SlideMagic Blog

What a nice chart by Mobile Analytics. Perfect blend of data, logos/icons, and typography.

The new shape subtract feature in PowerPoint 2010 (review) enables you to make shape cutouts in a more elegant way than before (see the old approach here). A step-by-step guide using a great image by Gregory Bastien.

The bar has been put higher and higher over the past years:

• Everyone is now able to put text and charts in PowerPoint and project them on a screen
• (Almost) everyone has discovered where to get beautiful page-filling images
• Many people have figured out how to clean up a messy data chart
• More and more people are learning to apply professional typography (PowerPoint gets a bit closer to Illustrator with every release) and coherent color schemes

What is left that is hard to do is the “art part”. It can never be automated. Sequencing the right story, knowing what to cut, what to keep in, picking the right analogies, selecting the right images, picking the exact right data visualization option…

Sometimes it is necessary to adjust the characters in a sentence manually. Look at this image (with a deep quote) and see how letters line up vertically. Standard horizontal and vertical spacing in PowerPoint will not get you this effect. Put in the characters as individual text boxes and align them to get it just right…

Image via FFFFound

Another excellent clip art manipulation on Tom’s Rapid e-learning blog: how to create characters with a hand-drawn feel:

1. Select a cartoon-style clipart
2. Ungroup and strip out background elements
3. Copy and paste as PNG
4. Apply PowerPoint 2010’s new pencil sketch filter (or use Photoshop’s)
5. Increase brightness, soften contrast a bit.

Screen dumps are often used in VC pitch presentations; either to showcase the company itself, or to give examples of competitors in the market. These screen shots are often filled with excess visual details:

• The Windows title and scroll bars (sometimes with personal information such as instant messaging windows or the names of other web sites that are open on the screen)
• The menu navigation structure, login windows, banner ads that surround the core web site.

Cut this clutter to create a much calmer slide that allows you to focus on what feature/aspect you would like to highlight.

Usually, animated GIFs drive me crazy. The more subtle ones like this one could actually work in a presentation. If you copy and paste an animated GIF into your slide it will start to play if you switch to presentation mode. Via this isn’t happiness.

PowerPoint is slowly adding features that have been standard in Photoshop for years. One useful one is the image blur filter to increase depth of field of your photos (earlier post). It adds some extra realism to this composite image trick (discussed earlier here and here)

1. Find an image for the foreground and use the PowerPoint format/remove-background function to get rid of the white background
2. Find a background (nice image of Cafe de Flore by DarkB4Dwan)
3. Combine the 2 images
4. Blur the background with (click the image, format, artistic effects, the right one in the 2nd row)

One other application is to repeat a blurred version of a busy chart for additional comments (see post here)

PowerPoint 2010 has now incorporated some of the shape manipulation techniques that until now were the domain of Adobe Illustrator: union, combine, subtract, and intersect (read my earlier PowerPoint 2010 review here).

Until now, I never got into understanding Illustrator. Until now, because I (ironically) start to experiment with integrating more hand-drawn shapes into my presentations (I am even thinking of picking up my old highschool habit of drawing cartoons of people). Fonts are no issue (earlier post). The line/curve manipulations capabilities of Illustrator however are still far better than PowerPoint.

Here is how to move an Illustrator shape into PowerPoint, not just as an image, but as an editable vector object.

1. In Illustrator export your shape in an EMF format
2. In PowerPoint, select “insert picture” (a bit counter intuitive)
3. Right-click the object and un-group it. Say “yes” to the question whether you want to convert it

Converting is this simple. Unfortunately, understanding Illustrator is not…

I stumbled on this image this morning: such a true quote. Whenever I allow myself to get upset in a Tel Aviv traffic jam, or on the phone to the useless support desk of my ISP, I simply cannot get myself to design a good presentation. The rest of the day is best spent doing the monthly accounting.

Via Diego Zambrano.