Alternative to Keynote to design great slides?

Question

What software are designers using to create great presentation slides?

E.g.

• Adding (configurable) drop shadows on text
• Creating custom slide backgrounds, e.g radial gradients
• Adding noise or patterns to fills

Do people create their slides in Photoshop? Is it not a huge pain?

Answer 1

If you are familiar with HTMl markup consider using reveal.js.

It's an slideshow/presentation in the browser.

http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/

Answer 2

I would imagine that there is more than one way to skin a cat here. But yeah, you can use Photoshop. You can export the elements and use Keynote/PowerPoint to wrap it all up, or you can merge all of your slides into a single PDF and present that in fullscreen. Depending on how formal you need to be, QuickLook isn't so bad either.

Answer 3

I like using Inkscape to full creative control over text, decorative shapes, images etc which I save as .pdf, or as .png which I convert to a .pdf with some other utility. But I'm unusual - practically all the people I've worked with use Microsoft Windows and PowerPoint. But PP does not allow arbitrary placement of text, shapes etc. It's good for people with limited graphics design skills, such as scientists, managers.