Be aware of the most recent iStockPhoto price hike

I just noticed that iStockPhoto has increased prices over the weekend. A medium-sized image now costs 10 credits instead of 6. That means that such an image costs around $15 depending on the pricing plan you use.

What image sources are you using for your presentations?

Grunge fonts

I must admit, I am ignoring my own earlier assertions about not using non-standard fonts in presentations. PCs do not come with Helvetica installed, and I love it. In most cases, embedding the font inside the PowerPoint presentation makes sure that people can use it on other computers as well.

Helvetica is a relatively tame font. Selectively you can go a bit wilder. The image below (taken from the excellent Google LIFE image archive) mixed together with the Boycott font gives that instant jeans commercial effect. Here is an example of a presentation that uses something similar. Obviously, these type of fonts are only to be used for big image/huge font presentations, and probably not in every presentation you make.

Making a photo cutout in PowerPoint (redux)

Readers from the early days will remember similar posts, but I want to bring up the subject of cutouts again. Recently, I started using them more, especially in combination with randomly drawn shapes.

1. Fill the background of a slide with an image. Right-click the slide, select [format background], select [Picture or texture fill] and select a file. Note that this is different from simply copying a page-covering image on your slide.
   
   
2. Copy another image over it.
   
   
3. Draw a shape, I like using random shapes.
   
   
4. Right-click the shape and select [Format shape], [Fill], [Slide background fill], and add an inner shadow for additional effect.
   
   

Images found on iStockPhoto.com.

Develping confident PowerPoint "brush strokes"

OK, this concept is somewhat hard to explain. I will give it a try, but I am not sure I can get it across in a blog post. Here we go:

Paint is irreversible: therefore a painter must get it right a first time, or otherwise face extensive fix up work. The more experience the painter gets, the more confident a painter becomes. It is better to make a (small) mistake than restrict yourself to making timid and boring paintings.

The starry night, Vincent van Gogh, 1889, oil on canvas, 74x92cm, MoMa, New York

I notice something similar in presentation design. Be confident as your design your slide in "analogue mode", scribbling on a piece of paper. Be confident to open the PowerPoint screen, delete all Microsoft bullets and start adding elements from your design: box, box box, align, arrow, etc. Make them big, bold, confident, but minimalist.

In this way you work faster, and slides come out more natural. It is all about confidence.

Maybe this post does a better job in explaining.

A presentation about Steve Jobs' presentations

Following my recent review of the book The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, here is a nice presentation summarizing the content of the book.

The Presentation Secrets Of Steve Jobs

Thank you Nancy Duarte for pointing me to this. Disclosure: links on this blogs to Amazon are affiliate links, I earn a small commission when you purchase products through them.

Formating an Excel table in PowerPoint (under time pressure)

At 11PM on the evening before the Board meeting, the finance department emails you a horribly looking PowerPoint deck full of copied tables from Excel with the latest quarterly results. There is no time to start designing beautiful data charts. What emergency fixes can you do?

Here are a few suggestions:

• Select the the table and set the fonts and font sizes to the ones you are using throughout the presentation. (Get rid of that Excel Arial)
• Remove as many abbreviations as you can
• Right-align the row labels
• Right-align the numbers
• Take out decimal points, or add decimal points so that the numbers align
• Round up to whole millions, billions if you can
• Select the columns with data and distribute them, set them to be exactly the same width
• Put repeated words ("M&S" in my example) to the right
• Center the column headings
• Bold up the totals
• Get rid of as many borders as you can
• Add some subtle grey tones to differentiate columns

Click on the image for a bigger picture.

Book review - "The presentation secrets of Steve Jobs"

Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, is a public speaking legend, and in The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, author Carmine Callo aims to give you everything you need in order to be "insanely great in front of any audience" (as he puts it).
When I started of reading the book I was not that enthusiastic. The book repeats a lot of the speaking basics that are covered by other authors on the same subject. A very good overview for someone who has not read many public speaking books.

But later on in the book it became more interesting for me, as Gallo goes into the detail of a number of keynote addresses by Steve. As it turns out, Gallo is a speaking coach who works a lot in the high tech sector, a field I recognize since my local clients often are in the Israeli technology industry.
Flicking back through the pages, here are some of the ideas I highlighted:

• The book made be reconsider my aversion towards video in presentations (because it causes so many technological problems). Maybe 10 years later, technology has moved on and it is time to think about incorporating (very short) fragments of video.
• "Your audience does not care about your product, people care about themselves". A good reminder when creating presentations that need to sell technology products loaded with features.
• The concept of "reality distortion field", being such a good speaker that the audience is basically ready to accept anything from you
• A reminder how important headlines are
• A reminder how important it is to practice (if there is one public speaking tip that is important, this one is it). And building on this: you actually need to practice in order to sound spontaneous and speak naturally. Winging a presentation with improvised language and "uhs" and "ohs" does not sound spontaneous and natural.
• That you need to be Steve Jobs in order to dress like Steve Jobs in a key note presentation.
• The important of "signalling" making it completely and utterly obvious what the point of your slide/image is. No brain puzzles for your audience.
• Great speakers remain calm and confident when something unexpected happened, see this video full of Apple bloopers:

All in all, I enjoyed reading this book. It is particularly useful if you belong to one of two categories: 1) people who have not read a lot of public speaking books before (this is a good overview), 2) people who have not read a lot of books about Steve Jobs before (I am part of this one).

Here is a 7 minute video by Carmine Gallo in which he talks about many of the topics that are discussed in the book as well.

Disclosure: links on this blog to Amazon are affiliate links, I earn a small commission when you buy products through them.

Everything in excess

This ad reminds me of many poor PowerPoint slides I see. It sure grabs the attention, but that's probably also the only thing it does.

Let people communicate like never before, let's try to achieve that in 2010 but in a more positive way. A happy new year to you all.

A bigger picture on Ads of the World.

Five presentation images your audience will not understand

It is important that your audience "gets" the image on a slide immediately, otherwise they will be staring at it, thinking about it, trying to solve the puzzle, in short everything but return their attention to you as the speaker.

Some reasons why an image that makes perfect sense to you in your office might not work for a big audience:

1. The clue is in the small print (as in the image used in this post). Put a big marker to draw the attention to the sentence that matters
2. Incredibly busy compositions, Times Square in New York, a screen shot of a video game
3. Cartoons with a lot of text. Things get worse when a small cartoon image is scaled up, leaving a poor picture quality. Give your audience time to read it, and may black out the screen to focus attention back on you
4. (Too) interesting people: an image of the red carpet during Oscar night might make people wander off and examine those beautiful dresses rather than listen to your story about Business Process Redesign
5. Clever graphics such as an Escher drawing. "Hey, how did he do that?"

Avoid slide elements with negative connotations

I really like red as a bright contrasting color to put comments or circles on busy slides. Until a meeting with people in the Finance Department of one of my big corporate clients. "Can you please take the red off, in our (financial) language red equals bad news".

Three things to avoid in slide design:

1. Bright red highlights in fonts, especially when talking about numbers
2. Arrows pointing down (if you want to visualize something positive), why not redesign the slide and have them point up?
3. Lines, sequences, or page elements that force the eye to go from top left to bottom right. The milestone graphic in this earlier post is a good example.

As always, these are not rules to be set in stone, it is just another piece of slide design context that you should be aware of.

The most expensive printing paper does not always look the best

Printers will always try to sell you the heaviest paper with the glossiest finish. If you are not printing the new corporate brochure or annual report, but need to make nice books of your PowerPoint presentation, I would go for a more modest choice of paper. It looks a lot better and costs a lot less.

Image via airgap

The best wishes for 2010

I would like to wish all readers happy holidays and a healthy and prosperous 2010. From a presentation perspective, try to make a difference in 2010, for example:

• If you are working in an organization with a conservative approach to presentations, try to find an opportunity to demonstrate a different way to get your message across, spreading the ideas we talk about here to more people.
• If you are a professional presentation designer consider donating some of your time to a really important cause and design the best possible presentation for it.

Since Tel Aviv is bright, warm, and sunny today, and probably the only Xmas tree in the city is put up in my apartment, I actually enjoy watching some of these old masters that have been put too many times on post cards:

Pieter Breugel the Elder, 1565, Hunters in the snow, Oil on wood, 117x162cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

A presentation review

You can learn a lot from regularly checking out the SlideShare front page. Here is a presentation that caught my eye. What I like about it:

• A consistent theme of the images throughout the presentation: (mostly) black and white, retro images of workplace scenes
• Original typography
• A very simple list structure, counting down from 14 to 1

Some items that I like less:

• Inconsistent use of colors (probably done on purpose though)
• The grunge font and use of colors make the text sometimes hard to read over the image background
• Putting text in vertical boxes, it looks cute but is hard to read
• The transition from the presentation content to the "contact me" last page, the beautiful presentation falls back into a more common PowerPoint format including bullet points

14 Signs You Need A New Approach To Performance Appraisals

PPT hack - custom chart templates

The standard PowerPoint templates do not look very good. The standard slide layout invites people to write presentations through endless lists of bullet points. But even more time-consuming to change are the standard templates for data charts.

This earlier post with a make-over of a column chart in a presentation by Skype shows some of the pain a presentation designer has to go through over and over again to create decent data charts. It took me around 17 years to discover the option to create your own templates. Let's save you this time, right now.

If you click a chart in PowerPoint 2007, you can find the "save as template" button in the "design" ribbon of the chart. (Confusingly, two "design" ribbons pop up when you have a chart open, one for the chart, one for the slide). Give your template a name and PowerPoint 2007 will save it in the appropriate directory (with a ".CRTX" extension, but you do not need to worry about that).

The next time you select "insert chart", a folder appears at the top of the standard PowerPoint options, open it to create a data chart using your own customer templates.

The color orange - since 1512

While reading Chris Brogan's latest book Trust Agents, I came across this interesting factoid: until only very recently there was no word for the color "orange" in Western European languages. Chris claims that it is the main reason why we talk about "red heads" or "goldfish".

Research on Wikipedia provides more background:

The colour is named after the orange fruit, introduced to Europe via the Sanskrit word nāranja. Before this was introduced to the English-speaking world, the colour was referred to (in Old English) as geoluhread, which translates into Modern English as yellow-red. The first recorded use of orange as a colour name in English was in 1512, in the court of King Henry VIII.

Chart concept - the zipper

This ad by CNN reminds me of a chart concept that I use often to uncover things: the zipper. It can easily be replicated in PowerPoint using two approaches:

• Select a stock image and remove the background color if necessary. An example here, or here, or this nice bag full of cash that you will return to your investors in 4 years.
• If you are in an artistic mood you can actually recreate the zipper using basic PowerPoint rectangles, maybe using straight lines instead of curved ones.

Via Ads of the World

Logos on PPT slides / logos on corporate gifts

It's the time of the year for corporate gifts. Many of these could be really nice, where it not for that huge corporate logo that makes you shelve a beautiful pencil instead of using it. A waste. If your gift is nice, you do not need to remind people that it was you who gave it to you, they will remember.

Most corporate PowerPoint templates waste a lot of screen real estate on elaborate graphics to make sure that the audience does not forget who the employer of the presenter is. This is not only a waste of space, but these graphics also disturb the overall balance of the slide. A far better way to reinforce your corporate identity is to use the corporate colors consistently through your presentation. No need for logos.

So far, a consistent message. But what if the presentation is poor, and people walk in and out of the conference room, check email, make a phone call or get a much-needed coffee? In that case, you might need a reminder of who is speaking when you re-enter the room. Maybe template designers just anticipate this situation...

Don't underline

Don't underline, ever. It does not look good. There are other ways to emphasize a word. Make it bold, change the word's color. Love these tiny blog posts.

Book review - Confessions of a public speaker

There are many books on public speaking, which probably makes sense: people who are good at speaking on stage usually also enjoy spreading their ideas in print. Many of these follow the same pattern: the experienced speaker explains to us (inexperienced novices who "hum", read out bullets from the screen, and avoid eye contact with the audience) how we can improve our stage performance.

Confessions of a Public Speaker is different. Scott Berkun is a public speaker, he does it for a living. What makes this book so interesting is that he discusses his own mistakes, failures, and stage fright. He puts into practice one of his techniques to gain credibility with your audience: tell the truth and be honest.

Here are some of the examples of the interesting experience and advice that are discussed in the book. Yes, taken out of their context and in random order:

• Why it is not useful to imagine your audience naked
• Even if (you think) you fail miserably on stage, the audience probably won't notice
• You have the mike, you are in control, do something nice for the audience (ask to change the freezing temperature of the A/C)
• Don't talk endlessly about yourself and your resume
• I love the chapter about "eating the microphone". When you start a presentation you have all the attention, the audience really wants you to do well, If things go bad, you will hit a point that you lose the audience, nobody is paying attention anymore. You ate the microphone.
• It pays of to learn how to write better headlines/presentation titles
• Anticipate the obvious question that any intelligent audience member would ask.
• The concept of interference (taken from physics): the audience is still digesting one point when you bring on the next. As a result, both points are lost.

The most important thing we learn from the personal experiences and mistakes of Scott is to practice, practice, practice. Never try to wing a presentation.

Disclosure: O'Reilly mailed me a free copy of this book for review. I earn a small commission on products you buy on Amazon via links on this site.

As promised my solution to the NYT infographic

Here is my suggested solution to yesterday's puzzle: improving the NYT's infographic that explains how a value-added tax works. Let me know what you think and/or whether you have alternative suggestions. You can click on the image for a larger picture.