SlideMagic Blog

The site of the IMP Awards has an excellent database of movie posters, searchable by year, title, actor. Useful inspiration.

Last week in New York, I used both Keynote and Adobe Acrobat for the first time on stage in a live presentation. Keynote worked great (it is designed to do just that). Presenting in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) was interesting.

I presented at a large conference (this one) where it is hard to switch hardware (I needed a Mac for Keynote) in the middle of the conference program without disrupting the experience of the audience (engineers walking back and forth, screens going on and off). Hence, I went for a PDF version of the deck. (An earlier post on why I think we are going to use PDF for presentations more and more)

With CMD-L you can put Adobe Acrobat in full screen mode, and it responds perfectly fine to the Logitech remote control I am using. The only adjustment you have to make is to make sure that any animated slide builds are spread out over multiple pages.

The one thing I am missing though is the ability to have presenter view in Adobe Acrobat: having a pre-view of the next slide displayed on the monitor that only the presenter can see. Adobe, are you listening? (An old post about PowerPoint presenter view)

To take this a bit further. The one thing that Apple can do to increase the penetration of Keynote is to develop a Windows application that can run Keynote presentations with animations. Editing is not necessary.

This was the question I got after my high-paced presentations full of impressionist paintings last week. Here is what is different about a Board presentation:

• Often you need to go through and approve detailed financials, so some slides will be dense
• Board members will have gotten used to certain type of slides, because many of them get repeated in every quarterly review. The slides might be bad, but everyone knows exactly where to look for a specific number.
• The corporate culture might not completely be open to impressionist paintings and other unusual images in a Board presentation

Having said that, Board presentations are actually very similar to other presentations:

• A well-functioning Board will have read the homework before entering the meeting room, so the detailed number slides can be left for the appendix
• If you need to convince the Board of a major strategic decision, it is a presentation like any other. Boring, dense bullet points is not going to help you win the hearts and minds of these people.
• Using visual slides with large images does not mean that you have to pick impressionist paintings. Highly conservative slides can still be highly visual.

So maybe Board meetings are not that different after all…

Read more about designing good Board presentations in this earlier post.

Last week I attended a Creative Mornings presentation by John Maeda in New York. He is the head of the Rhode Island School of Design and a well-known designer, artist, and author (more information about him here).

He made an interesting point about the graphics design industry. What caused the creation of the graphics design industry as we know it today? The fact that in the 1950s and 1960s, it became customary for publicly traded companies to have well-designed annual reports for their shareholders.

I think we are seeing something similar in presentation design. The bar is rising constantly. Presentations, and videos of presentations are being shared online and are getting wider and wider audiences. Corporations start seeing the value of good slide design. Enterprises will start allocating budget to it.

I do not think this investment will solely go to the design of PowerPoint slides. The corporate story needs to be brought out consistently in presentation slides, documents that can be shared online, videos, and the web site. A new discipline in graphics design, and a new design market is emerging.

Recently someone asked me: “How much time do you need for your presentation, 30 minutes, 45 minutes?”. While I can fill 2 hours with just talking about presentation design I chose to go for the 30 minutes. It focuses you to be to the point and interesting.

TEDTalks can discuss very complex subject matters in just 20 minutes. I have designed 6 minute presentations for startups participating in pitch competitions that managed to convey the entire company’s story. Often I find that a time constraint results in a better presentation.

The idea of visual presentations is spreading and I see more and more decks that I would call “80% there”: very limited use of bullets points, big images, one message per slide. For those experienced amateurs among you, here is how to get it to 100%:

• Use only high res images, instead of low res ones borrowed from Google Image search
• Scale up your images either to full page size, or stick to the same white frame on each page.
• Think of image aesthetics: people in toilets, eating gross food, a close up of an ugly animal might be funny, but they are in a college humor kind of way. Deep down, humans do not like to look at things that are not pretty. Not every image has to be funny. Funny images can also be beautiful.
• Resist the temptation of the image barrage. An onscreen presentation is not a SlideShare presentation that requires a click to go to the next word in a sentence. Not all points need to be supported by an image. It is scary, scary face image. We are confused - confused face image. It is difficult - child doing math image. Use images or graphs to show why you are scared, what is confusing you, and how come it is so hard to solve. Much better than pictures of scared and confused people.

Photoshop is growing on me, after having confused me for many years. Photoshop is catering to multiple audiences. Professional photographers need the sophisticated tools for correcting camera images. Advertising designers need the engine for creating complex layer compositions.

What is useful for presentation designers? (search help in Photoshop for exact instructions how to find them):

• The magic wand to remove image backgrounds (the Microsoft PowerPoint option is really poor)
• Image size and canvas adjustments to get to the exact right size of an image at 300DPI
• Content-aware fill to extent backgrounds
• Content-aware extend to extend backgrounds
• The spot healing tool to fix extended backgrounds
• The color-replace function to change colors that are slightly off (i.e., make orange red)
• And (a bit advanced) the vanishing point filter to put text on 3D objects

Whenever a new version of Photoshop is released, I am not so much looking forward to more features, but better implementation of existing ones.

What features have I missed?

Tim Harford is defending PowerPoint in the light of the recently formed Anti PowerPoint Party. I agree. He argues that PowerPoint is a tool used poorly. The link to the article.

I am increasingly interested in designing documents for tablets. They could work great in one-on-one meetings (or even stand alone). I have not found the right platform to develop them yet though.

PDFs do not always work (especially when converted using the Microsoft Office plug in) and show up within the frame of the iPad PDF reader (menu bars, chart thumbnails).

HTML5 looks promising. Onswipe aims to be an HTML5 publishing platform for magazines that also could be useful for presentations. If you visit the Marie Claire web site on an iPad for example you see what it can do (it looks like an app, but it is a regular HTML page). But you also see the limitations. A browser-based environment makes page switching slow, and again, you still have the navigation frameworks of the browser application.

Custom apps. Over the past weeks, I taught myself Adobe InDesign, and loaded up software that can turn Adobe InDesign files into custom iPad apps. My computer science background is trying to convince me actually download the entire IOS 4.3 SDK to have a look inside to see what it takes to program an iPad app from scratch. It is a heavy-handed approach though.

Do you have experience with this? Let us know in the comments.

The summer is here: time to slow down a bit and look around for design inspiration. The site Posters in Amsterdam by Jarr Geerlings enables you to walk around the city without physically going there.