Episode #9, This is where I Design is live.
Take a listen to a more casual summer episode as we discuss our office setups and favorite things to grill.
Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.
Corporate advertising on the back of a celebrity death? Check. But this Chevy tribute to Prince is undeniably beautiful from a graphic design perspective.
It is still true what they say: Nobody writes songs about Volvos.
You know I love great stories told without words. And this one from the always creative New Yorker hits it out of the ballpark.
Guy Kawasaki has long said that he would never invest in a business that couldn’t make its case in 10 slides. While I’m no venture capitalist like Guy, I’ve seen plenty of pitch and investor decks that had no hope of getting investment—and one of the common themes was far too many slides. When you don’t understand your business well enough to explain it simply, or if your business model is so complicated that it can’t be explained simply, then why would an outside want to invest?
Guy revisits his 10-slide maxim in the below Entrepreneur article.
The always awesome Johanna Rehnvall of Presentitude.com has put together a comprehensive visual guide to the default color themes included in various versions of PowerPoint.
Check it out here!
And if you are looking for a comprehensive guide to PowerPoint’s default fonts and recommended font combinations, check this out also from Presentitude.com.
Episode #3, How, and When, to Hire a Presentation Design Professional is live.
Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.
While most of my training continues to be onsite at clients, you can occasionally catch me online. And I have two upcoming webinars.
This Thursday, April 7, I will again be giving Creating Visual Presentations for the AMA.
This 90-minute session is an overview on how to become a better visual storyteller. We’ll cover proven strategies for reducing text, how to avoid the bullet point trap by using the “chunking” technique, how to harness the picture superiority effect and basic graphic design layout principles to make your presentations look more professional.
For more information and to sign up, click here.
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The next is fo
r my friends at Presentationxpert.com where this time I will be giving a free 1-hour session on Creating an Effective Presentation Story. Much of my training revolves around what to do after you have created a clear and compelling story, but now I’ll take some time to dive into all the things you need to do before you start burying your head in PowerPoint.
In the webinar, I’ll guide you through creating your own persuasive presentation structure step by step, and reveal each question that needs to be answered along the way. From the very first and most important determining piece of information (it’s not what you think…) to identifying your audience, creating singular messaging, calls to action, simple ideation techniques and easy outlining.
You’ll learn how to define your “Point A” and your “Point B,” how to write your presentation bumper sticker and how to use certain PowerPoint tools to your advantage to stay organized.
I’ll even discuss what makes good a header and how to avoid jargon and business-speak.
Sign up for free here!
My friends at UK-based Eyeful Presentations has teamed up with Microsoft on a tutorial series on how to create powerful presentations. Check it out!
Justin Bretschneider just released an incredibly cool free add-in for PowerPoint (PC-only) called Neo/Ipsum.
Often, one has to begin design of a presentation before all content has been written, and so very often designers will place “greeked” text in headers and text boxes to show how the slide will look down the road. You can laboriously cut and paste Lorem Ipsum or use PowerPoint’s secret key commands of =lorem() and =rand(), but you still need to do this one slide and one text box at a time. This is where Neo/Ipsum comes in.
After a painless install, just select the new “Fill Placeholders” button on your Insert ribbon, choose which slides you want to work on, select one of a number of types of dummy text (Classic Lorem Ipsum, Hipster Ipsum, Famous Final Words Ipsum, and a few others) and hit confirm. That’s it.
The add-in turns empty slides with empty placeholders like this…
Into this…
Download it here!
