In some presentation slides, the grid is obvious: a data table is an example. But also without the explicit lines of a table structure, you can recognize a grid in almost any composition you make. A diagram, the positioning of boxes on a slide, even a big picture with a few words of text. Recognize the grid structure, imagine the hidden lines and make sure everything lines up and is spaced out nicely. It will make for a much better slide composition.
If you are ready to dive in to hard core literature on the use of grids in graphics design, I can recommend the 1981 book Grid Systems (affiliate link) by Swiss graphics design master Josef Mueller-Brockmann (some of his poster design are in this Flickr set). The big issue for print designers is to juggle around text columns and images. Presentation slides are a bit different, but still the conceptual approach applies to them as well.
Visual memory
A year after discovering it, I finally got around to reading Moonwalking with Einstein (affiliate link), by Joshua Foer. A journalist gets fascinated by memory championships, and takes on the challenge to participate himself. On the way he explains how to train your memory, and puts memory in a historical context.
Why am I interested in these types of books? Presentations are all about helping people remember your story. We all know that forcing people to remember bullet points be repeating and repeating and repeating them does not work. The brain needs a visual story around which to store your message.
And it turns out that is exactly what memory champions do. They commit random numbers, names, facts, to rooms in virtual memory palaces in their brain. These palaces are often based on places the contestants know very well: a home, a school, a library. In these rooms, the objects are placed in the most outrageous (memorable) ways possible, including smells and sounds. After you put everything there, you can simply take a walk in your virtual memory palace and see all objects in front of you.
Scientists now think that the brain actually never forgets anything (capacity: 10-100TB). The problem is accessing the information. The brain needs an emotional stimulus (smell, visual) to unlock its memory. Slightly different than a indexed memory access of a computer. People think that we are so good at remembering places, locations, stories is survival: how to find a place with food, and then more importantly, how to find the way back home was a more useful skill in the stone age than remembering phone numbers.
With these techniques, you can teach yourself to remember thousands of unrelated items. And it just shows the power of the brain. Remembering is actually pretty simple when compared to the computing power it takes to coordinate hitting a baseball mid air.
Scientist think that forgetting is important for our mental well being. Just remembering everything is very stressful and distracting. That is the reason why some people with brain dammage can perform these extraordinary memory stunts.
The book gives interesting insight in our learning process. The brain is lazy and tries to put things in auto-pilot mode as soon as possible (driving a car for example). Once there, it does not consume a lot of energy, and does not cause distraction to do other tasks. Sometimes people experience this with learning. The cure to this is to move yourself outside the comfort zone, start trying, and most important of all make sure you are exposed to a direct feedback loop to tell your brain what worked, and what did not.
But what is the point of memorizing anything in the current time of abundant digital storage? The author argues that creativity in fact is future memory. You need to be able to provide sufficient hooks to stick new ideas, new insights to.
An interesting read.
Why am I interested in these types of books? Presentations are all about helping people remember your story. We all know that forcing people to remember bullet points be repeating and repeating and repeating them does not work. The brain needs a visual story around which to store your message.
And it turns out that is exactly what memory champions do. They commit random numbers, names, facts, to rooms in virtual memory palaces in their brain. These palaces are often based on places the contestants know very well: a home, a school, a library. In these rooms, the objects are placed in the most outrageous (memorable) ways possible, including smells and sounds. After you put everything there, you can simply take a walk in your virtual memory palace and see all objects in front of you.
Scientists now think that the brain actually never forgets anything (capacity: 10-100TB). The problem is accessing the information. The brain needs an emotional stimulus (smell, visual) to unlock its memory. Slightly different than a indexed memory access of a computer. People think that we are so good at remembering places, locations, stories is survival: how to find a place with food, and then more importantly, how to find the way back home was a more useful skill in the stone age than remembering phone numbers.
With these techniques, you can teach yourself to remember thousands of unrelated items. And it just shows the power of the brain. Remembering is actually pretty simple when compared to the computing power it takes to coordinate hitting a baseball mid air.
Scientist think that forgetting is important for our mental well being. Just remembering everything is very stressful and distracting. That is the reason why some people with brain dammage can perform these extraordinary memory stunts.
The book gives interesting insight in our learning process. The brain is lazy and tries to put things in auto-pilot mode as soon as possible (driving a car for example). Once there, it does not consume a lot of energy, and does not cause distraction to do other tasks. Sometimes people experience this with learning. The cure to this is to move yourself outside the comfort zone, start trying, and most important of all make sure you are exposed to a direct feedback loop to tell your brain what worked, and what did not.
But what is the point of memorizing anything in the current time of abundant digital storage? The author argues that creativity in fact is future memory. You need to be able to provide sufficient hooks to stick new ideas, new insights to.
An interesting read.
Writing versus speaking
This blog post by YCombinator founder Paul Graham on writing versus speaking is worth reading start to finish.
What he says is probably inspired by the many conference speakers he saw. A big brand gets up the stage, unprepared, slightly rambling, but charismatic and full of catchy sound bites. In the end, when you look back, she actually did not say that much. Writing a good story is much harder.
This is what I encounter in presentation design every day. It is hard to design that story, but when you crack it, it often can be said in very little words but full of real content and insight.
But then again, I think that conference audiences are not always looking for that piece of insight or intellectual stimulation. Maybe they just want to laugh and have a good time.
What he says is probably inspired by the many conference speakers he saw. A big brand gets up the stage, unprepared, slightly rambling, but charismatic and full of catchy sound bites. In the end, when you look back, she actually did not say that much. Writing a good story is much harder.
This is what I encounter in presentation design every day. It is hard to design that story, but when you crack it, it often can be said in very little words but full of real content and insight.
But then again, I think that conference audiences are not always looking for that piece of insight or intellectual stimulation. Maybe they just want to laugh and have a good time.
Lego Simpsons
I love Lego. The ad below looks like a PowerPoint column chart, but also like the Simpsons family. It shows the power of imagination that many of us forget about when we grow up. (More ads here on Ads of the World).
Where to start?
Common presentation design wisdom is to start your design process by going analogue, sketching an outline on a piece of paper, on yellow stickers on a whiteboard, or in a mind mapping app. That is one of three components I start a presentation design with. Two others:
- A completely finished, random slide that is easy to make (a financial forecast for example) and just looks great to design the overall look and feel for the deck, yes going straight in to slide design software at hour 0
- A sketch of “killer chart”, a diagram that is the core of the whole story, the most important concept that needs to come across.
With these 3 pieces done, the biggest creative problems have been solved, and it boils down to executing your design.
Crappy fonts, better recall?
Here is an interesting piece of research published in Harvard Business Review: if you make text hard to read, people remember it better. Backed up by hard data. The possible explanation: when you go slower and you are less confident about understanding something, you concentrate more.
I agree with one of the commenters in the article: if you have to understand something, this might work. But if you are up against an audience who has better things to do than reading your material (i.e., a potential customer), I think you better make sure your material is readable.
What do you think, do you agree?
Thank you to to Akash Bhatia.
I agree with one of the commenters in the article: if you have to understand something, this might work. But if you are up against an audience who has better things to do than reading your material (i.e., a potential customer), I think you better make sure your material is readable.
What do you think, do you agree?
Thank you to to Akash Bhatia.
Mac screen to TV - wirelessly
I think that wireless video technology will transform home entertainment and the corporate conference room. In the latter, hopefully we might see the end of battles with laptops, cables, and projectors before we can get down to showing our presentation. It will take time before the last conference room is Airplay enabled, but I am keen to accelerate things.
It is already possible to Airplay iPhone and iPad screens on your Apple TV, but font issues still complicate the transfer of presentation files from computers to mobile devices. Currently, Airplay mirroring is not supported for Macs. The next version of Mac OSX will allow Airplay mirroring of Mac screens wirelessly to your Apple TV.
If you cannot wait, well, there is an app for that. Airparrot enables sending your Mac screen wirelessly to you Apple TV ($10). The app has many customization features, allowing you to adjust the performance/quality trade off and select which screens you want to transfer, or even which apps. You can switch off the cursor.
Still we are not yet living in the world of 1-click Airplaying of video. Television screens have a lower resolution than computer screens. So before using the app, you need to downgrade your Mac display to 1280x800, the closest to my Apple TV 1280x720 resolution. After that some fiddling with the screen remote to get the right aspect ratio. The resulting screen sharpness is OK, but not the pin-sharp feel you get from watching an HD movie. It is perfectly fine to play presentation slides (which are often 1024x768), but less than optimal for other applications.
Soon we will all laugh about this. Until then, a struggle to get rid of the cables.
It is already possible to Airplay iPhone and iPad screens on your Apple TV, but font issues still complicate the transfer of presentation files from computers to mobile devices. Currently, Airplay mirroring is not supported for Macs. The next version of Mac OSX will allow Airplay mirroring of Mac screens wirelessly to your Apple TV.
If you cannot wait, well, there is an app for that. Airparrot enables sending your Mac screen wirelessly to you Apple TV ($10). The app has many customization features, allowing you to adjust the performance/quality trade off and select which screens you want to transfer, or even which apps. You can switch off the cursor.
Still we are not yet living in the world of 1-click Airplaying of video. Television screens have a lower resolution than computer screens. So before using the app, you need to downgrade your Mac display to 1280x800, the closest to my Apple TV 1280x720 resolution. After that some fiddling with the screen remote to get the right aspect ratio. The resulting screen sharpness is OK, but not the pin-sharp feel you get from watching an HD movie. It is perfectly fine to play presentation slides (which are often 1024x768), but less than optimal for other applications.
Soon we will all laugh about this. Until then, a struggle to get rid of the cables.
5 ways to present on iPad
I am switching my own introduction presentation to iPad/iPhone, leaving my laptop home as a I go to meetings and instead bringing a small iOS to VGA converter cable with me (Airplaying the presentation to a big screen only works in my own office for the moment). I would recommend this to anyone who constantly needs to have her pitch/sales presentation ready to go.
As a result, I am trying all possible ways to view slides on my iPad. Only Keynote users have a perfect solution (Keynote), if you use other formats it is still compromising. In my case for example, I need PowerPoint to show example presentations that I designed a while ago. And a second complication is that I use a few custom fonts...
So here are your options, I use Dropbox to sync my files, it is still a lot more convenient than iCloud.
What are your experiences?
As a result, I am trying all possible ways to view slides on my iPad. Only Keynote users have a perfect solution (Keynote), if you use other formats it is still compromising. In my case for example, I need PowerPoint to show example presentations that I designed a while ago. And a second complication is that I use a few custom fonts...
So here are your options, I use Dropbox to sync my files, it is still a lot more convenient than iCloud.
- Keynote to Keynote. Straightforward and simple. Download in Dropbox, tick open in Keynote and you are all set. When you are in presenter mode, you get a preview of the next slide on your iPad, while the audience just sees the current slide on the projector. Only works with standard fonts that are installed on the iPad.
- PowerPoint to Keynote. This works surprisingly well (if you use standard fonts). Download the PowerPoint file in Dropbox, tap open in Keynote and you have a file which is 95% OK. However, I am a perfectionist, and the 5% needs to be right as well.
- SlideShark is iPad app specifically designed for presenting slides. You can upload PowerPoint files to their server, or tap a dropbox or email link and tell the iPad to open the file in SlideShark. The interface is nice, with the option to move randomly between slide tiles (which the audience cannot see) to break the lineair flow of a deck. SlideShark preserves animations in your slide. Using a special font requires a request to SlideShark technical support to install it in the data center. Unlike Keynote, SlideShark does not support the standard Apple fonts (such as Helvetica) SlideShark is not yet retina-optimized I think, the image looks slightly hazy on my screen, but I am sure an update will follow soon. The app has still some childhood diseases at the moment but it could be a clear winner in the future as the team there seems to working hard to make it work among larger competitors who are less focussed iPad presenting (i.e., Microsoft).
- PDF to Adobe Reader for iPad. Convert your PowerPoint file to PDF on your desktop, download it via Dropbox and select to open it in Adobe's Reader app (free). Fonts come out perfectly. The display is crystal clear, and the Adobe Reader app for iPad has a good full screen mode (unlike other document readers). Obviously PDF does not support animations
- PowerPoint to Adobe CreatePDF for iPad. The Adobe CreatePDF app works reasonably well for me (I do not understand all the 1-star ratings on iTunes), but (and it is a big but), only if you use standard fonts (and are willing to invest $10) and your deck does not have animations.
What are your experiences?
iPad sales app in practice?
I just got contacted by a journalist who is doing an article about the iPad as a sales tool, integrating the functions of a presentation platform and a catalogue/ordering system. I came up with iRep as an example. Do any of you know any other applications, and even better examples of companies that use this in the field?
Visualizing 6 million
Today is Holocaust Remembrance day in Israel and the country will come to a standstill for 2 minutes to think of those who lost their lives. Here is a small presentation I designed to try to put the number 6 million in perspective.
Remembering 6 million Holocaust victims
View more PowerPoint from Idea Transplant
Searching Instagram images
Stock images sites are full of images that are not real (post from 2008). Images from Flickr with a creative commons license are a great alternative. But recently Instagram is taking over as a great source of images. The site searchinstagram.com allows you to search images on a desktop (Instagram is a mobile-only application). If you want to use an image in your presentation, you need to send the person who took it a message, because she owns all the rights to material posted on Intagram.
Instagram is the new Flickr.
Instagram is the new Flickr.
Fixing standard data charts
Standard data charts in PowerPoint and Excel look ugly. Here is how I usually fix them. A raw screencast with som uhs and ohs, I am still experimenting with the software to see whether I can make these videos more often.
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