Frequent updates about all things presentations since 2008. Subscribe to never miss a post.
Most of my work is confidential, but there are some exceptions. An example is this presentation by Qelp, a startup based in The Netherlands that offers an online, picture-based, mobile phone support engine for operators. The people of Qelp have good presentation skills themselves, so I work more on a coaching basis: they deserve part of the credit for this presentation.
Watching the disputes between players and the referee in the soccer worldcup reminds me of corporate negotiations. After the pitch presentation people start discussing the terms. Often, they are so preoccupied with their own viewpoint that they forget to listen or try to understand what the other party is saying. The same points get repeated, and repeated, and “let me explain to you one more time…”. Nobody is listening, everyone gets annoyed.
A reader asked me in the comments of my post on the Pulse News iPad app what feeds I put in there. Here are some sites for daily creative inspiration:
Please let me know what sources I am missing here.
Here is a big sentence on the front page of a new web site targeted at iPhone users:
[Company] develops real-time personal discovery and contextualization technologies that leverage semantics and social attention to make social streams more relevant.
Industry insiders might understand what it means, but most people will not. I am not a big believer in mission statements. Often, the big wordy sentence that covers all will be the most compact way you can describe your business to yourself, but as you suffer from the curse of knowledge, other people will not get it.
Every day I like to browse through an enormous amount of images from photography, art, design, and advertising sites to get inspiration for my presentations. The iPad is making this a whole lot easier.
Applications for the iPad are still in their infancy. Many RSS reader applications are popping up, partly driven by the fact that Google Reader does not work very well in the iPad browser (scrolling down is hard).
One iPad RSS reader app, Pulse News, is making an effort to mimic the iPad user interface by rendering content “iPad-style”: creating a stream clean headlines with images ripped from the RSS feed. For your regular feeds, this is a nice gimmick, but the draw back of the app is that you can only put in 20 feeds, by far not enough.
But for my image feeds this is brilliant. I follow less than 20 feeds and with the touch of a finger I can fly through days of content in a few seconds, just images! Try it if you own an iPad.
More and more presentations are given on plasma/LCD screens with a wide aspect ratio. Most PowerPoint presentations are designed for a narrow 4:3 ratio (a traditional computer monitor). Most of the time, the screen will automatically stretch you image to create a bigger picture. I never understand this habit: the distorted proportions look horrible. (Judging by my own experience, this is how most people watch TV nowadays as well).
My advise: set the screen back to the narrow aspect ratio. Doing this on your computer is often tricky, the best way is to take the remote control of the screen and fix it there. A smaller picture is much better than a distorted picture.
The painting is Manet’s Portrait of Irma Brunner.
More maps today. This simple site ifthiswasmyhome puts the size of the oil spill in perspective… using a town of your choice. It would cover pretty much the entire Netherlands (the country where I grew up).
An excellent visualization, making people internalize what big numbers mean.
A week with an iPad has shown me how poor presentations and other documents get rendered on a PC (or a Mac). Leaving the touch screen aside, and even for a PDF viewer, navigating between pages is incredibly slow and the borders of the screen are packed with distracting menus.
Maybe this can all be brought back to the roots of these applications: they were designed for editing text line by line, changing data cell by cell. Each page is built up real time from its components. Editable text gets pet in the right font, the right size, aligned, images are scaled to the right size, colors added. All this takes processing time. The iPad (I think) converts the whole document to some sort of image and caches this image into memory. The result is lightning fast scrolling between pages in a document.
There is no reason why this cannot be implemented on a PC/Mac as well. It is bit like the revolution of the Firefox and Google Chrome browsers that were specifically designed to render content as quickly as possible.
I decided to upgrade to PowerPoint 2010 (affiliate link) not because of the features that are discussed in most reviews, what interests me is the ability to create customer complex shapes (adding, subtracting), something that until now only was possible in Adobe software. Although I would be interested in the video functionality as well (the complexity of video editing software prevented me from getting serious with motion graphics).
On a separate note, the world of office software is changing. I used to be a loyal buyer of the “Professional” edition since the early days. Not any more. Excel has become so powerful that I see no need for Access anymore (99% of my clients do not know how to deal with this software), and I still get Outlook bundled with my Excel and PowerPoint, although I will probably never open it now that I have moved completely to Google for email, calendar, and contacts. (Another reason not to take the Professional suite: Microsoft has abandoned their upgrade pricing scheme.)
I will post my experience with PowerPoint 2010 in future posts.
When I design my slides I usually leave the outline pane open on the left side of the screen, so I get a sense of what an audience member sitting in the back row might see when the slide gets presented.
