When designing presentations it can be easy to get swallowed up by the desire to exercise that design trick you’ve been dying to use, or to use white space in a quirky designer-y way; it is, after all, part of the nature of a designer to create interesting, beautiful things. What can be tricky, however, is to keep in mind how a person might absorb the information onscreen...
As a designer that works in the field of presentation, I am constantly on the lookout for inspiration and new ways of thinking to further advance my presentation skills. Inspiration is all around, one of my favourite forms of ‘presentation’ are movies; specifically the title credits of a movie.
How marvellous that the recent versions of Office automatically embed videos into PowerPoint instead of linking them. And how frustrating when you bundle up your multimedia presentation and someone else reports that the videos don’t play on their PC. This is an issue we’ve come across many times over the years, and it can be very tricky and time-consuming to troubleshoot, so we’ve developed a little tool to help.
No matter how good your content might be, if it doesn’t look good you’re going to put your audience off even before you’ve started speaking. Here are three design hacks that will have you creating professional-looking presentations in about half an hour.
Triggers allow you to initiate a sequence of animations by clicking on a specific object rather than a simple mouse click. This can be helpful for de-cluttering a slide or making a presentation more interactive however getting triggers to work practically can be a bit tricky. Let's take a look.
PowerPoint does many things well, but typography isn’t one of them. I’ll walk you step-by-step through techniques to get it to play ball. Be warned – SERIOUSLY advanced PowerPoint functionality follows...
There seems to be universal acknowledgement that presentation software (like PowerPoint) can’t do it on its own (without a team of experts), and we need a better alternative. But is SlideMagic the answer?
We exhibited at a large trade exhibition a couple of weeks ago, and I went along to see what other vendors are up to. A lot of exhibitions are a desolate wasteland for exhibitors with nothing but tumbleweed and other vendors to stop the boredom. This show was actually pretty busy though, and by walking around l think I managed to notice things companies were doing (right and wrong). Some of these observations are surprisingly apt for sales presentations too...
To quote Microsoft: Sway is an app for expressing your ideas in an entirely new way, across your devices. The trouble is I don’t really know what to use it for…
Presentation handouts and leave-behinds are a great resource in giving your audience a tangible reminder of you and the company you represent. The problem is that they're oft-neglected and oft-ignored. So how do we create handouts that not only accurately represent our content, but look great and don't take a fortnight to create?
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