Jumsoft Theme Pack Set of seven new Themes for Keynote
Page Five: New Themes

With the release of Version two of this Theme pack, Jumsoft added 3 new themes. We'll take a quick look at them and see if they add any value to the set.

Black Table
This new theme has potential. The dice bullets are a nice touch, and I could see this used in a poker or gaming presentation, but this theme has the same problem that many of the themes in this set have: the contrast is just not strong enough. A light background with dark text, or a dark background with light text is a good choice, but this theme washes out on light text, and isn't light enough for dark text. This theme just left me wanting something more.

One other issue with this theme is the Apple leftovers. If you move the background image from the non-photo cutout pages, you'll see the Pushpin background still present as the default background. I'm not sure why Jumsoft did this, but I hope they fix it in their next release.

Geography
At first glance I liked the background of this theme, but I wasn't sure it was actually practical for a presentation. Georgraphy suffers from some of the same things that Black Table and the other themes suffer from. The contrast can be less than snappy, and the font isn't exactly a stunning choice. I found the default bullet font size to be MUCH too small for any use. This theme also containes pieces of the Pushpin.

All that said, I started building a fake presentation and found this theme actually works pretty well with a little tweaking. Here's a title slide using an image from Hemera Photo objects. I will be posting a tutorial on making photos that burst out of a photo hole, so I won't go into how I did that effect in this review. The slide is too small to see the shadow behind the title text, you can see it on the full sized slide:

Now here are two slides, a before and after. Here's the slide using my airplane image and the default slide settings:

Pretty hard to read the bullets, and well, it's boring. Now here's the same slide after I messed with the font and bullet sizes, changed the shadow and the font, and then changed the slide background to a blue gradient that shows through the photo cutout.

Honestly, it doesn't look too bad, but more work than you should have to do considering these themes aren't free.

Grass
Grass? Heh, I half expected this one to come with Golf ball bullets, but no, you get a weird white splat looking thing instead. I don't have much to say about this one. Again, it's got pieces of Pushpin left in there. I suppose you could use this for golf or lawn service presentations, but I am trying to figure out why there appears to be a killer yellow STAIN on the slides!

Here's a slide i created using more images from Hemera Photo Objects, but you can still see that stain in the bottom right corner. Not something I would want on MY golf green:

The default font in this theme was Helvetica, and again, there was the Pushpin background. Also, several of the photo cutouts had the background slightly shifted, enough that when you switch quickly between a photo cutout slide and a bulleted slide you can see the background shift a few pixels.

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