SlideMagic Blog

I have been avoiding clip art for many years in my presentations. The graphics look clumsy and cliche compared to a high quality stock image. (Sometimes I am longing for that screen bean though).

After reading a few posts on Tom Kuhlmann’s Rapid e-learning blog I might change my mind though, maybe. All these big image, big text slides start looking sort of the same. Some ideas by Tom:

• Edit your clip art to make it interesting. Dramatically scale them up, so they become huge on the slide. Ungroup the object and remove items you do not need, or even swap heads on characters.
• Keep the style of your clip art consistent. I did not know that you can search for specific consistent clip art styles, this one for example: style 802. More examples here.
• Clip art is a good source to make black silhouette characters.

Add Tom’s blog to your RSS reader if you are interested in this.

This interactive map is amazing: click a US county and it shows you were people who live their move to, and from where people are moving into this area. This is a (very cool) tool, but some serious DIY analysis is required to tell the story though.

I clicked around a bit and discovered some patterns:

• Lots of people are moving back and forth between big cities
• In the mid west, people move within a short radius
• Upper east coast people move (retire?) to Florida
• Etc.

To use this in a presentation there is no avoiding to going back to a series of screen dumps to take people by the hand through the data. (I am not a big believer in live demos during short presentations.

Some market research agencies must be paid by the page. Reports are filled with pages of text describing the market: United States: segment 1, 2, 3, volumes, revenues, pricing, Asia: the same, Europe: the same. All in long full text sentences (“The U.S. segment 1 market was $1.345bn in 2009, up 3.125% compared to the year before. On the other hand, segment 2 declined by 3.54% versus 2008 and is now $2.675bn in 2009”).

Text is not the right way to convey this information. A simple one-page table with rounded figures can replace the entire document. And hey, you might even be able to put it on one slide in your presentation.

Look at this beautiful visualization of images taken in London. Blue: images taken by locals, red: ones by tourists (more cities here).

I am using maps more and more in my presentations. A map with color-coded segments is a much more powerful way to visualize data than a bar chart with a ranking of variables. I am still struggling to find good tools. There are very few good editable PowerPoint maps available, and Google maps screen shots are a bit cumbersome for large volumes of data points. Suggestions?

The recent post on the Google blog about an update to the search algorithm is an excellent example of how to explain technology:

1. No apologies or “I will not bother you with the detail”, or “this is kind of complex and only an engineer (read someone more intelligent than you) will understand”. No instead, explain things clearly, but without oversimplifying.
2. A simple graphic supports the verbal/written explanation

In case you missed, an earlier post on how Google uses cartoon characters to explain why its Chrome browser beats the competition.

Mary Meeker is a well-known Internet analyst. Every few months she updates her presentation about the state of the online world. Usually, dense slides are boring and fail to communicate a message. Not when every slide is packed with interesting data like in Mary’s decks. This presentation will not fit a Steve-Jobs-style keynote address, but it contains a wealth of insights well worth digesting.

Internet Trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley Research

Microsoft is quietly rolling out its office applications in the cloud. They announced that the web-version of major Office applications are live, at least in a number of countries/languages. In Israel I could get it to work. Try for yourself here.

I have been following these in-the-cloud initiatives closely, and must conclude that Microsoft stands a good chance to be the winner. I chose Microsoft over Google docs for a recent project that involved collaboration in multiple countries.

It looks like the world is dividing into 2:

1. Consumers and freelancers using Google Docs, iPhones, prezi, SlideShare, Windows 7 or Apple OS, gmail, freely sharing stuff over social networks and insecure internet connections
2. Corporate workers using Blackberry, Microsoft Office 2003, Windows XP as a result of strict security guidelines and cost cutting in IT budgets (i.e., delaying upgrades of software). These people are struggling to find stuff in their bulging Outlook 2003 inbox.

The learning curve of switching user interfaces of Office applications is huge (read: costing a lot of money in downtime and helpdesk support), and for a big corporate to switch means that everyone is required to change habits: the 25-year old tech savvy analyst, the 60 year old secretary of the CEO, the CEO herself, to name a few. It’s just hard to move them out of the Microsoft world.

Ultimately, the big corporates will move Office applications/data into the cloud, there are significant benefits to collaboration and simply finding stuff. They will go with Office Live though, and not with Google Docs…

The BP logo was a very powerful one: an environmentally green flower/sun beaming with lots of positive energy. (Apparently it is based on the symbol of Helios, the personification of the sun in Greek mythology).

The fact that it was so good is proven by the enormous number of logo redesign contests that are being conducted now after the oil spill disaster. See this Google search.  Here is one that offers a $200 bounty (still accepting entries), and here is a Flickr page with the entries from a contest organized by Greenpeace. The illustration below is taken from Draplin Design.

It is good to see that graphics design can spark so much emotion. Just a shame that is not a more positive one.

When you pick a color for a shape, PowerPoint gives you the option to set its transparency. However, when you select a color for your font, this dialog box does not appear. How to recreate this effect

in PowerPoint? Here is the work around (PowerPoint 2007).

1. Select the text
2. Right click
3. Format text effects
4. Text fill
5. And now you can change the transparency!

We offer quality because we control the entire supply chain.

A bullet point on a presentation that I came across last week. This statement could have come out of any presentation. People hear it, but do not internalize it.

The real story is that competitors are small players working out of tiny factories in emerging markets stitching together poor quality products that just, but just, meet regulatory requirements. If that is the story, tell it.