Presentation · SlideMagic Blog

Category Presentation

January 12, 2009·Design

"Everyone can draw" - clean and simple shapes in PowerPoint

“Everyone can paint” used to be the name of a Dutch toy set when I was a child.

With really basic drawing skills it is possible to make useful “iconic” charts. The umbrella below was used to highlight how a strategy has shielded one of my clients from the full effect of the 2008 economic meltdown.

Image no longer available

Look at shapes and see how they are decomposed in very simple elements: a few ellipses and some rectangles. On the right I gave them a different color to make them visible. Make sure that everything is neatly spaced out and symmetrical. The background image was purchased on iStockPhoto.

The key lesson: simple drawings do not have to look simplistic.

January 11, 2009·Design

Chart concept - the audience as the patient

Some images can literally make the audience feel that they are the patient. Suffering, helpless. Other variations on the theme: a dentist with a buzzing drill, or less medical, someone “zapping” you away to another channel with a television remote control.

Image via BigStockPhoto. The good thing about a medical picture is that the most of the faces of the models in the image are covered, hiding that this is not a “real” image.

Update, here a version of the remote control image:

January 10, 2009·Design

Experiment with typography - slice up those paragraphs

Typography is a major under-utilized tool in PowerPoint. On the right a standard PowerPoint display of a large 100pt text. Wide distances between lines, not very interesting. On the left, I cut it up in 3 pieces and started to re-align characters vertically. I am only starting to learn.

January 6, 2009·Design

The problem with design and computers

I just watched this entertaining TED presentation by John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, reflecting on his career as a designer (more information about him in the linked TED post).

The most interesting bit comes mid-way in the presentation. John shows a video how he orchestrates an excercise where people need to get other people to draw things on white board using their “voice commands”. After some miscommunications the groups starts designing a coordinate or grid system (similar to a PowerPoint canvas). The maximum output of the excercise was a completely boring, 2-dimensional drawing of a house.

I often feel the same. How to make this 3D composition? How to add quality hand-drawing or artwork? How blend different images? Computer constraints determine the majority of my slide designs. Something is still missing in the human-computer interface.

January 6, 2009·Design

Make big things look huge by adding something small

The 2 tiny people, and their 2 tiny shadows make the whole dam look huge. You probably remember your highschool physics teacher explain: “if the nucleus of an atom is a strawberry, its electrons would be flying around the football field”.

Something to think about when making your next slide composition. Image purchased from iStockPhoto

UPDATE: I have now added a chart concept featuring a dam in the SlideMagic template store, you can download it here.

A PowerPoint slide template featuring a dam

January 5, 2009·Design

How to recreate a realistic looking chalk board in PowerPoint

After graffiti, now the less permanent graphics of the chalk board. I scribbled some suggestions on a black board below (click image for a larger picture):

Now that we are on the subject, check out my favorite Bart Simpson chalkboard generator as well.

January 4, 2009·Advertising

So hard to do - "real" art in PowerPoint

PowerPoint effects, PhotoShop, and a bit of typography/fonts enable an amateur to create PowerPoint slides that start approaching the capabilities of a graphics professional. Not so fast.

This ad for a financial services firm shows that good artwork cannot (yet) be matched by a PowerPoint slide.

Taking someone like Dali as the inspiriation for a slide
Creating the characters and the elaborate backgrounds
Insert the detail and small “jokes”

You immediately “get” this ad. Another one I took from Ads of the World (larger image here).

January 4, 2009·Design

Squeezing more text inside a PowerPoint shape

Circles are beautiful shapes to work with. Unfortunately, PowerPoint’s standard settings make it hard to fit in text. To get a bit more space, got to “format shape”->“text box”:

Set the internal margin to zero
Switch off automatic word wrap

January 3, 2009·Design

Symmetrical shapes - hold shift while drawing

Symmetry should be avoided in slide layout. Symmetry in shapes on the other hand is beautiful. Hold-down shift while drawing to create a shape with equal hight and width, and in the “size ribbon” click the box to lock the aspect ratio.