SlideMagic Blog

Everyone will agree that this image by Christian Xavier is beautiful and grabs the attention. Why? It is because the implied position of the photographer is impossible, it should be in the middle of the air. We are not used to seeing pictures of the Chrysler building from this perspective. Most pictures of the skyline of New York are taken from the same viewpoint (the roof of the Rockefeller Center for example).

How was this image created? He took a regular New York skyline picture with a good camera and zoomed in, cropping out areas of the picture he does not need.

Two lessons here. The theoretical one of using unexpected perspectives. And two, you can actually use this zoom/crop technique with high resolution stock images to make them more interesting.

Many business presentations contain pages with images of projects: real estate, solar farms, factory installations. Usually, they are small, low resolution, many on a page, and backed up by a dense paragraph of explanation.

To make your presentation look better: do the opposite. Stretch them across the full page, use high res images, use 1 image per page, and set a brief explanation text over the image.

The audience will not notice that you clicked through 7 slides when discussing your project portfolio. For them, it is just one slide.

Another way to show off your portfolio is to use the images throughout the presentation on separator and title pages that mark the beginning of a new section in your story. So, you have 1 image on your portfolio slide with the explanation that is 1 of 35 buildings. The audience gets a sense of the other 34 throughout the presentation without talking directly about them.

Pages with headshots of people are always a pain to design: the names and titles of people can vary greatly in length.

I spotted this neat trick in a promotion email for this book. People with long titles have been moved to the bottom where a 2 line job title does not break the grid. Also, the right column looks a bit wider than the first 2 to me, again creating a bit more breathing space for long names and/or titles.

Now, hopefully your CEO has a short name (she always wants to go first).

I noticed that I am using fewer and fewer stock images in my slides. Not so long ago, almost every slide started as a brain storm about what image concept to use. Not anymore for 2 reasons.

1. Stock images are often cheesy and unnatural and have a very specific style, which makes it hard to mix them with other stock images in the same deck. I also suspect that stock image providers have been adding a lot of content to their databases thereby diluting the quality of the search results.
2. My slide designs are getting simpler and simpler and often I can design them without the need for an image. A simple message written on a slide can be more effective than a slightly forced visual analogy in an image.

Image manipulation software can do a lot, but most of the time it is used over the top. All that technology causes most ads to look worse than those elegant compositions from the 1960s.

First of all there are the clear Photoshop disasters such as this nice composition below (via the PSD blog).

One step up, designers get the technical execution right, but the chosen concept just hurts the eye (via Ads of the World).

Finally, it possible to get it right, but in most cases these compositions are beautiful illustrations rather than image manipulations. The only difference with the 1960s is that the analogue pencil has been replaced with an electronic one (via Ads of the World).

Exporting things as a picture can be cumbersome. File types, resolutions (PowerPoint for Mac is horrible), finding where the file was saved, etc. More and more, I use simple screenshots to the desktop as my picture exporting tool. With the added benefit that I can make find compositions in PowerPoint which I often find easier than booting up Photoshop.

Hey, Compfight is a neat Flickr image search engine.

I just returned from a camping and hiking trip in Israel’s southern desert (the Negev) and came home with some beautiful pictures.

It is very hard to capture the sheer size of a landscape in a photo, and one trick to do this is the make sure to have an object in your frame that the viewer knows the size of. In the example below you see that the perspective greatly diminishes when I Photoshop my friends out.

The same is true with data in presentations. Putting the stunning image with the word “53 million” on it does not put the size of the number in perspective. Relate it to something instead.

What is clear to you is hardly ever clear to everyone in the audience. A screen shot with a cleverly integrated login feature, a photo of a long line of people who cannot wait to try your product, an image of an unhappy customer. When in doubt, put a big call out or title that says what the audience is expected to see.

Unfortunately, not many teams get together in one room for a team picture. The alternative team slide is a collage of headshots that are taken by different photographers at different times. How to make something decent out of it?

1. Make sure all images have exactly the same size
2. Crop all images so that the size of the head is more or less the same
3. Line up the eyes 1/3 from the top of each image
4. Go for a close up, losing some of the top of the face if required
5. Make the images black and white
6. Increase the brightness of selected images if require

From the archives: a 2008 post on the same subject.