After some design trends like Flat-design and Boxed-tiles we have a newcomer which is a bit more elegant. The circle design is seen on more websites now a days and got a boost of popularity thanks to the Android phone OS adopting her with the use of profile pictures.
In this post I'll describe how you can easily create your own perfectly round pictures with the help of PowerPoint.
So why this tutorial
You can just convert a picture to circle with the quick picture styles, so why all of this?
Besides the fact that people don't take the time to remove the shadow or the border the main issue will be the size of the picture. A perfect circle is created from a perfect square! Only most pictures are not square. So what do we do, we resize or crop them and here's where we mess up.
So how do we do it?
Even that picture styles are quick and dirty this method will be perfect and dirty. You can use the same method for text with a picture background or any other creative idea.
Add your picture to the slide and then add a circle shape on top. If you hold the shift key while dragging the shape size the circle will stay perfectly round.
Remove the inside fill from the circle that you only have the border left. The color is unimportant as we will not see it later.
When you select both objects by holding the shift or ctrl key two new tabs will appear in the ribbon. Select the Drawing Tools tab.
At the beginning of the Drawing Tools tab we see a button called Merge Shapes and a little pulldown arrow. Click the pulldown arrow and select Fragment.
Now we'll see the border color of the circle changed to white and if we select the circle we can separate it from the rest of the picture.
That's it, now we can copy and paste it to where ever we want and resize it. So no more long faces or people who look like the gained an extra pound or 20.
Hold on
But what if we want to save the circle image as a separate file?
Ok, unfortunately I don't know a way to do it directly from PowerPoint as it will turn the whole slide in to an image with a white background. But we can copy the picture to Word and save the word document as a html website.
It will create a *.htm file and a corresponding folder in which he puts the images. Just copy out the images you want and delete the rest.
The down side from this last trick is that you will lose the transparency and the background of the circle will become white. If you will try to remove the background with the Word picture tools it works but you will probably lose some of the perfect picture pixels.
Anyways it's still a great trick.