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A client needed to visualize the regulatory uncertainty in his industry after the financial crisis. This traffic light tree in London is a very useful art installation that you can use in many other confusing situations. The high rises of large financial services firms in the back help complete the picture (my client works in that industry).
The Internet is full of images of the sculpture. Try searching Flickr for images with a Creative Commons license.
A recent image I used for a cover page of a presentation provided some excellent opportunities to blend PowerPoint text and shapes into the image. Use the strong red light source to create matching shadows and colors. Click on the image with the boxes to get a larger picture.
I talked about slide subtitles before as an idea to add detailed content to a “Zen-style” presentation with big images and few words, content that can be read when the document is viewed without a presenter being present.
I start using photo subtitles more and more as I increasingly move away from staged/fake stock images and use real images in my presentations. When using a creative common image from Flickr, it is important to give credit to the photographer, that is one thing to in the footer.
But the photo footer can also include a little bit more background information on what we see in the image, information that does not always have to contribute to the slide. The full details of the painter, the painting title and the place where the painting is currently displayed. The fact that the Paris cafe you see on the image is actually Cafe de Flore, in an image from 2006.
The Big Picture section of boston.com should feature in the RSS reader of every presentation designer. It is an almost daily stream of beautiful images (often more than 1MB a piece). The image below (related to the Diwali celebrations) was taken from it. You see a good way to format an image subtitle (with - in this case a lot of - information) as white text in black at the bottom of the photo.
This ad on Ads of the World uses an effect that you can easily replicate in PowerPoint. Select a data point (or a data series), right click, fill, and select “image”.
The audience might feel a little bit like they just stepped out of a roller coaster after you showed them your 30 images in 10 minutes presentation. Some suggestions to calm things down:
Film directors can use powerful tools to throw us in the middle of a story right in the first seconds of a movie. Steven Spielberg’s opening of Saving Private Ryan is a gruesome but good example. Everyone in the audience thinks “Wow, I should be grateful to these guys that drew the short straw and had to come out of the boat first…”
Presenters can use similar techniques. Try to find big images with a perspective as if they were taken from someone in the middle of the issue you are talking about. These images trigger an emotional response from the audience, especially (and maybe only) if they are “real”. Think of photographs that make it on the front page of a newspaper.
The following 2 images could lead into a presentation about the issue of maternal deaths due to poor living and health conditions in the slums of India:
Less powerful examples of images with a patient or victim perspective here and here. Many of my investor pitch presentations use different styles of charts throughout the presentation:
P.S. Read more about the great work that the Acumen Fund is doing to combat the issue of maternal deaths here.
Some places are easy to get in, and hard to get out. (That one-off discount which becomes permanent for example). How to visualize this?
Things that come to mind (the one-way revolving door, permanent temporary structures such as the Eiffel Tower or the London Eye) are not obvious when you use them in a slide. “You see, your discount scheme is a bit like the Eiffel tower”. Blank stare.
Images of someone stuck in a well and looking up into the light do work. The idea was triggered when I found myself inside the double helix staircase in the Château de Chambord in France, and looking up. Stock image sites also have lots of “inside a well” images.
There is a bigger point in this: presentation designers should look at cinema direction to move audiences inside a scene or a situation and make them “feel” what your message means. A future blog post on this is in the pipeline
Most people have now caught on to the idea of using large images in presentations. But with a few graphics design tricks you can make things look even better:
Here is how to do it:
Many new technologies in enterpriseA software help you see the bigger picture that is hiding in various bits of information and data scattered across the organization. One option to visualize this in a presentation is through impressionism (painters such as Monet).
Another one is through a photo mosaic. This ancient post on Engadget still holds. You can download the software AndreaMosaic here. It’s freeware, as you as you give it credit when you use it. Hereby. Installation and use instructions can be found on the site.
This ad (via Ads of the World) reminded me of an earlier post showing that you can also achieve this effect in PowerPoint (2007). It only works with huge, huge characters. The ones I used in my original post are actually not big enough.
