Rant: iStockPhoto stealth price increases

The site iStockPhoto is a great source for stock photography (got the image below there). They have increased prices significantly. I remember being able to buy images at $1. Then 1 credit did not equal to $1 anymore. Then, higher DPI images cost a bit more. Since a few days ago, a regular "medium" image cost 6 credits (a lot more than $6).

• I don't like the "stealth" price increases, every few months, a bit up. Why not set your prices, and stick to it? Pretty much what Apple did when it set up the iTunes store.
• At these prices, I am stopping to use a creative process of buying lots and lots of images, and in the end picking the best possible slide. It has to be rigth the first time. I would be willing to pay a lot for a crucial image for a huge advertising billboard, the day-to-day PowerPoint is a different story
• Small isolated objects I buy in lower resolutions
• I increasingly look for other "real" image sources (such as Flickr), there are more and more cliche images and illustrations available on iStockPhoto
• There is a sense that people are getting a bit tired of the "stunning image with 1 word" anywway in slide compositions
• More and more I am discovering other ways to make interesting slides: typography for example
• There used to be a sense that iStockPhoto was the answer to expensive stock image sites such as Getty Images. Getty bought iStockPhoto, and with stealth price increases is it still "cool"?
• iStockPhoto migh be missing a lot of people on the verge of signing up. Professional presentation designers know about iStockPhoto, and have the budget for it. But as the "Presentation Zen" approach spreads among "amateur" designers, there could be a great opportunity for iStockPhoto to increase its customer base beyond these professionals.

OK, rant over. Reading back, I am actually most upset by point 1: stealth increases. iStockPhoto is a great site but it should pursue a more straightforward and transparent pricing policy towards its customers. It is a shame that the price increases might kill some creativity in the process.

Humor: "someone just had to do it"

This act of vandalism added to the communicative power of the billboard:

Found on PhotoBasement, via a Tweet of Ouriel Ohayon.

The problem with design and computers

I just watched this entertaining TED presentation by John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, reflecting on his career as a designer (more information about him in the linked TED post).

The most interesting bit comes mid-way in the presentation. John shows a video how he orchestrates an excercise where people need to get other people to draw things on white board using their "voice commands". After some miscommunications the groups starts designing a coordinate or grid system (similar to a PowerPoint canvas). The maximum output of the excercise was a completely boring, 2-dimensional drawing of a house.

I often feel the same. How to make this 3D composition? How to add quality hand-drawing or artwork? How blend different images? Computer constraints determine the majority of my slide designs. Something is still missing in the human-computer interface.

Make big things look huge by adding something small

The 2 tiny people, and their 2 tiny shadows make the whole dam look huge. You probably remember your highschool physics teacher explain: "if the nucleus of an atom is a strawberry, its electrons would be flying around the football field".

Something to think about when making your next slide composition. Image purchased from iStockPhoto. 

How to recreate a realistic looking chalk board in PowerPoint

After graffiti, now the less permanent graphics of the chalk board. I scribbled some suggestions on a black board below (click image for a larger picture): Now that we are on the subject, check out my favorite Bart Simpson chalkboard generator as well.

So hard to do - "real" art in PowerPoint

PowerPoint effects, PhotoShop, and a bit of typography/fonts enable an amateur to create PowerPoint slides that start approaching the capabilities of a graphics professional. Not so fast.

This ad for a financial services firm shows that good artwork cannot (yet) be matched by a PowerPoint slide.

• Taking someone like Dali as the inspiriation for a slide
• Creating the characters and the elaborate backgrounds
• Insert the detail and small "jokes"

You immediately "get" this ad. Another one I took from Ads of the World (larger image here).

Squeezing more text inside a PowerPoint shape

Circles are beautiful shapes to work with. Unfortunately, PowerPoint's standard settings make it hard to fit in text. To get a bit more space, got to "format shape"->"text box":

• Set the internal margin to zero
• Switch off automatic word wrap

Symmetrical shapes - hold shift while drawing

Symmetry should be avoided in slide layout. Symmetry in shapes on the other hand is beautiful. Hold-down shift while drawing to create a shape with equal hight and width, and in the "size ribbon" click the box to lock the aspect ratio.

Almost all presentation bloggers are introverts

A little fun on January 1. I ran the typealyzer test on a number of presentation, speaking and communication blogs tonight.

In case you are unfamiliar with Myers Brigs personality types, you can catch up here, and do a test here.

ISTP - "Mechanics"

Me (!!!) [a bit different from my test results]

Slide:ology

Speaking about presenting

Breaking Murphy's Law

Speak Schmeak

ISTJ - "Duty fullfillers"

David Padani

Xplane

INTP - "Thinkers"

Presentation Zen

Bert Decker

Guy Kawasaki

Mike Pulsifer

INTJ - "Scientists"

Seth Godin

PowerPoint Ninja

All of these great communicators are introverts? And now for the only extrovert in the pack:

ENTP - "Visionaires"

Empoweryourpoint

It is great to have so many excellent presentation blogs around. I am looking forward to exchanging ideas with you in the new year.

2009 - looking ahead in the world of PowerPoint presentations

It is the time of the year to look ahead. Here are some thoughts where the world of presentations and PowerPoint might go in 2009. A start for debate:

• The bar is rising to make your presentation stand out. More and more people will get exposed to Presentation Zen and other books, more people will know how to find good stock images, and will be able to produce Zen-style presentations. 
• People will recognize presentation design as a "serious" business discipline. Presentation gurus like Garr Reynolds will become general "business celebrities", who can reach audiences beyond those people who are just interested in graphics design or public speaking. They will be selling many books, doing many public speaking events, just like experts in other functions such as marketing (Seth Godin) . Congratulations Garr! This will further grow the tribe of people who want to change the world of business communication.

• Slideshare will become the dominant online presentation sharing platform, defeating many rivals in this area. Big corporates will start using it to upload their official presentations (quarterly results etc.), pretty much in the same way that YouTube has become a mainstream platform for sharing ideas. Online presentation tools that rely on learning a new user interface will not be among the winners. 
• Huge file sizes will drive more and more presentation development work and collaboration into the Internet cloud
• Slideshare-style presentations meant for online sharing will become one of the most used formats. Almost too simplistic for my taste: "1 word a page", often accompanied by cliche stock images, to be clicked through at very high speeds, often abandoned mid-way. Better than bullet points, but not necessarly the best presentation form either.
• Typography and fonts are tools that will be exploited more in mainstream business presentations, beyond the world of advertising
• More daring creativity will be accepted in the (often "boring") board room. People suffer form information, PowerPoint overload. Using provocative images, formats, fonts, informal language (i.e., the techniques a billboard designer would use) will become acceptable forms of communication.
• 3D will be used better, enabled by PowerPoint 2007, bringing "the technology to the masses" people will start to think how to use shadings, gradients, perspective in a way that is more than just adding a (useless) dimension to a bar chart
• Data visualization is still relative virgin territory. More data is available. More processing power is available. It becomes easier to integrate things like maps. Etc. Etc.
• Gradually doing away with the overhead projector heritage: one slide per subject, title in the top-left, source at the bottom. Instead slides will become more fluid as they transition into each other. New technologies enabling zooming in and out of areas will be leveraged. A great PowerPoint presentation become more similar to the supporting graphics that are often used in TV documentaries. 

My 2 cents. A healthy, peaceful, prosperous, and visual 2009 to all my readers.

Images with emotion - Flickr versus stock image sites

Stock images can be cheesy, staged, unnatural, cliche, especially when it comes to getting a shot of "real" people with real emotions. Try Flickr or other image sharing services as an alternative to stock image sites.

Here is a great, spontaneous and real image that caught my eye today. Look at the emotion in the girl's eyes, great light coming from below.

Original (in larger size) here on Flickr, picture taken by Studio Cougar. Always check copy right and license restrictions before using Flickr images in your presentations.

Too much - "painful graphics"

Before I argued that slightly irritating the audience's senses could support your presentation. Two cases of overdoing it:

More details about these ads on Ads of the World: Nycomed and Eurostar. I recommend adding this blog to your RSS reader.

A better solution for using custom fonts in PowerPoint

PowerPoint Ninja is essential reading for improving your technical PowerPoint skills.

The most recent post is about embedding non-standard or custom fonts inside a PowerPoint presentation so that you can be 100% sure your presentation will come out as you intended it when using on another computer. Custom fonts are a major untapped designer resource for PowerPoint presentations. Over the past years people started using a number of graphical tools in PowerPoint. First enabled by technology, then "abused", after which a "Zen-oriented" tribe of people developed the common wisdom about how to use each of them correctly, elegantly, and most importantly in such a way that it helped the purpose of the presentation

• Bullet points
• Colors (my pre-2002 presentations were almost all B&W)
• Clip art
• Boxes and diagrams
• Animations
• Images: Google image search, stock images

I think fonts and typography are next.

One more quick post: Kawasaki on Santa's perfect VC pitch

An example of a "perfect pitch" by Santa according to Guy Kawasaki. An overview (of more serious) web resources about writing pitch presentations to Venture Capital firms can be found here.

Visuals - 30 Christmas ads from around the world

Not much time to write elaborate blog posts over the holidays. Some interesting visuals on Digg Design - 30 unforgettable Christmas ads today (here is one to them):

Street art - "the secret of happiness is..."

I stumbled on an interesting street art project (more about creator "Elay"and more images here).

• In the spirit of the season: happy holidays to everyone, and hopefully you have found the secret already or will find the secret soon.
• The image is an example of how leaving stuff out (of a PowerPoint presentation) can stimulate your audience to fill in the details themselves. Like (good) authors of novels, film directors, etc. try to do.

Best of my little-known yet useful PowerPoint how tos

I have posted a number of PowerPoint how to posts over the past half year, but they disappear quickly to page 2. Here are some of them brought back to the front page:

• Selection pane: how to edit multiple layers in complex animations
• Aligning bullets: how to make sure the second line of a bullet point gets aligned with the first one.
• Color overlay: how to change a color image to a black and white one using one of your color scheme colors
• RGB and HSL codes: how to match PowerPoint colors exactly
• Copy PowerPoint objects while keeping them aligned
• Colors schemes: how to find the perfect color scheme for your presentation
• Tag clouds: how to make one in PowerPoint
• Bar charts: how to make PowerPoint/Excel data charts look clean and professional
• Live preview: how to switch it off to speed up PowerPoint
• Buttons and textures: how to make realistic-looking looking ones in PowerPoint
• Non-standard PowerPoint fonts: how to make sure they work on other computers
• Freeform shapes: how to turn PowerPoint shapes into freeform objects
• Paste as PNG: how to transform complex PowerPoint objects into images
• Image backgrounds: how to get rid of them in PowerPoint
• How to crop portrait pictures 
• How to fix drawing guides that got lost in PowerPoint
• How to email big PowerPoint files
• Presenter view: how to create a presenter screen with crucial stats and features that the audience cannot see
• Waterfall charts: how to create them in PowerPoint/Excel
• Graffiti: how to create graffit-style fonts in PowerPoint
• Apostrophes and quotation marks: how to use them correctly in PowerPoint
• Twitter: how to create a Twitter background using PowerPoint

I will update this on a regular basis.

Learn from psychology to design better sales presentations

I rediscovered an old bookmark of an excellent post on copyblogger today: "12 tips for Psychological Selling". The key idea here is that any purchase is an emotional decision, facts and logic come in second. 

The blog post is written with an online copy writer in mind, but some of these 12 tips can provide useful guidelines for PowerPoint presentation design as well. Especially for sales presentations, or even VC pitches for funding a startup. Maybe not every presentation is about selling something (a product, a company), in the end all presentations are about selling an idea.

1. People make decisions emotionally. 
2. People justify their decisions with facts. Combined with 1: the numbers and stats in your presentation are probably be used to post-rationalize an emotional decision. They are not the key decision driver
3. Peole are ego-centric: what's in it for the PERSON you are presenting to (not just the company he is working for)
4. People look for value
5. People think in terms of people: real-life situations, social interactions, stories are better vehicles to get a point across than logic, data, and analysis
6. You can't force people to do anything: convince them.
7. People love to buy, people love to be sold to: HELP THEM do what they want to do
8. People are naturally suspicious: add testimonials, maybe even a bit of hard data
9. People are always looking for something: love, wealth, glory, comfort. Your presentation needs to link these desires with what you are trying to sell
10. Not really relevant here
11. People like to see it, touch it, feel it, taste it, smell it: good pictures, good diagrams, good demo screens
12. Most people follow the crowd, again testimonials, your customer list, etc.

Many of these concepts also are discussed in the book "Made to stick". One of the most interesting factoids in this book (if I remember it correctly) is that it is actually scientificially proven that requiring to switch on the logical/analytical part of your brain literally turns off your desire to buy into a story.

How to speed up PowerPoint by switching off live preview

Live preview is the function that lets you see the result of an action (another color, another font, etc.) before you click it. Nice but a drain on performance. Here is how to get rid of it:

• Go to the Office button (top left)
• Select PowerPoint options
• Uncheck the live preview box

(PowerPoint 2007)

"The coming end of the middle class"

Weekend reading/viewing. I got to this video by  Harvard Law scholar Elizabeth Warren via Twitter:

There are many "doom" videos and presentations out there at the moment, reinforcing the state of mind of the current economical crisis. This one stands out, and I sat through the entire 57 minutes (skipping the first introduction bits).

Elizabeth managed to make an exact like-for-like / inflation-adjusted comparison between the financial situation of families in the 1970s and the early 2000s. Her main conclusion: Americans haven't taken out all that credit to finance blind purchases of consumption goods such as cars, gadgets, holidays, etc. Some of the messages:

• Per person income hasn't really increased over the past 30 years, women just started to enter the workforce, pushing household incomes up
• Expenditure on items such as appliances, clothing, food (including restaurants) did not really go up
• We did spend a lot more on housing ("parents are buying schools"), child care, healthcare, and college education
• Risk has increased for the highly leveraged 2-kid family: illness, divorce, job loss

This blog is not about economics. But from a presentation perspective, this video is worth watching. The slides are strictly statistical, poorly formated, almost resembling a 1990s overhead sheet, the speaker does not move, still the story is truly captivating. Captivating because many, many people (me included) are looking for the answer to the issue Elizabeth is raising. We just want to stay until the end to find out.

Another example of why giving everything away on page one of your presentation is not always the right thing to do.

The video was recorded on 8 March 2007, added to YouTube on 31 January 2008, but very timely to watch in December 2008.