I’m in the process of setting up another site, Trailing Eudora, and the way I have it set up requires that I apply a thumbnail image to each post.  That stumped me a little because the right image can be trouble to find or create.  Then of course there’s the issue of whether or not the image is actually legally or ethically available to post once it’s been found.  Plus, though I do appreciate the use of images in blog posts, I don’t feel the need to always have one every single time.  Sometimes I’d rather have just a colorful text box with a short excerpt from my post calling attention to it rather than a photograph, I told myself as I contemplated the how of coming up with a thumbnail image for every single post.  That’s when it struck me that the easiest way in the world to create a colorful text box that can be posted to a blog as an image is to make it as a slide in PowerPoint or Keynote.  From either program, an individual slide can be exported as a jpg image.

Easy peasy.  Problem solved.

And the same technique can be applied to adding text-based images to flyers or other documents as well.  Sometimes the easy answer is really the best one.