SlideMagic Blog

A user of PowerPoint 2007 has an enormous amount of 3D tools at his/her disposal. It is only after a year or so of working with this software that I start to understand how 3D could help get your message across.

Many 3D effects are NOT useful. Three dimensional graphs make it harder to match the data to the value axes. Adding “random” bevels, reflections and shadows to a PowerPoint object does not make it an elegant graphical element. The fact that PowerPoint can do it, does not mean you have to use it.

Why don’t we use 3D for what it can do best: show distance? The example below shows a time line that we expect to last forever.

Adding some 3D effects will make it much more powerful:

Other examples could be a landscape scattered with competitors battling for market share. Or a quadruple layer of defenses that can protect the intellectual property of a startup.

Notice that you actually do not need any of the PowerPoint 2007 effects to create a 3D effect. It is all about positioning shapes, and reducing the size of objects and fonts as you come closer to the imaginary horizon.

Use 3D when you think two dimensions are not enough to tell your story.

My Vincent van Gogh color set from a few days ago is not very good for people suffering from red-green color blindness.

Use Vischeck to test your own templates. To do so, you need to “save as” a PowerPoint page as “PNG”.

A side-benefit of this test is that you get sense of what happens if someone prints your presentation on a black & white printer. (But hey, the B&W white test is the easiest of all: print preview)

Somewhat related: an earlier post about designing presentations with people suffering from dyslexia in mind.

Via Richard Garber. A more elaborate post on Vischeck and PowerPoint in this post on the Indezine blog.

Somehow Stumbleupon has gotten too complicated for just dipping into a series of beautiful images now and then. Lunarr’s Elements keeps it pure and simple. You can vote up and down images and follow (get followed by) people with similar visual tastes.

Via VentureBeat

Many people ask me for examples of my work. The problem is that most of it is highly confidential. Some of my presentations are in the public domain, and I have embedded them in this post. You should realize though that most of these presentations are designed for a big conference audience: large images, very little text. This is not the only style in which I can create presentations (see an earlier post about this issue). Having said that, here we go:

People have been talking a lot about how colors influence behavior. A study published in Science Magazine today added one more entry to the list.

• Red: improves performance on detail-oriented tasks
• Blue: stimulates creativy

The article goes on to discuss underlying causes. Stressful colors like red might enhance effectiveness of getting things done. Blue “calm” colors are better for coming up with that brilliant idea.

Regardless of whether these type of studies are right or not: picking a color scheme for your company look and feel (and/or your PowerPoint presentation) is a far more important decision than deciding the graphics of your logo.

When you align 2 or more objects in PowerPoint, one will stay put while all the others move to line up. It is easy to predict which one will move. See the diagram below. Click on the image for a larger picture.

Photoshop has sophisticated tools for cutting our shapes from images. In PowerPoint you can reach similar effects by filling a shape with an image.

When selecting a fill for a shape, choose “picture or texture fill” instead of a color:

Alternatively, choose “slide background fill” to creat “holes” in your graphics.

Do you save the most important part of the meeting for the end, when everyone is already standing? See Seth’s Godin full post here. Bert Decker added additional thoughts here. Things you should NOT do:

1. Step back
2. Look away
3. Move on the last word
4. Raise your hands
5. Rush to collect your papers
6. Blackball yourself

Great painters use colors to set the emotion of a painting. An example is Van Gogh’s “Le Cafe de Nuit”. He talks about this painting in one of his letters to his brother Theo:

I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four lemon-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most alien reds and greens, in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a rose nosegay. The white clothes of the landlord, watchful in a corner of that furnace, turn lemon-yellow, or pale luminous green.

It is interesting that Van Gogh talks about clashing colors, but the end result is in fact a very harmonious ensemble of colors.

Painters use intuition and a sharp eye for real-life images to create a suitable color scheme. You can “borrow” a bit of their genius by using painting as an input source for tools such as kuler to create your own color combinations. In fact, paintings might be a better source than images for this purpose.

The result is good, but not as perfect as the original. I miss the digital equivalent of the artist color pallete to mix and match colors as you go. I am starting to experiment though with going “off color scheme”, injecting here and there colors in slides that do not fit 100% with the defined presentation colors.

Every day, I am working hard to convince my clients to switch to a presentation format that no longer resembles the hand-written overhead slides we used in the early 90s: lots, and lots, and lots of slides, pushed forward by remote control, big pictures, big fonts. The slides become the background animation of a speaker’s performance. The best way to do it is by using an internal meeting, a low-risk setting to try it out. The annual company gathering, the annual sales rep conference, these are all great occasions. In these presentations I will use humor, images, and concepts that would never make it to an external presentation, but once the presenter has gone through the experience she is usually “sold”. The way back to dense boring slides is closed. Subsequent external presentations will be more “serious”, but never boring. One more member of the tribe.