Buying Presentation Graphics

Last week, Duarte Design, launched Duarte Diagrammer, an online store offering pre-made presentation diagrams and graphics. All graphics are downloadable as PPT files, whereupon they can be edited, recolored and further customized. Duarte is certainly not the first to this game, but I do like their iTunes-like pricing (everything is 99 cents) and the categorization that attempts to help the user identify exactly the type of diagram they need. Many of the diagrams will be familiar to readers of Nancy’s excellent book, Slide:ology, which includes a healthy section on various diagrams and process graphics.

It should be no secret by now that I’m all for shortcuts for presentation design—such as reusing elements from previous presentation, using PPT’s tools instead of Photoshop and even “stealing”. But, I have another dirty secret, and that is that on occasion I actually buy other people’s work in the form of pre-made graphics.

Get Out the Credit Card

Because I have the skills to create many graphics myself, most often I do fire up the sketch pad or Illustrator or PPT and start building needed graphics from scratch. (Sometimes, I will also make use of pre-made vector stock files.)

But every so often, I have a need for a presentation graphic that someone has already spent a lot of time and thought creating. So I get out my credit card.

A recent client insisted that their product line be shown as a hierarchical pyramid. Okay. I wanted to give them a 3D pyramid, but I couldn’t find anything with the right number of levels in my past work or on any professional stock site (like Shutterstock or Getty.) But I did find a perfect set of 40 PowerPoint-ready pyramids at PresentationLoad.com. So, $29 and 3 minutes later, I had my pyramid and continued working on the content. Sure, I could have spent an hour or two perfecting the perspective myself in Illustrator, then importing into PowerPoint, but it just wasn’t worth the time. Take a look—you can buy the same pyramid right here. 

What’s Your Time Worth?

My friend Mike Parkinson runs a great site called BizGraphicsOnDemand.com, and puts it to me this way a few years ago:

“What’s your time worth? Isn’t spending a few bucks on a pre-made graphic better than spending hours designing it yourself when the result will be the same or probably even better?”

He’s right. I’ve bought a few things from him over the years. Mike’s site also has really nice categorization, and if you’re interested in really learning how to create and choose the right business graphics, I suggest Mike’s seminars, book and other resources which you learn about at his other site, BillionDollarGraphics.com.

Graphics, Not Templates

The above are just a few that sites provide quality elements for your presentations, but there are many more you can find that will sell you whole template designs. The reason I’m not recommending those sites is because I’m a firm believer that you don’t actually need templates for presentations. If you missed it, I discussed that in a guest post at Indezine.com. But since a graphic itself very often is the focus of a slide, by all means take advantage of those who have tread before you…