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It took me a while before I understood why this image is a huge Photoshop disaster. I will stay vague in order not to give it away. More evidence in favor of the “Zen-style” presentation.
From an earlier post on Photoshop Disasters.
Everyone now knows how to get their hands on beautiful images. The next challenge to make your presentation stand out is to pick the right ones. I prefer to do the chart concept brainstorming myself, rather than relying on a stock image search engine to do it for me. We completed the project. Typing in “success” for “finish” will give you a stream of highly predictable and often cheesy images. “Man in suit raising his arms in victorious joy”, “hiqh quality render of a character crossing the finish line”. You/the human brain can do better than that. Think of the concept you want to make, all the way to the end. Then, search a highly specific (stock) image that goes with it. Armstrong waiving his hand on the moon, a bunch of empty, used coffee cups on a desk.
And remember, the right visual concept does not always involve an image.
I often have to use a visual concept of the “tip of the ice berg”, “things are different as they appear”. The picture of an actual ice berg is the obvious choice to use. The Titanic archetype is deeply engrained in our collective memory.
These Sanyo ads show how you can use typography to do the same thing. The first image replaces the image of an ice berg with the actual words, but it gets really interesting when removing the link to the ice berg all together and start using giant text cut in half. Big enough that you can actually read both sentences (sort of) easily.
Not very friendly to audience members with dyslexia though.
Via Ads of the World.
I am browsing through an old (1979) book, Magritte: Ideas and Images, about the life of the Belgian painter Rene Margrite this weekend. What if he could have used Photoshop? Repetition of graphical elements, cut outs, projections. He was ahead of his time.
Today, Photoshop can do a lot, but it is still hard to make that perfect photo composition. Today, the New York Times used this image in an article about research to improve concentration.
Nice Photoshop work, but:
Keep your images real.
Today I am writing a speech for a group of university students, so I had the luxury of being able to"go all the way" with creativity, not having to worry about whether visual concepts would be appropriate for the audience.
Eighty slides later, I got tired of many of the images I used and cut back on a lot of them.
What you can do to overcome stock image fatigue:
You do not need to use data all the time to get a point across in your presentation. Sometimes a good image is enough to tap into our collective memory.
In a big conference hall your title page should contain some useful information for the audience that is walking in (“Is this the right session?”). When designing for online presentations platforms (such as SlideShare), they need to grab the attention of the site visitor without patience. Pretty much like the posters you used to put up for your events near the coffee machine in university.
Here is my coffee machine poster for a lecture I will be giving at the Technion in Haifa, Israel next week. In case you are in the neighbourhood…
Look around you and see how powerful simple graphical shapes can be. The ad below is an example (text below Chaplin: “It’s the hat.”).
A larger image can be found here on Ads of the World.
It is hard to get the magnitude of a huge number across on a slide. A $700bn bailout,how much is that? Photographer Chris Jordan takes a different approach. Repetitive patterns of miniaturized objects that form a bigger picture. Images have a political message, many of them try to put current “consumerism” into perspective.
The image below is inspired by Seurat’s “un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte”, and constructed from 106,000 softdrink cans.
Check out more of his images here. Via Village of Joy.