change that to a bold version of Open Sans. That changed seven font types and everything in Arial these will be like sub headers. So change this to an Open Sans Semi Bold.
Now if you want to see what this looks like click this button again. These are now Open Sans versions of fonts and look a little cleaner than Times New Roman and Ariel. Okay, now that we have our customizations set, note also if you make changes to the typography it may actually change the sizes of text and the documents might require you to have to reformat or enlarge shape objects to fit and so on.
So you might have to do a little bit of reformatting. Okay, now we've made our color changes, our graphics changes, our font changes. We're going to rebuild our test project and you can just keep iteratively going through making customizations, going back into this test project, deleting the files, rebuilding the documents until you get all your settings just right to be able to start creating your actual working documents.
All right, now it's generated the document again. Take a look at it you'll see now the typography has changed to Open Sans instead of Times New Roman. But also the expanded size of an 11–point Open Sans versus an 11–point Times New Roman just pushed the text down a little bit.
Now you'll see the blue color scheme applied to the background and to the font types and all the font types changed to Open Sans. You'll see our color scheme applied to these frame shapes. And now everything actually looks a lot better.
This is another example of the Open Sans font type being a little larger so we can just expand some of these shape objects if we need to. And you'll see the color scheme applied to the sidebar shape, the background shape and so on. And the color scheme applied to all the table colors and our back page, the color scheme applied to the shape objects and so on.
So that is a complete color graphic and font type customization by just making changes in a couple screens and creating a handful of graphics. And this will work for every Proposal Pack design theme. As an example we'll go back to this Transportation #7.
We'll pull up one of these stock templates you can see it has shape objects in the background that can be customized with the color scheme the same way the color scheme was applied here. It has one single photograph in the entire background so that's an easier swap if you can just create an 8. 5 x 11 inch graphic that has room for some shapes to be overlaid on top of it.
And every Proposal Pack will have the same basic scheme of some shape objects or graphics in the same or similar places in every page. They just look different. Again this Back Page has a full–size photograph in the background whereas in the Architecture #3 design theme it's a smaller PNG graphic with transparency.
But as far as the software is concerned they're both just graphics. And that is all there is to doing custom graphic and photo changes.
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