SlideMagic Blog

Here is a new idea. Zen-style presentations with large images and a few words in a big font do not stand very well on their own. Maybe we should apply something from the movies: add subtitles to a PowerPoint slide.

• Crammed in a small black box that blends in with the black frame of the projector
• A small font that can be read when sitting in front of a screen, but blurs away when viewed from a distance (when a presenter is explaining the chart)
• Unlike notes pages, the text appears on the slide itself (in PDF, in SlideShare)

It’s like reading a newspaper page:

1. You read the small print under the images first
2. You read the headlines after that
3. You read the actual text last

An example below, click on an image to get a larger picture.

Interestingly, this concept is very similar to the “lead” in the ancient McKinsey exhibit format.

Another problem that would be solved by this is to make the information captured in a presentation searchable. In particular large knowledge firms (such as management consultants) struggle with archiving the knowledge that is hidden in PowerPoint presentations with little text.

Depth of field is an under-used technique in PowerPoint. Here is an idea for a slide I used for a client that has a powerful solution against spam. Repeating and object many times can give dramatic effects.

More 3D tricks here.

Certain industries do not seem to be subject to change (but maybe a new startup is about to change all this!). I like to use images of the moai on Easter Island to visualize this kind of market environment.

Photo credit: Natmandu. For these type of “real” images it is much better to go to sites like Flickr then to stock image sites (check the image license though).

My life and business partner Anat Naschitz has a strong interest in the arts. She recently created a chart for a client that needed to show how its solution makes it possible to see beyond the dots and construct the full picture (in a medical application).

The painting “The Seine at La Grande Jatte” by Seurat is an example of the pointillism style. An approach similar to the CYMK technique used in many printers today. (Seurat starred in a previous post on this blog as well).

The round cutouts were made by setting the background of the PowerPoint shape to “slide background”. The curly font used is Curlz MT.

Mashable pointed to this usefull tool yesterday. Aviary is an “in-the-cloud” image manipulation utility (trying to take on Photoshop and others). To lure more users to their site, they have created a neat screen shot capture tool (bookmark this URL).

I use screen shots a lot, and until now relied on CTRL-PRT SCR, followed by a paste into a PowerPoint slide. (For example to extract tag clouds from Wordle) Two drawbacks:

• A huge, very wide image (I have a large screen resolutions) gets plopped into your slide that you need to crop by switching the PowerPoint zoom to 33%
• A partial web page image (PRT SCR only captures what’s on the screen)

The Aviary tool is more useful:

• Simple: type in aviary.com followed by the URL you want to capture, for example aviary.com/http://ww.axiom.co.il if you want to make a screen shot of my corporate site www.axiom.co.il.
• The image (covering the entire web page including parts that are not on the screen) opens up in a basic image editor for cropping.
• You can save the image for future use

Long shadows can add great perspective to a slide. Lucky Luke needs them to show off his speed. Photographers like Heinrich Heidersberger have used them nicely in photo compositions (see the “Street Scene” image below)

They are very easy to make in PowerPoint. I suggest forgetting about the built-in shadow functions of PowerPoint, they can be tricky control. Instead, draw your shadows using rectangular boxes. Below a chart that can be used as a setting to display the 3 (or so) key messages of a presentation on a final slide (excuse the bullet points):

A neat trick. Select your text, go to “format” and select “text fill”. The font I used in the example below is “Showcard Gothic”.

Weekend reading. A site with signs and portraits of homeless people. It makes you think. You got a piece of card board and a marker (in fact that’s all you got), now write the best “pitch” slide you can…

Via Swiss Miss.

Three dimensional street artists try to create the illusion of a 3D composition jumping out of a flat surface. It results in some stunning pictures. Especially interesting are the images taken not from the viewing position but from the side, giving you an opportunity to see the enormous distortion the artist applies to make his effect work.

Some 3D pavement art links:

• Tracy Lee Strum on Village of Joy (the source of images in this post)
• Julian Beever on the same blog
• European Street Painting

A video how Edgar Mueller goes about making one of his creations:

Usually you use the align tool bar buttons (essential tool bar elements) to line up/center multiple objects. If you just select one object and hit a “Align Center” or “Align Middle” button, PowerPoint will center the object across the slide.