SlideMagic Blog

I have never been a fan of stock image photographers making pre-fab slide compositions, but in one area they can add value: digitally replicating items to infinity. See the attached image by higyou on Shutterstock. It is worthwhile visiting multiple stock image sites for these type of renderings, since they often can only be found exclusively on one site. Have a look at Filter Forge if you want to try to create these types of effects.

Here is a simple concept to visualize a problem that the cable television industry has: replacement cycles of hardware sitting in the people’s homes is really loooooong, especially compared to how often we upgrade our mobile devices. In this slide I used repetition plus cropped the years on both sides of the page to create that sense of continuity.

Advertising agency RPA made a bunch of Apple-style ads for common products, probably intending to show that the world would be boring of all ads looked like this. I actually disagree, and would welcome to see the clutter in advertising go.

You see how easy it is to create professional looking slides by just applying a bit of white space and picking the right crop for your images. You do not need to be an advertising professional to do this, you do not need sophisticated software to do this.

Via AdFreak.

I am a PowerPoint veteran who only recently started to design presentations in Keynote. Here are some of the little things that were hard to find:

• Connecting shapes with a line: select both shapes go to the insert menu and select connecting lines
• Remove an image background: go to the format menu and select instant alpha
• Edit an image (make it B&W for example): select the image and click the tiny button with the levers (next to the stroke buttons).

The best way to make a slide with a smartphone screenshot:

• Get a stock image of a smartphone without the device maker brand (using Google Image search might get you into copy right issues)
• Take the actual screenshot on your smartphone, in my case I use my iPhone browser to go to the web page and press the home and on/off button at the same time. Email yourself the image
• And here comes the trick: apply a subtle inner shadow to the image. You see the difference in the image below, the left side one looks a little bit bland, the right side looks much more natural

This Twitter conversation just unearthed another feature that is missing in the Mac OSX version of PowerPoint:

@ideatransplant Unfortunately no trim video options on PowerPoint:mac - Trim Video Clips bit.ly/MeJKHH — Geetesh Bajaj (@Geetesh) July 10, 2012

There are many more, see older posts about PowerPoint 2011 for Mac versus PowerPoint 2010 for Windows here.

I do not think the reason for this is a technical one, it should be possible to write the same software for both platforms. Hence, Microsoft must be thinking that by making PowerPoint 2010 for Windows just that tiny bit more feature rich, it will convince users to stay on the Mac platform.

I think this will be backfiring: Mac users will simply switch to Keynote. Microsoft should create an organizational separation between the Windows and Office business, the latter should consider the Mac a highly profitable platform for selling software.

When you have invested in a great animated promotion video to put on your website, why not use it in your presentation? A good video can tell a relatively complex story in under 2 minutes. Most of these videos contain high quality art work that is great for use in a presentation.

Embed the video in your presentation (I prefer putting in the actual file rather than linking to an YouTube video) and create visual connections later on in the deck using screen shots of the video (either page-filling or small thumbnails).

Do not feel embarrassed that that video just cut your bullet point product explanation from 15 minutes to just 2, your audience will appreciate it.

If you got the attention of a potential investor in a random setting you can decide how to use your 2 minutes. One option is the 1-way monologue, where every single one of these precious 120 seconds is filled with information and facts.

The other option is pitch your idea briefly, read someone’s face, interpret a quick question and adjust your story to the concern you see.

I think the second approach is better. Maybe you lose 30 seconds of airtime, but the other 90 seconds are definitely more effective.

PowerPoint or Keynote are perfect alternatives to word processing applications to write documents that are primarily intended for reading and not for presenting on-stage. Corporate executives are so overloaded with information that the memo written in long-hand text is making way for a more visual way of presenting that is somewhere in between a dense text and a keynote presentation. If you write a book or a complex legal contract you probably rely on some of the more advanced word processing functionalities (style sheets, numbering, revision marking, etc.) For all other situations, PowerPoint or Keynote work fine.

The first and most important thing to do is to realize that you are writing a document for reading not presenting and adjust your style accordingly:

• Reduce your font size to make space for more elaborate sentences. You will not be there to present the document, so the text should be self-explanatory. Big bold fonts work great for catchy headlines, for actual reading a smaller font size is more readable (a bit counter intuitive).
• Don’t make your sentences to long. A book has only 7-10 words on a line, and newspapers use columns to keep lines short. The eye can get lost if it needs to make left-to-right movements over longer distances. Consider using a column layout of the page as well, either across the page, or one column at the side of the page and an illustration covering the rest.
• Add tracker pages, page numbers, and other reminders of where the reader is in the document. I believe that in short stand up presentation these elements just add clutter, when we sit down to read, we need to bring them back in.
• Maintain white space on the page, use wide page borders to create a calmer look. It is better to shrink the text and give it space to breath, rather than increase the font size until you covered the entire canvas.
• Use very subtle techniques to highlight text. Too many bolds, italics, and underlines create clutter. Only use a few different font sizes.
• Make sure that objects and text columns are properly aligned on each page.
• Dark background are usually not very readable with smaller text, and are definitely a problem when your document has to be printed. Go for a light background instead.

The 2 photos from a birthday party below show what an impact cropping a good composition can have on the quality of your images. I used the iPad app Snapseed (affiliate link) to do the following:

1. Cut out the eating man, cut out the light/bright parts of the image at the top to focus on the boy in the foreground and the girl reaching fro the bubble in the back
2. Take out the color since the composition of the greens and the clothing of the kids does not really look interesting. The B&W image enhances the texture of the bubbles, leaves, and grass
3. Selective up the brightness around the faces of the boy, the girl, and the boy back to the left
4. Up the sharpness and structure of the image

The result is a transformation from a bland image to one that looks like a Matrix-style freezing in time. I am constrained here by the 455 pixel limitations of Blogger, the final image looks better at its proper resolution.