Designers have created minimalist movie posters before, but Michal Krasnopolski hit it out of the park with his take by limiting everything to this simple square/circle grid:
Great limitations can lead to great design…check out all the posters here.
If you liked the saddest chart in Congress, prepare to feast on Floor Charts, a new Tumblr site cataloguing the mediocre, the bad and the horrendous charts our elected reps use as part of their floor debates.
Hat tip to FastCo Design.
And yet I love it and can’t look away…
Love this ad…
Loved this Thai restaurant’s menu use of images in type.
I ordered my dishes “three elephants” style.
First things first: You should ALWAYS endeavor to create a distinctly different leave behind for your presentation if a leave behind is necessary. It should be much more detailed, function more like a printed document and NOT simply be a printout of your on-screen slides.
There are a lot of strategies and tricks for creating a more detailed leave behind from your slides, and I’ll be discussing some of these in my session at this year’s Presentation Summit.
BUT … creating TWO items for a presentation is a challenge, and sometimes you do just have to “hand your slides out.” Whatever the content of these handouts looks like—and whether they are different from your on screen slides or not—there are still simple ways to have them be not so “PowerPoint-y.”
This one is so simple I can’t believe I never thought of it until recently when my project manager Dave suggested it for a very thin client proposal we felt would have seemed unsubstantial on normal paper. If you have a thin deck, printing on cardstock will make it seem literally and figuratively more weighty. Use a nice coated stock.
It’s not just more green, but it can also make your slides seem less like a deck and more like a document. A simple layout change in your masters can place logos, page numbers and even headers on alternating sides of the page, so the end product does feel more designed.
A “bleed” is when imagery and graphics extend beyond the edge of the page without a white border. To do this for an entire deck, you’ll need the help of a printshop that will print your presentation on larger than needed pages, then trim everything down. For trimming, there needs to be at least 1/8″ on all sides that will be trimmed away, so your end document will be slightly smaller than your document page size unless you account for this (set up a letter-sized PPT file as 8.75″ x 11.25″). Or, if you have a really good printer, he can actually blow up a document 1-2% before trimming back down to normal page size.
And of course, you’ll need to design your presentation with content that does bleed off the page edges. But make sure that any important information is at least 1/2″ from the edge—this is called a “safe zone.”
If you do nothing special on your slides themselves, at least create a well-designed cover page. Use a full page hi-res image and make sure it bleeds off the page. To create this, you’ll either have to have the cover printed at a printshop or Kinko’s or you can print on 11×17 paper in-house and trim it yourself. And while you’re at it, make a back cover as well so you have a full attention-getting wrapper for your presentation.
Whatever you do, avoid that awful plastic comb binding! If you’ve made friends with a good local printer, they can offer you more professional binding solutions such as wire or perfect-binding. If you do a lot of binding, replace that comb binding machine with a wire spiral binding one. We bought ours from these guys who are pretty good.
If you’re trying to stand out among competitors, consider distributing your presentation in an unusual size. For big, involved presentations set up your file and print at tabloid (11×17). Or legal-sized (8.5×14) for something different but not as unwieldy. Finally, you can go the other way and print at a very small size. A printer can take your standard-sized presentation and print it at 50% of size to create more of a handbook for your audience. Note that whatever size your PowerPoint file is, it will still scale to fill the screen in presentation mode.
If you really want your leave behind to standout, design your PowerPoint file as “spreads”—a double-sided print style in which content and layouts are designed as pairs of facing pages (just like a magazine.) This is an admittedly advanced solution in which you hack PowerPoint to work like a professional layout program, and it can involve bleeds and content that actually stretches from slide to slide (like a panoramic photo that lives half on one slide, half on the next.) If you’re clever, you can create a spreads presentation that also works on screen. Stay tuned for more on spreads in the future…
I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday and did a double-take in an exhibit called “Storytelling in Japanese Art.” (How could I miss an exhibit with the word “storytelling” in it…?) In artworks and hand painted scrolls going back to the 14th century, the Japanese were all over the use of perpective and exploded graphics to show characters and explain the story being told. Need to show a domestic scene? Remove the roof!
Many illustrations reminded me exactly of Google Sketchup.
The coolest items were a series of long hand scrolls meant to be unrolled and rolled as the story is read left to right. The diagonal perspective actually leads the eye to the right urging continued reading.
Oh, and there was a healthy balance of type and imagery…
If you were in control, how would you present the world’s most important information? Written document? Speech? Video? Stone tablets? …PowerPoint?
Earlier this month the CIA declassified seven video intelligence briefings created for Ronald Reagan which got me thinking about Presidential presentation.
Arguably, some of the most vital contemporary information comes either from or to the President of the United States. And it’s interesting to note the various methods Presidents have used to communicate.
At the end of the day, the most lasting and world-changing presentations tend to be the unadorned live speech. Lincoln redefined America with 272 spoken words at Gettysburg. FDR calmed and connected with the nation through his radio fireside chats. Kennedy inspired millions with idealistic speech such as the Man on the Moon speech to Congress. And Reagan mourned for the country with his Challenger disaster address.
While we have had a Presidential candidate present with PowerPoint (not a rousing success) and we’ve seen gubernatorial PowerPoint, we haven’t yet had a full-fledged slide presentation by a President.
Obama has come very close though with his State of the Union speeches. If you were in the House chamber, you would see no slides on screens, but the White House releases portrait-sized “slides” to accompany the speeches. These graphics served both as a documentary complement and as visual speaker support when combined with the video in an “Enhanced State of the Union” version. I have to say that if you haven’t seen the enhanced version online, it’s quite smart. And the graphics (slides) are incredibly well done.
While the Founding Fathers may have produced this country’s most effective piece of communication via written document, it may be true that more vital information flows to the President on the printed page than flows out.
Every day the President receives a top secret presentation of international intelligence called the President’s Daily Brief (PDB). The most famous and controversial of these was the one from August 6, 2001 which contained the written heading, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”
Could there be a better format than written memo for the PDB? Maybe, maybe not.
But that brings us back to Reagan…
Though some may believe that Reagan requested all of his PDBs in video format, it’s certainly more likely and realistic that the newly released video briefings were occasional supplements on specific larger topics. Even today, producing a 10 minute informational video piece is not an easy or quick task. But one would hope that a video PDB were it produced today, would feel a bit more mature than Reagan’s which, quite frankly, seem more appropriate for a 5th grade social studies class than the Oval Office. Take a look…
