Presentation Backgrounds

by Roy Winkelman

This resource dates back to 2004 making it fairly ancient in Internet Time. That’s when I started creating Presentations ETC, a website of resources that students and teachers could freely use to individualize their Powerpoint or Keynote presentations. At that time, I was visiting many classrooms around Florida and had far too often been treated to a dreary series of cookie-cutter student presentations all using the same Powerpoint template. Sure, businesses could buy packages of additional templates and backgrounds, but those weren’t generally available to students in classrooms. That realization led to the creation of the Presentations ETC website.

Looking back nearly two decades later, I’ll admit that the collection of 20,000 backgrounds isn’t great art by any means, but at least it offers images that haven’t been used to death, and it’s completely free and safe for students and teachers to use. It’s certainly worth a quick look.

As you browse through the background collection, you’ll find both solid backgrounds and those with cut-out shapes. The solid backgrounds, of course, are to be used as the back layer on a slide. The “backgrounds” with cut-outs, however, are used in front of other images, which then show through the cut-out shapes like so:

Most of the sets of cut-out backgrounds have the following shapes available:

If you look carefully at the sample set of cut-out slides, you’ll see that some of them were designed to work especially well with either horizontal or vertical “push” or “cube” transitions. That way, you can use a particularly wide (or tall) image across several slides. For example:

And, finally, here are just a few more examples of backgrounds from the collection:

Additional Collections from the Presentations ETC Website