 If you want to know the easy way to make some great looking icons for your stream deck, then this video is for you. Hello and welcome to Take One Tech. My name is Alec. So if you're watching this video, it's probably because you've already got a stream deck and so you're looking to add some nice looking icons to your stream deck screen. It's often the case that, you know, people have got this wonderful device that can do so much and you can program it to do all sorts of things. But if you haven't necessarily got the graphic skills to make those icons, then you can often tend to, you know, download sporadic images from this site and that site and so you don't get that sort of consistent look and feel to your stream deck. Well, I'm going to show you the easy way that you can do that now on your Mac. Now just for those that don't know what the stream deck is, I'll link to a full video explainer up in the top corner of exactly, you know, what a stream deck is and how you can use it. But just to give you a bit of an idea quickly, I shall flick over to mine now because the stream deck is actually what I'm using for switching between all of my scenes in Ecam Live. I've done a video all about that as well, so I'll leave one of those in the top corner if I point to the right one. And so yeah, here basically it is just a device that is a got a series of keys on it. So slightly bigger than keyboard keys actually. But each key itself is in itself an individual screen. And that means that you can change the images that are on each screen so that it matches the the use case that you have for the button. So here you can see my main scene. I've got my sharing my desktop screen here. This is my mobile phone view. I've got my presenter view and flicking sides and various other different things in here. I've got this one as well, which is handy when I press that it brings up this thing, which is a good time to mention not to forget to go and like this video if you're liking what you're watching and subscribe to the channel if you want to see more content like this. So all of this is activated from the stream deck. But how do we make these pretty looking icons? Well, it's very simple. And as is often the case, I turn to Keynote. It seems like Keynote has a lot of other features outside of its main role as a presentation software. I use it to make all the overlays and things like that that I use in Ecam Live. So I'll link to a video I did all about that in the top corner as well. But we're going to use it now to create these icons and it's actually really powerful for doing this. So let me just flick over to my screen sharing now and I'll show you the way we're going to do that. So I've got Keynote open and it's going to ask us to select a theme. Well, we're just going to use a blank one. And then we've got a couple of options here as to whether we use wide screen or the standard screen. So you would think that those are the two options. But as you will see, we can be a little bit cleverer and get exactly what we want out of it. So it doesn't really matter which of those we select because I am going to go and change that afterwards. So now it's going to open up a blank page. So let's just get rid of that. And then what we want to do is go over to here and we'll go to the document setup. And then we want to come down to this section just around here where it says slide size. So again, you can see the two options we've got there are either standard 4 to 3 ratio or 16 to 9 wide screen. Well, we want to click on this custom slide size. And this allows us to make the slides absolutely any size we want. Now the icons for the stream deck, they basically are square. So we want a square size and we don't need to be too big with the resolution of it because it's only a small screen. And so let's set that for example 600 by 600 pixels. It's probably a bit on the large side really, but it doesn't matter. These aren't going to be big files. So let's set that as 600 by 600. And now if I zoom out, we've got ourselves a nice little square, which is our canvas that we're going to use to build out our icons. Now the background color, this would be a good time to decide on what sort of colors we want for our background. But we're not going to change it in the slide itself. Rather, we're going to come over here to this format. And then instead of changing the background, which is what you would do here for the individual slide, we're actually going into the slide master. So let's edit the slide master. And what we could do, if we wanted to be really clever about it, is we could just delete all of these different master slides. So I'm just going to go in and delete all of these. You don't absolutely have to do this, but it just is going to make things a lot easier to see as you will find out a little bit later. So if I just delete all of these, unfortunately, you can't highlight them all in a master slide and just delete all of them together. But never mind. I'll go through and do it this way. So let's say that we want to have buttons of various different colors. Well, we can do that in here, because we can change now that we're in the master slide editor. And you'll notice you can see that we're in that because down at the bottom it said edit slide master. So we're still in that one there. And so now I'm going to change the color fill. And I'm going to change it to a red color. And then let me just duplicate this one. And we can change the background color of that one to purple. And as you can see where this is going, we're going to create a number. Whoops, Daisy, I didn't want to delete that one. I wanted to duplicate it. And then let's change this one to orange. So we're creating a series of different backgrounds. And obviously you can create these in whatever color you want to match the different colors that you use. And you might want to have them all the same color, or you might have different color coded things for different tasks that you're going to use them for. But there we go, we've got four different potential button colors. And incidentally, instead of just filling them a plain color, you can also go into here. And instead of color fill, you could change it to gradient fill. And so that would then fill it as a gradient. And you can change down here, the colors that you're fading from and to, or if you want to get really clever about it, you can do advanced gradient fill. And that basically allows you to blend from one color to another, from here to here, or you can just double click and add in another one. So if we wanted, we could fade from blue to pull my color picker back across to red and back to blue again. I mean, that looks pretty atrocious, really, doesn't it? But you get the idea, you can play around with that, you can change the angle of the fill and all sorts. So it's just done in this background color. You could also drop an image in there if you wanted an image for the background. But these are just all basically the backgrounds that we're going to be using for our buttons. So now we'll click done. And now we've got by default, one slide in here. So what we were looking at before with the sort of master slides, the main sort of backgrounds that we're going to be using. And then if any time we want to add in a new slide, we would just or a new button, we would just click here, add slide, and you can see it lets us choose between the ones that we've set up. And that's why it was quite good to delete all of those ones that we didn't use with titles and things like that, because all we want to be able to see is when we want a new button, what is the background? And it just makes it very clear for us to pick the one that we want. So let's say we wanted a purple one in here next. Right, well, we've got that now. It's some backgrounds for our buttons. But how about the actual buttons themselves? How are we going to make those? Well, that's another good thing about keynote is if you come up to the top here, you'll see that we can go to this little function called insert. This here, this add shape, and you click on that one. And now you can see we've got some shapes so we could make a square. Say we were having a play button, we're going to use this to play our music on our stream deck or control our music from our stream deck. We can click here. And by the way, you can scroll to you can drag these from the corners to resize them. But if you want to rotate them, if you just hold down the command key while you're hovering over the corner, can you see how that changes from and sort of expand? Let me see if I can highlight that. No, it didn't highlight the cursor. But yeah, you can either drag it like that. But if I hold down command, then I could rotate it. So in that way, we've got ourself now, maybe that could be a play button, for example. And if I go over to the color fill, I could change that to white or whatever color we wanted. And there we go, we've got the symbol of a play button. So let me come over to this other slide here. And I'll go back up to the shapes at the top. The thing about Keynote is, and you've also got this in PowerPoint, by the way, what I'm explaining here, you could equally do in PowerPoint, I just find that keynote is a lot easier to just work around and get things done quite quickly. But you can see, you've got all these other shapes, and you've actually got a whole load of other shapes that are, you know, far from simple shapes. So let's say we wanted volume, we've got a thing for that, and you can search, and it will find things that are similar as well. So we can just click on the volume. So now if we want the volume, we could have that as a volume up and change that color to whatever color we wanted. And incidentally, as well as the fill, you can change the color, you can do the gradients and things like that that we could before. So if you want to get a bit more fancy with it, you can do that as well. Or if we want to have a line through it, maybe we want to have like a mute button. So we could click in here again. Let's go back to our shapes. And then let's go up to the top, clear that little search there, go right back up to the top, and we'll just put a line in. So now we've got a line there that we can select. So Daisy, I'm selecting the wrong one. It's a bit of a thin line at the moment, but we can go over to these controls. Bear in mind, I'm just in this thing here, format. So anything you want to do to change the colors or the shapes or the sizes or things like that, and the exact precise positions as well, you do that in this format. And then in the style tab, so you can see now I've got the line style and also the line thickness. So I could make that a lot larger. So there we go. I could make that into a line through that speaker. So we've just made ourself a simple sort of mute symbol. But there really are a lot of different shapes in there, and you'll be surprised at what you can find. And so if you're thinking about the sort of uses for all your buttons, then there's probably something in there that is, you know, can at least show you what the button is for. But of course, failing that, if you can't find exactly what you're looking for in there, then you can simply just add some text in and you could write on the buttons as well. So let me just create another few just to quickly show you another great thing about doing it in Keynote. We've got that horrible background there. So let me go back into shape again. Not quite sure what we'd be doing with this particular button, but there you go. Oh, incidentally, if you hold in the corner and you move in and out, it scales it that way, like with one corner staying where it is, and the other corner moving out. But if you press the alt key or the option key when you do it, can you see how it scales out but keeps the center in the same place? And often when you put these icons in your, from the sort of icon picker, then they will just appear in the center. So it's easy to just grab the corner and move them out. But also notice that as I move it around, when it gets to the center vertically, you get that little yellow line. And when you move it down, you get another yellow line, which marks that it's centralized. So there you can see it's in the center of the picture. And there we go. Again, not quite sure why we'd have a button with that particular image on it, but I'm just picking some out at random here. So there we go, perhaps something like that. Who knows? The point that I want to show you is when it comes to actually, you know, how do we get these out from here and use them on our stream deck? Well, now we've got five icons. And it's really simple, we just do file and then go down to the export. And we want to export those as images. And once we do that, it doesn't really matter whether we choose the JPEG or PNG, because we're just going to be using them as buttons and it will accept both of those. We've got all slides selected. If you did just want to export a new batch of buttons, you maybe got more in there that you'd already made more icons. Then you could select the specific numbers. You can see how they're all numbered down the side. But we're going to export them all. And then what we'll do is we'll just click next. And it'll ask where we want to save that. So we'll just save this to our desktop, to our desktop like that. And then we can just call these icons. And then what that has done now is it's given us a nice little folder on our desktop or wherever we saved it. And it's right over on another monitor. But I shall open this up and you'll see what it's done. So although we've exported this as a presentation, what it has done is it has dropped these icons in a nice little folder, all individual files. And what that means is that if I was to go to my stream deck, and here we go, I've got my stream deck here. So this is just so that you can see this is exactly the same replicating what you can see in my actual stream deck. So if I go to my top down camera, you can see it's pretty similar, not pretty similar. It's identical in fact. So this is a representation of the stream deck. And here you can see I can change the icon. So if I wanted to change, let me just change this number five and say I wanted that to have, I wanted that to be that little alien head. Why not? I'll drag that one in there. And now if I go over onto my top down camera again, there you go, you see it's appeared in there. That is how easy it is to create icons in keynote. And as you can see, by doing them in keynote, if I just go back there again, you can see that it is easy to create these and you can get this consistent look and feel. And if you actually really wanted to get them that little bit tighter, what you can do is come down to this view menu as well and click on this show rulers or click command R is the shortcut. And that gives you these rulers along the top and down the side. And then if you just hold into one of these, this ruler area and drag down holding the mouse button, then you can drag down these sort of guides. And so you could maybe put, oops, it is easy, you could maybe drag some guides over and put guides on either side. And then that way you've got this space in the middle and you could just size everything to fit into this area. And then that would really have all of your icons looking like they were sized the same. And yeah, just to have that consistent look and feel really. So I hope you found this useful. If you have found it useful once again, don't forget to click that like button down below and subscribe to the channel because I'll be making lots more videos about how to use keynote and Stream Deck and Ecamm live all together. And so yeah, you'll get notified whenever I do if you click that notifications bell as well. That's all for this video, but don't go anywhere. We've got plenty more coming up in the videos just to the right.