Graffiti and crossing things out with a red paint brush in PowerPoint

Crossing things out in an immaculate PowerPoint slide with a rough, red paint brush can make a point strongly: "with our technology you can skip buying that new server"

I use a simple PowerPoint 2007 "glow" to get a graffiti-style effect. In the image below, I selected the "Boopee" font (standard in PowerPoint 2007) to which I applied a red glow and a gradient text fill (bright red, with a darker red). The background image was purchased on iStockPhoto. Let me know in the comments if you need more detailed instructions.

The French are just so good in inventing words: "taggeur" for graffiti artist (or vandal). Brilliant.

Be sure to avoid setting yourself up for disaster when using non-standard fonts in a PowerPoint presentation.

Create your own buttons and lights on a metal skin in PowerPoint

Inspired by a post on slide:ology today linking to a set of newly released PowerPoint templates with examples of what graphical effects PowerPoint can produce, I decided to start posting some of my own favorites.

Many logos of Web 2.0 companies are examples of how not to use these graphics capabilities: add a "bevel", "reflection" and "drop shadow" and the result must look good. In graphics design, most of the time, less means more.

But sometimes these effects can help. In my case a client needing to explain software functionality. We decided to go for the metal "HiFi component" look with buttons that can easily activate functions. (Click image for a larger picture)

• Metal skin: an image purchased from iStockPhoto
• Metal text: a big font in a similar, but slightly darker color than the background with an interior shadow applied to it
• Button 1 and 2: a circle with a heavy outline (red or black), a simple "bevel" applied to it, but in the tab "3D options" of the bevel functionality I increased the depth to 20.
• Light 3 and 4: a circle without an outline, with an central interior shadow and a color gradient running from a full color to a slightly faded color.

Let me know in the comments if you are interested in the detailed instructions.

Bleeding edges - you can use them both for images and text

A "bleed", or "bleeding edge" is a page with a graphic extending over the edge of the page. I like to use them a lot in PowerPoint presentations.

Take the following example. When the elephant is positioned in the middle of the slide, the composition is not really interesting. Have him walk off the page and insert a bit more white space makes it a lot more interesting (our friend just stands there, ignoring all things around him).

Pushing things a bit further, you can use the same technique for words/typography as well. The brain does not always need clean typography to be able to read. You probably remember this text (I do not know who wrote it, or whether the research actually happened):

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

An example of letting words "bleed" off the page (I used to highlight problems with current solutions in the market for a client in the technology sector):

In print, you create bleeding edges by printing on a piece of paper that is too big, excess graphics are cut off later. In the digital world, this is a lot easier: crop the parts of the picture you do not need.

More 3D: positioning text with a reflection in PowerPoint

On today's SlideShare front page is a nice presentation by Martin Pure:

Marketers See Think Wonder

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

Following on yesterday's post on 3D objects, you can see that "something is wrong" with the alignment of the objects. The use of a reflection (a "Web 2.0" effect that I only use very rarely) implies a 3D setting.

You can apply the same guide lines thought to correct things. In addition, you can change the size of the font to emphasize the feel of a 3D environment.

My comments were all about positioning of text. Do not misunderstand me, I like this presentation.

SlideShare ribbon for tight integration into PowerPoint

Today, SlideShare launched a ribbon for PowerPoint, integrating its functionality more tightly with the desktop office application.

How to position 3D objects in PowerPoint slides

I am not a big fan of heavy 3D graphics in PowerPoint. Similar to animations, or 3D bar/column charts: the fact that PowerPoint enables you to do it, does not mean you have to use it.

• It is tricky to get things to look realistic: PowerPoint is not a 3D design tool. A failed 3D chart looks very amateurish
• 3D charts make it almost impossible to work with images. If given a choice, I would use an image rather than 3D objects. You can't have them both.
• 3D is hardly ever required to make a point: less is more in good PowerPoint design. Exceptions to this rule could be things emerging at the horizon, long-term outlooks, etc.
• Text becomes harder to read

If you do want to use a 3D composition, use guide lines and an imaginative vanishing point to make sure your objects are aligned properly.

UPDATE: more on positioning text (with reflection) in 3D in PowerPoint in a folow up post to this one.

How to set a non-standard color in PowerPoint - HSL codes

You can fill books about color theory, here I will take things one step at a time. How to set a non-standard color in PowerPoint?

First of all to enter the right menu: hit any fill, outline or font color drop-down and select "more colors". A big rainbow-like display will open. (Click the image above for a larger picture.) You have 3 options:

1. Manually move the mouse in the color grid and click a color: this is never accurate enough. (Tip, you can actually stretch the window to make your selection more precise)
2. Use RGB codes: a value of 0-255 for (R)ed, (G)reen, and (B)lue: it is impossible to predict what the resulting color of an RGB-combination is
3. Use HSL codes, my favorite. Let's elaborate.

In the "color model" box at the bottom left of the matrix, change "RGB" to "HSL".

You can define a color exactly by changing the 3 variables, each ranging from 0 to 255:

• (H)ue is the position of the color on the spectrum, going from red all the way to purple
• (S)aturation determines how bold are faded your color will be. Fluorescent colors go for the full 255, pastel colors for a low value, if you make the value really low, all colors turn more or less into grey
• (L)umenance sets the shade of the color, from light to dark

In practice I hardly ever use this technique to set my PowerPoint presentation color scheme (see a previous post on how I do this). There are situations though you might have to use the HSL color model:

• Micro-adjust colors: "a bit more yellow in the orange" (more hue) to fine tune colors. Or to define clashing colors on purpose: create a second colors just a few nodges away from the original on the hue spectrum.
• Create color shades: I use lumenance a lot, it gives an almost endless array of color shadings that I can use in my designs. PowerPoint 2007 gives a standard spectrum of shadings in its default color menu, but if you run out, you can manually adjust the lumenance to get an even larger amount of colors to work with.

• Toning down light, bright colors. Highly saturated colors do not look good when you increase the lumenance. To have beautiful light shadings of these colors you need to take down the saturation.

Back to basics: going analogue using the pencil (+ a bit of self-relativation)

A nice presentation by cartoonist Betsy Streeter on the front page of SlideShare today:

Ten Great Uses for a Pencil

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

Two "so whats" for me:

1. Go back to the pencil when designing presentations. Sketch, erase, sketch, sketch again. A much better creative tool than opening the PowerPoint standard template. Design your slide offline, PowerPoint is a production tool to get your original idea in digital form. Nothing more.
2. A bit of self-relativation: it is amusing to see how professional presentation designers (ME INCLUDED) increasingly resort to using "back to analogue" techqniques to make their point. We've come full circle when we start pasting 10MB high-res scans of a piece of paper, a sticky note, etc. into PowerPoint.  Why not bring the physical flip chart page to the presentation event and leave the laptop in the office? This reminds me a little bit of the joke of the investment banker who worked 100 hour work weeks to retire at 45 and settle in a Mediterranean village to spend the day fishing. His fellow local fisher man has been doing this since he was 15 without going through the trouble. (A better, longer version of the joke here).

Presentation shortcut: "scientists extract images directly from brain"

Presentations are all about brain-to-brain transfer:

1. Idea in presenter's brain
2. Idea transferred in presentation
3. Idea in audience brain (hopefully)

Japanese scientists are working on the shortcut: extracting images directly from someone's brain(!). 

There are some ambitious objectives for future research:

• Read someone's dreams
• Read someone's thoughts
• And: "read [someone's] feelings and complicated emotional states"

Until now, it has been very difficult to transfer feelings and complicated emotional states in a PowerPoint presentation. You had to resort to writing a novel for that...

Via Pink Tentacle

From 2x2s to 4x4s - heat map to visualize trade-offs

Not a grand presentation design insight today, but a quick sketch.

Matrices such as 2x2s are often over-used. When you combine them with a heatmap, some colors and some gradients, you get a nice visualization of a trade-off:

Update: to show that the big lines are not grid lines, here are the 3x3, 2x2 and 1x1 versions of the same chart:

Preserving custom fonts when presenting away from your own computer

Complex, custom fonts can be beautiful. Seth Godin even recommends everyone to buy their own as one of his 9 steps to PowerPoint magic.

One problem, custom fonts are a disaster when used on a machine that is not yours. And you discover it when you click through slide 2 of your presentation in front of  a live audience...

Therefore, I won't use them as my default font in a presentation, but only in specific pages. Here is the trick:

• Make a copy of the original (editable) slide and put it in the back of the deck, you don't wont to lose the original
• Group all elements of the original slide into one object
• Cut it (CTRL-X)
• Paste special as "PNG"

The whole slide has been transformed into an image which for sure will show up correctly on whatever computer you are using.

UPDATE: POWERPOINT NINJA SHOWS A MUCH BETTER SOLUTION. HOW TO EMBED CUSTOM FONTS IN POWERPOINT: LINK

Background image purchased on iStockPhoto. Font used is Palace Script MT, built into PowerPoint 2007.

"Burning" typography that almost hurts the eye

I am more and more fascinated by design lessons from consumer advertising billboards. Take this ad for Tango (a UK soft drink):

First of all the message. Confident, huge font, but the reader will discount the message completely "yeah right". But it makes you think.

Then the typography. It almost hurts. Like watching a broken television screen. The onset of a migraine aura. Looking through the corner of your glasses and see how the lenses distort colors because of light refraction.

I argued before that slightly irritating the senses of your audience can help get your message across.

How did the typographer (Chris Chapman) do it? Clashing colors. Full orange background. Bright red shading. Colors that are very close on the color spectrum, but not similar. Like hitting 2 adjacent keys on a piano (harmonic dissonance). Grunch letter fill (hard to imitate in PowerPoint).

More on working with color wheels in a later post.

Via Ads of the world.

UPDATE after a comment. People should not misunderstand me. Any dissonance effect should serve a purpose. Simply screaming out a message does not make it stick. However, certain "painful" situations can be supported by a (one) "painful" chart.