I don’t know about you, but I generally approach anything with the word REMIX (sometimes spelled in large friendly type) with a bit of trepidation. Especially if it’s something that I hold near and dear (say, for example, Devo’s Whip It or Seals & Crofts’ Summer Dream). I always think about whether or not a thing can be redone yet still maintain the same special thing that made the thing what the thing was in the first place.

Sometimes, if it’s something I wasn’t particularly fond of, then it becomes more of a curiosity to see if the new one moves me in a way the prior version didn’t. In the case of this interesting approach to Walk Like an Egyptian, it ended up being a bit better for me. All in all, though, you never know what you’re going to get until you click that link.

Whether you’re wary or feeling curious ambivalence, if you’re using Keynote and looking for some cool shapes, this is the place for you. As with my previous post, this is basically a file full o’ shapes that can be used as design elements in Keynote. The earlier version of this file had a hidden problem which didn’t reveal itself until iWork ‘06’s Make Editable command... it suffered from StraightSegmentitis. This was caused by the old way I created the shapes.

As a result of the process, if you Make Editable on the old shapes you’ll end up with a whole lotta points. If you thought you would just make it editable and, say, remove one axis of an asterisk, you had a LOT of work ahead of you. Click. Delete. Click. Delete. Click. Delete. OR, worse yet, Shift, Click, Click, Click, Click, Click, Click, Click.. oops! You missed a point and just deselected all the points you meant to delete!

Click. Delete. Click. Delete. Believe me, I know your pain because I went through the same exact thing in fixing this file.

Now, curves are properly curved and removing an entire section of an object is just a few clicks away.

Take an object, remove a few points, move some of the remaining points around and create a unique design element. Oh, while you’re moving those points, you may notice that Keynote (and Pages and iWeb) helpfully snaps you to a nearby point. If you don’t want to snap, just hold down Command while you’re dragging for full freedom.

For the reasonably observant, you may have noticed that I left the “stars” objects out of this collection. This is because Keynote 3 includes a very flexible Star creation tool that even allows you to edit the number of points AFTER you draw it so you’ve got gobs of star power under the hood without needing me to give you more.