The trouble with 99% perfect photo compositions

See the ad below. Something is not right. It is hard to see what it exactly is, but the image is not natural. The light? The shadows? The 3D proportions?

Photo manipulations are increasingly easy to make, but the technology of image editing is not the problem. We already learn as a child that getting 3D to look right on a 2D canvas is hard. Architects and designers use a full 3D design environment to create realistic-looking simulations.

But, a 3D composition can look great even if the designer does not even bother to get the proportions right. Art would be have been incredibly boring if painters had stuck to the conventions all the time. Luckily they did not.

The problem are those compositions that are almost right, but not 100%. Look at the ad: very good technical execution, no ruffled borders around the sheep, drop shadows re-created, letters embedded in the fur: far better than most PowerPoint designers (including me) could do. Still the viewer is distracted: what is going on here? A distracted audience does not absorb messages.

In short: distort reality completely or forget about photo compositions all together.

Related, one of my earlier posts contains some useful links about photo manipulations.

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Practice, practice, practice - please read the body of this post as well

Practice, practice, practice.

Every public speaking book talks about it (this one and this one for example). Every presentation design and public speaker blogger repeats it all the time. So much so, that it is tempting just to speed read over the paragraph to get to the cool stuff about adding that 3D shadow to your slide. "Hey, I am a confident speaker, ticked that box"

Some sentences to get you to change your mind:

• Steve Jobs practices for roughly 2 days full time before his keynotes
• When your are confident you know your stuff, test yourself: close the office door and do the first 3 slides as if it were the real thing. Did that came out brilliantly? If it did, congratulations, because this first test run is exactly how your opening would have come out in front of a large audience. If it did not go that well, congratulations, you just got yourself a good incentive to start practicing.
• Spontaneity does not equal winging your story, a good movie actress can only come across spontaneous if she now her stuff inside out
• If you know your material inside out, all the presentation professional's talk about cutting bullet points and clutter will come naturally to you: you do not need on-screen speaker notes anymore.

Nobody likes to look at stressed people

Almost all my presentations (fundraising, sales pitches) start with some sort of description of a "pain" that needs to be solved. It is very tempting to go to a stock image site and fill the first page with an image of someone who is clearly suffering big time. I have been guilty of this as well.

I am moving away from this. Nobody likes to look at pictures of people in trouble. (Maybe this is a deep instinct, I remember how they use sounds of birds under great stress around airports to prevent them flying into jet engines.) Often these images are acted out and not natural. Using them takes the aesthetics out of your presentation.
Below an example of 2 approaches. The left image is a contestant in a mobile phone throwing championship about to toss her handset into the air, I replaced her with a more neutral-looking mobile phone subscriber. The text in the image is illustrative.

The vertical center that feels right to the eye

If you use big title headings on your PowerPoint slide, the exact vertical center of the slide might not feel natural to the eye. I suggest centering items slightly lower. Here is how you can find the exact location where to set your drawing guides.

1. Draw a random shape in between the top and bottom drawing guide
2. Switch on "snap to other objects" (arrange-align-grid settings-snap to other objects)
3. Select the shape to make its center marker visible
4. Drag the middle horizontal drawing guide to the center of the shape, it should "snap"

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.

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