Displaying tweets in Keynote

Every so often, I want to use a tweet in some slides I’m making (I have three in my PyCon UK slides for Friday). If I’m doing this, I want to make it clear that the text I’m using is a tweet, not just a generic quote. Tweets have quite a distinct visual style, and give a very clear way to find the original author.

Twitter gives you an “Embed Tweet” button for using on web pages, but I’m not sure if you can use this in Keynote or PowerPoint — and given it has to make a network call to display the tweet properly, do you want to rely on it in a presentation?

Screenshots are better, but still not ideal — you lose the text, so your presentation becomes less accessible. You can also get fuzzy text if you have to resize the tweet or took a small screenshot.

Far better to draw it using your app’s drawing tools as a static image, which is exactly what I do in Keynote. Then the text is directly embedded (more accessible), and text always looks nice and crisp. This is what the effect looks like, with a single tweet per slide (more than one gets distracting):

It’s on the small side for text on a slide, but I’ve found it to work well if deployed sparingly.

If you’d like to use these templates, I’ve uploaded the Keynote file that has both these slides, and templates for creating more. It will probably work in PowerPoint, although I don’t have a copy of PowerPoint to test with.

Enjoy!