SlideMagic Blog

The past few weeks have been rough for me as I am dealing with the loss of my brother in law, Ethan Naschitz. After tweets like this one, I got some heart warming comments/questions to see whether I was OK. I can tell you I am (given the circumstances), and the Tweet is actually less morbid than it sounds. Part of daily life in Israel.

Building on this, I had to go through the interesting experience of actually designing a gravestone for Ethan. It is surprising to see that a whole industry is built around the loss of people, including graphics designers that specialize in this type of design. Some guide lines that I hope you will never have to use:

• Less is more. A stone filled with white space looks much more beautiful. Cut as many details as you can, focusing all the attention to the name and maybe just years of birth and death. It is always tempting to put quotes, descriptions, details, but would your relative have liked them? Would you still like them in 10 years? Would visitors appreciate them in 2,000 years? Cut your font size. If you really would like to put in details, consider adding a “foot note” in small font at the bottom. From a distance the text will blur, when standing close, it can be read.
• Get rid of symmetry. 99% of stones are centered, why? Why not left centered, bottom aligned?
• Very important: pick a good font, the standard fonts available are usually poor. “Can you do Helvetica Neue?” gave a blank stare.
• Extra features available at a premium (filling letters with black, covering things in plastic) do not necessarily  improve the look.

Both of these charts contain the exact same data. The second is a lot easier to read, the spectrum of customer choices is neatly laid out, and the colors are picked in sequential order.

Our collective memory has some very powerful images. Photo editing software enables us to manipulate them and use them to communicate a message. “Learn to anticipate” says the ad below with a set of shortened WTC towers and planes happily flying over it. Maybe the ad was meant to be funny. Maybe its intention was to shock people and trigger a discussion of a controversial subject (What Benetton tried to do in the 1990s). A “fail” on both accounts. Be careful with charged visual concepts.

Via Ads of the World.

You probably have noticed as well that it is impossible to capture a wide panorama with a camera. “Look at this sunset over the sea! Where is my camera?!”. The resulting image is often boring and lacks depth, the exact reason why so many stock images of panoramas fail to excite.

The human brain is not restricted by a small 2D screen. It senses distance/3D by blending the slightly different images from both eyes in to one. Eyes never sit still, they constantly move. We are standing at the inside of a gigantic sphere. Eyes compare the size of objects, to assess dimensions.

Handing out 3D goggles to your audience is not an option (at least not today), so the presentation designer has to resort to tricks to create 3D effects.

• Pay attention to camera position (earlier post)
• Put a known object in the image so people can relate the size of the whole to the familiar dimensions of the object (earlier post).
• Or use effects like the one used in the image below. Stitching together multiple photographs to create on large, distorted image that gives the illusion of standing inside a sphere. Your eyes are really running up and down the image, just as you would do when you would stand inside the cathedral for yourself. Huge image by balondrotor here. (Earlier post on a similar but less spectacular version taken in the Notre Dame)

For those interested, the cathedral in question is the one in Coutances, Normandy, 20 km from this year’s holiday home. This majestic old building stands in the middle of the city center that was largely rebuild after the July 1944 battles. It was almost unscathed.

A very interesting analysis of why it is harder to read all caps text on UXMovement. All caps reduces the number of differentiators between words, and hence should only be used in short bites such as titles, logos or lables. I have been ranting about title caps as well before.

OK, sometimes I contradict myself, but all caps worked in this presentation with very few, short sentences.

The umbrella protecting you against falling misfortune is powerful visual concept, albeit maybe even a bit cliche (earlier post in defense of cliches). This Red Cross ad uses it very well. Bigger image here. (Via Frederik Samuel’s blog)

The presentation below is packed with useful and specific suggestions to make you a better presentation designer. By Jesse Desjardins.

STEAL THIS PRESENTATION!

Today is a difficult day as we are about to bring my brother in law to his final resting place. Life is a short period of time in which we are granted the opportunity to make this world a better place. Ethan Naschitz has used his 48 years to the maximum. We will miss him.

A major event like this makes you think about what contributions you can make every day you have on this planet. In its purest form, a presentation is a tool to touch someone’s heart, to make them excited about an idea, to bring positive change, to break with the beaten path.Think about that objective when opening PowerPoint and start designing the slides for your next presentation.

The design of the template should be simple: minimal graphics and logos, maximum screen space (see a previous post here). My favorite is really simple: a nicely designed title page followed by a completely white page for the rest of the deck.

So what does matter? The technical PowerPoint stuff that helps thousands of employees with only a very basic understanding of PowerPoint do the right thing. Before letting the genie out of the bottle and releasing a new template to the whole organization check the following:

• Are the RGB codes of the color scheme coded correctly as standard colors? In 99% of all templates I see, PowerPoint offers the default blue, green, red color options when drawing a shape in a template. Easy to fix.
• Are the drawing guides set up correctly so that people align objects correctly on the page? There should be guides that align with screen graphics, and guides that help users position objects on the screen. (Earlier post here)
• Does the standard blank page pop up correctly when hitting “insert new slide”? Most templates are a bunch of example charts that people can use for inspiration. Nobody uses them, every one clicks “insert new slide” and - if not corrected - gets served the standard Microsoft chart with a big title and a hierarchy of bullets in Calibri font. To fix this, go into view slide master, delete most of the template charts on the left side of the screen and carefully re-design the key blank slide with the correct graphics, colors, and fonts. If you have courage, delete the standard bullet page.
• Are the standard shapes set correctly? Draw a text box, set the font, right click it and set as default shape. Repeat for a shape (rectangle, anything) and focus on the color, the font, the outline, the shadow, etc. Right click and set as standard shape.
• Are custom fonts embedded in the file? (PowerPoint Ninja post)
• Are the page-filling images in title pages and separator pages compressed? If not, a presentation of 2 pages can already take up 5MB in hard disk space. Go into the slide master, select the image, and compress image sizes.
• Are the data charts formats set up correctly? This is a bit more advanced but should really pay off. See an earlier post on fixing issues.

I have joined the legion of designers in criticizing the comic sans font (earlier post here). In this rant (strong language warning), comic sans strikes back at us, elitist Helvetica fans. Written by Mike Lacher, thank you Ellen Daehnick for suggesting it.