One Lego visual - 2 insights about leveraging imagination

I found this great Lego ad yesterday on SlipperyBrick:

Sometimes relying on audience imagination can work, sometimes it does not.

1. Sometimes it can work. Although adults might lose some of their imagination capabilities over time, it is still possible to get across visual messages with very simple graphics. Simple shapes, simple cartoons, even just creative typography. The mind will fill in the missing pieces
2. Sometimes it does not work. The book Made to Stick introduces the concept of Curse of Knowledge. The presenter "hears"/imagines a tune in his head and taps it with his fingers on the table. All is perfectly clear to the presenter. All the audience can hear is.... someone tapping. 

Chart concept: the 2x2 matrix and other grouping techniques

McKinsey and other management consultants love 2x2 matrices (and obviously 3x3s). Personally, I think they are often overused (framework overload).

Not every categorization can be crammed into this framework.

• The axes need to be logical
• The groups needs to lead to 4 categories, i.e., leaving one or two boxes as "not applicable" does not make sense
• They work particularly well when you want to show things moving from one category to the other
• They are good to show that something stands out (from for example the competition) by popping up in the top-right corner

Here are some other techniques to group items on a PowerPoint slide using line and venn diagrams:

• Diagram 2 - "you cannot have it both ways"
• Diagram 3 - "the best of both worlds"

Weekend reading: 127 RSS feeds about design

Creating PowerPoint presentations is all about design. 

The COLORBURNED blog author shared the content of his RSS reader in this post with a list of 127 RSS feeds "that all designers should subscribe to" (the comments add a few more).

Not sure whether I will do that, but it does provide some good weekend reading.

Chart concept: "fast forward" - a good summary chart is like a good headline

Putting a summary slide as page 1 in your PowerPoint presentation is tricky.

• A diluted and boring summary might turn the audience off ("let's check email on my phone")
• A summary chart might "give away the point" of your presentation too early
• Some presenters might get stuck on page one and tell the whole story without using any other slides (sometimes this can be a good thing, a presentation with PowerPoint)

A good page one is a slide that gives the audience some clue about what's going to happen and presents an interesting teaser about what is to come.

Now that I come to think of it - a good summary chart is like a good headline

The following image (purchased from iStockPhoto) adds another possibility to presentation opening concepts I discussed before (here, here, and here). "Let's fast forward to the end before diving in". Shrink the image to one side of the screen and add your teaser in big-font-text

Funny - video about cliche stock images

Great images can do amazing things to your PowerPoint presentation. But, cheesy stock images are as bad as poor clip art. The Empower Your Point blog dug up this amusing video on the subject:

There are no golden rules here. In practice I find that any image that is not "natural" usually does not pass the bar: renderings, staged compositions with models (exception: children), combination of 2 or more images (you can do that yourself). Related posts about this issue here, and here.

Be consistent - $s, Euros, millions, bns, GBPs, 000s

There are many ways to spell monetary amounts. Pick one and use it consistently throughout your PowerPoint presentation:

• $, US$, USD, I actually like these 3-letter abbreviations, no searching on keyboards, no need to search and insert symbols, every currency has one that looks consistent
• Billion, bn
• Million, M, m
• 000, thousand, k
• Decimal point, decimal comma
• Thousand separator point, comma, or none
• Negative number with "-", or in between brackets

Unfortunately, detail does matter in presentation design...

Using "paste as PNG" to wash out complex PowerPoint objects

Going a bit (only a bit) against the "Zen" presentation philosophy, I have argued before that overwhelmingly complex PowerPoint charts could be used in a large keynote presentation, if (big if) they are positioned well.

One way to use it is as follows:

• Put up the overwhelmingly complex chart, message: "it's complex, don't even try to understand this now"
• In a subsequent chart, wash out the original object
• Start highlighting individual components for further explanation

You can use the "paste as PNG" function in PowerPoint to transfer any object (including complex groupings) into a picture and subject it to the regular picture manipulation tools available to you: resize (a pain for complex PowerPoint objects with text in them), crop, and of course re-color.

Recoloring the image with a very light overlay creates a wash out effect that you then can use as a background for subsequent highlights. I have tried to explain all this in the following SlideShare presentation (click on "screen" image at bottom right for full screen mode).

Explaining Png Washout In Power Point

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: powerpoint presentation)

Rediscovering PowerPoint classics: the Gettysburg presentation

More weekend reading. 

Peter Norvig is Director of Research at Google. Back in 2000, being fed up with boring PowerPoint, he decided to use a famous speech by President Lincoln to demonstrate how a poorly designed PowerPoint translation could destroy its communication power completely. He put the creative "master piece" on his web site and more or less forgot about it. 

Gettysburg address

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: gettysburg lincoln)

Today (November 2008), the "Gettysburg PowerPoint presentation" still comes out #4 on a Google search for "powerpoint presentation". (Check also "the making of" page)

Brilliant visualization of a "real word" design user interface

Weekend reading (1 day earlier than the rest of the world in Israel). I stumbled on this great ad for Adobe Photoshop CS4. It shows what graphics and presentation design is all about, a creative process working with shapes and colors and a blank piece of paper. Computers make it easier to work, but in our mind we should go "back to basics" now and then. Go to this Flickr stream for more detailed/hi-res images. Agency Bates141. Via Zurb.

Create a Twitter background using PowerPoint

There is a lot of (white) space for self expression on Twitter in its background image. (Not implying that "cluttering it up" will make it look better though) The "The Closet Entrepreneur" posted a tutorial how to create a Twitter background in PowerPoint. It includes a template with the areas you should leave blank for Twitter's own content. P.S.: follow me on Twitter. Via Digital Inspiration

Source file of the bouncing PowerPoint equalizer now online

I have put the source file of the happily dancing equalizer in PowerPoint now online. I uploaded it to Slideshare, you can see the animations if you download the presentation (a PPS file), the regular SlideShare embed does not support it.

Bouncing equalizer in PowerPoint

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: animations equalizer)

Improve your looks in a picture - automatically!

Israeli scientists have not only found a way to specify human beauty mathematically, they go a step further to develop a tool that automatically improves your looks in a picture. Not sure when this will be added to the PowerPoint format ribbon...

Project page here, found via Haaretz. An earlier post about face "recognition" here.