If you’re in the business of setting up PowerPoint templates and need a way to create a layout in which a logo or other content always floats on top of an image placeholder, these are two hacks that will do just that for you.
And one will also let you create an image placeholder in any shape you want—not just default circles and rectangles.
One of my favorite PowerPoint hacks is to hide page numbers in slideshow mode because really, who needs to see those on screen? This simple technique can also be used to hide unreadable source notes and any other content that should be visible in printouts and PDFs, but just isn’t needed or wanted on screen. Watch it here!
There’s a new(ish) conference dedicated to presentation out there, and I couldn’t be more excited to be a speaker at this year’s Click Presentation Design Conference, June 13-14 in Seattle.
Click is a part of Creative Pro Week, a larger gathering dedicated to Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and other aspects of print design, run by CreativePro. Traditionally, those hard core Adobe print and digital graphic designers didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the world of presentation, so I was thrilled to see the organizers of Creative Pro Week add a couple of days dedicated to presentation design at last year’s conference in New Orleans. And apparently, it was a hit, so they are again offering attendees sessions dedicated to the world of slides.
I’ll be giving two sessions (topics to be announced soon) and will be joining a number of other heavyweights including Julie Terberg and Richard Goring of BrightCarbon.
The complete list of speakers and more information is here, and the full conference agenda will be announced shortly. But you can register now for 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5-day passes depending on how much learnin’ you want. I’m hoping to arrive a day or two prior to the start of Click in order to deepen my InDesign skills.
If you’ve been on the fence about attending the Presentation Summit because it might be too much presentation and not enough design, Creative Pro Week might be for you! Or if you just want to soak up as much presentation stuff as you can, I would definitely consider heading out to Seattle in June.
And if you do decide to go, let me know as I would love to meet you!
Episode #70, Presentations in the Courtroom with Kerri L. Ruttenberg is up and live!
Troy, Sandy and I welcome our first legal guest, Kerri L. Ruttenberg, to talk about trial graphics, how presentation is used in the courtroom and her fantastic book, Images with Impact: Design and Use of Winning Trial Visuals.
Kerri is a top DC litigation attorney and probably the top expert in using visuals in the courtroom in the country. I reviewed her book a while back when I first learned of it, but now we get to dive a bit deeper and hear more about the psychology of visuals, what can and can’t be used in a courtroom and what the state of the trial graphics industry is.
Even if you never plan on working in this area of presentation design, this is a really good conversation in which you’ll learn a ton not just about how to convince juries with visuals, but how to convince your own audiences.
Take a listen!
Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.
Episode #67, There Are No Mistakes (with Travis Thomas) is up and live!
Troy, Sandy and I welcome Travis Thomas from LiveYesAnd for a discussion on how to live with presentation mistakes and what can be learned from the world of improv comedy.
Take a listen!
Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.
The New York Times has been using the below graphic style for a lot of their recent political coverage. They didn’t invent this look, of course, but I really like it and wanted to show how you can recreate this effect all within PowerPoint in a just a few steps.
Episode #64, International Perspectives on PowerPoint is up and live!
We took advantage of the recent Presentation Summit to gather a group of presentationists from across the globe. Take a listen!
Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.
My friend Lori Chollar of TLC Creative gave a talk on typography for presentations at the recent Presentation Summit, but my favorite part is her History of Typography (in 60 Seconds). Take a look—I know you have the time…
One of the questions I get asked most often is how can an average user create professional-looking infographics in PowerPoint. There are very good sites like Diagrammer, Canva and Infogram that can all help with providing and assembling elements of an infographic. And yes, you can always resort to PowerPoint’s own SmartArt, but unless you use it simply as a starting point, it’s going to look like…well, SmartArt. The disappointing truth is that to produce a professional looking infographic, you generally need to hire a professional. Enter Mike Parkinson and his brand new Build-a-Graphic add-in for PowerPoint.
Mike Parkinson runs Billion Dollar Graphics and is one of those professionals that has been creating custom infographics for high profile clients for years. He’s got an excellent book on infographics and a brand new one on PowerPoint, but he has also just introduced Build-a-Graphic, a killer add-in for PowerPoint that allows any user to call upon a massive library of pre-made (professionally designed!) vector graphics all from within PowerPoint. If SmartArt is a tricycle, Build-a-Graphic is a Ferrari.
But it gets even better. Because while you can simply search through the catalog of ready-to-use graphic and insert them onto your PowerPoint slides, the tool can also examine your slide’s content for you, automatically convert bullet points to more readable visual chunks and then suggest specific graphics relevant to your material. The quick demo below shows all this in action.
And all graphics are made up of pure PowerPoint shapes and vectors which means they are completely customizable, recolorable and can be taken apart however you like.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that now that anyone can have professionally designed customized graphics with just a few clicks of the mouse.
The Build-a-Graphic add-in is a $99/year subscription which includes ongoing updates and additions to the graphic catalog. PC only for right now.
Episode #63, Live From the 2018 Presentation Summit is up and live!
We gathered a bunch awesome people and turned the mic on at last week’s Presentation Summit in San Diego…
Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.
