SlideMagic Blog

I must admit, I am ignoring my own earlier assertions about not using non-standard fonts in presentations. PCs do not come with Helvetica installed, and I love it. In most cases, embedding the font inside the PowerPoint presentation makes sure that people can use it on other computers as well.

Helvetica is a relatively tame font. Selectively you can go a bit wilder. The image below (taken from the excellent Google LIFE image archive) mixed together with the Boycott font gives that instant jeans commercial effect. Here is an example of a presentation that uses something similar. Obviously, these type of fonts are only to be used for big image/huge font presentations, and probably not in every presentation you make.

Readers from the early days will remember similar posts, but I want to bring up the subject of cutouts again. Recently, I started using them more, especially in combination with randomly drawn shapes.

1. Fill the background of a slide with an image. Right-click the slide, select [format background], select [Picture or texture fill] and select a file. Note that this is different from simply copying a page-covering image on your slide.

2. Copy another image over it.

3. Draw a shape, I like using random shapes.

4. Right-click the shape and select [Format shape], [Fill], [Slide background fill], and add an inner shadow for additional effect.

Images found on iStockPhoto.com.

This ad reminds me of many poor PowerPoint slides I see. It sure grabs the attention, but that’s probably also the only thing it does.

Let people communicate like never before, let’s try to achieve that in 2010 but in a more positive way. A happy new year to you all.

A bigger picture on Ads of the World.

Printers will always try to sell you the heaviest paper with the glossiest finish. If you are not printing the new corporate brochure or annual report, but need to make nice books of your PowerPoint presentation, I would go for a more modest choice of paper. It looks a lot better and costs a lot less.

Image via airgap

While reading Chris Brogan’s latest book Trust Agents, I came across this interesting factoid: until only very recently there was no word for the color “orange” in Western European languages. Chris claims that it is the main reason why we talk about “red heads” or “goldfish”.

Research on Wikipedia provides more background:

The colour is named after the orange fruit, introduced to Europe via the Sanskrit word nāranja. Before this was introduced to the English-speaking world, the colour was referred to (in Old English) as geoluhread, which translates into Modern English as yellow-red. The first recorded use of orange as a colour name in English was in 1512, in the court of King Henry VIII.

This ad by CNN reminds me of a chart concept that I use often to uncover things: the zipper. It can easily be replicated in PowerPoint using two approaches:

• Select a stock image and remove the background color if necessary. An example here, or here, or this nice bag full of cash that you will return to your investors in 4 years.
• If you are in an artistic mood you can actually recreate the zipper using basic PowerPoint rectangles, maybe using straight lines instead of curved ones.

Via Ads of the World

There are many books on public speaking, which probably makes sense: people who are good at speaking on stage usually also enjoy spreading their ideas in print. Many of these follow the same pattern: the experienced speaker explains to us (inexperienced novices who “hum”, read out bullets from the screen, and avoid eye contact with the audience) how we can improve our stage performance.

Confessions of a Public Speaker is different. Scott Berkun is a public speaker, he does it for a living. What makes this book so interesting is that he discusses his own mistakes, failures, and stage fright. He puts into practice one of his techniques to gain credibility with your audience: tell the truth and be honest.

Here are some of the examples of the interesting experience and advice that are discussed in the book. Yes, taken out of their context and in random order:

• Why it is not useful to imagine your audience naked
• Even if (you think) you fail miserably on stage, the audience probably won’t notice
• You have the mike, you are in control, do something nice for the audience (ask to change the freezing temperature of the A/C)
• Don’t talk endlessly about yourself and your resume
• I love the chapter about “eating the microphone”. When you start a presentation you have all the attention, the audience really wants you to do well, If things go bad, you will hit a point that you lose the audience, nobody is paying attention anymore. You ate the microphone.
• It pays of to learn how to write better headlines/presentation titles
• Anticipate the obvious question that any intelligent audience member would ask.
• The concept of interference (taken from physics): the audience is still digesting one point when you bring on the next. As a result, both points are lost.

Here is my suggested solution to yesterday’s puzzle: improving the NYT’s infographic that explains how a value-added tax works. Let me know what you think and/or whether you have alternative suggestions. You can click on the image for a larger picture.

If you see it for the first time, value added tax is a bit tricky to explain. The NYT (equals the Herald Tribune) gave it a go in the infographic below. I am trying to do a better job and will post it in tomorrow’s blog post. I am actually not that happy with my result so far.

This is a heads up: give it a try yourself and we can compare notes tomorrow.

I had to modify the image on the NYT web site slightly and added the right column with totals that appeared in print, but was omitted in the online version of the graphic.

This ad on Ads of the World reminded me what a difference the angle at which an image is taken can make.The chocolate figures were repeated an almost infinite amount of time and stacked behind the front row. But to create the illusion of depth and infinity, the figures in the back stick just a tiny bit over the heads of the ones in the front row.

Think of this when picking your next image, especially roads or other concepts that need to show a long journey towards somewhere. The best images are those where the photographer was almost flat on the ground. Hopefully the photographer of this image (orangeacid on Flickr), managed to get up before the next train came by.

If you are interested: photographers refer to this effect as depth of field. If you look carefully at the image of the rail road, you see that the focus is narrow: the immediate front of the image is blurred, then follows a narrow strip of pin-sharp railroad beams, after which the rest of the image is blurred again.

Related: extreme use of depth of field to make images look like miniature toy scenes: tilt-shifting