Using Creative Commons Imagery

More and more people are coming to accept the “less text, more imagery” philosophy of presenting information, but finding quality imagery remains a challenge–often a financial one.

Below, I’ve listed a number of pay and free sites for imagery, but lately I’ve been seeking out imagery available under Creative Commons licenses. Wikipedia can give you a good definition, but in a nutshell, CC imagery is put up on the web by amateur and (sometimes) professional photographers with varying usage licenses that most often allow anyone to use the image if accompanied by attribution and prohibits commercial usage (they just don’t want you making money off their work.)

Flickr and Compfight are the two places I generally go to find CC imagery. On Flickr, you’ll want to do an advanced search and filter for only CC imagery. When you find an image that is CC, it will be accompanied by various symbols indicating the level of usage allowed. Usually, all you have to do is give attribution by listing the image URL or the photographer’s name. I generally place this information on the image hidden in a corner as much as possible.

Yes, you’re going to find a lot of amateur, poor photography in the CC pool, but I’m continually surprised at the quality of some of the photography, and if you look hard enough (especially on Compfight), I think you’ll find some gems, including highly specific pics from events and the like.

Here are a few slides from a recent presentation we created here using mostly CC imagery. Note that this was a print/e-mail deck, hence the small type.

 

Where to Find Imagery

Royalty-free and Rights-Managed
Getty Images (the biggie)
Corbis (the other biggie)
iStockPhoto (one of the best cheaper sites)
Veer 
Jupiter Images (also has a subscription-option)
Masterfile
Dreamstime (cheap)
Fotolia (cheap)
Photocase (cheap)
StockXpert (good and cheap)

Subscription-based Services
Shutterstock 
Creative Express (Getty’s subscription service)
Photospin
Photoshop Tutorials list of free photo sites

Search Aggregators
Fotosearch 
Punchstock

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Categories: Design, Imagery.

How Not to Fix Afghanistan

It will come as no surprise to anyone when I admit I don’t know the first thing about military or geopolitical strategy. But I’m just having trouble imagining that a recently leaked strategy document on the war in Afghanistan makes use of the right tools to present its findings. 

Of course, the strategy plan created by the PA Consulting Group was, as far as we can assume, presented primarily in PowerPoint. And PowerPoint wasn’t used in this case as a word processor the way it often mistakenly is, but to tell a story graphically with minimal explanatory text. Normally, that would be something I would applaud, until you take a look at the deck, and its main slide…

Yes, it does seem like something from The Onion, but MSNBC says it’s legitimate, and you can download the whole presentation from their site here. Perhaps this is a brilliant plan, but if it is, I hope the intended audiences can get past the format to take it seriously. And if anyone out there is familiar with war planning and can tell me that this is the way generals win wars, I’ll be happy to learn something!

 

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Categories: PowerPoint.

Readability [on the Web]

 

It’s not often that we get to control how information is presented to us and even adjust the format to our personal preferences, so I was unbelievably excited recently to discover a brilliant tool for the web called “Readability.” I have to give a hat tip to David Pogue, who turned me on to this in his NY Times column and who declared: “Readability has changed my life.”

Readability by Arc90 Lab is a “bookmarklet,” and its installation is quite possibly the easiest I’ve ever seen. Simply go to the Readability page, select your few preferences (font, size, margin) and then drag the Readability icon to your bookmarks. Now, any time you find yourself on a web page reading a story and want to eliminate all the distracting advertisements, flashing banners, endless links and other web junk, just click the Readability bookmark and your current page will be transformed into a distraction free page of easily read text. Need to go back to the original page? Just click on the return button at the top left of the page. 

Readability works best for longer form articles, but it does work on Mac and PC and with any browser you might be running. 

Below is a before and after from a NY Times article… 

Let me know what you think of this!

 

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Categories: Visual Thinking.

My 9 Year Old Niece Gets It. Do You?

My sister recently asked me to help my 9 year old niece with a PowerPoint presentation she had to create for class on U.S. National Parks. No, I didn’t just do it for her, but I did send her some examples of presentations that made use of little text and beautiful full screen imagery. It just kind of seemed natural for her topic…

I didn’t hear anything else until last week when my sister sent me her completed assignment. The email came with two attachments: a PowerPoint presentation and a Word document.

I liked where this was going…

I’m going to give the credit on this to my niece’s teacher for understanding that there shouldn’t be a one size fits all format for delivering information. Too often, that one size is a PowerPoint document, and the in-person, on-screen presentation suffers from too much text and content as does the printed, leave behind that suffers from too little real writing and content.

I know, it’s just easier to make one slide-ument that can be presented, printed, handed out and downloaded. But as Olivia Mitchell says: It’s also easier to break up with your boyfriend by text message. That doesn’t make it right.

Last night someone gave me a spiral bound leave behind from a presentation by an $8 billion dollar hedge fund looking for new investors. It was an inexpensively bound identical copy of what was presented on screen. All my eyes saw were loads of text and information–probably all important and legally necessary, of course. But an $8 billion dollar venture should have created both a professionally printed and designed leave behind (think annual report…) and a professionally designed on screen companion presentation that walks the audience through the digestible highlights of the complete printed piece. And they should have distributed only the printed document. 

I have a client right now that approached us wanting help designing a “PowerPoint.” This is a new health consulting company that was paid a lot of money to do an assessment of a corporation involving research, surveys and analysis. My client had planned on presenting its findings in a PowerPoint deck (which would presumably be distributed). We advised them that while they of course will need an on screen version of their findings to present at their 2 hour client meeting, the real meat of their work needed to be presented much more seriously and professionally. So our primary work is now not a PowerPoint deck, but an 18 page professionally designed and printed report. Again, think annual report… After that is written and completed (we’re helping the client with their content as well), then we’ll focus on creating a matching companion PowerPoint deck to present.

I know it’s more work. But many times 2 distinct formats and documents is what’s needed.

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Categories: Imagery, Reducing Text.

How Would Zagat Rate Your Presentation?

Zagat came out with their 2010 New York guide earlier this month, and it got me thinking about what presenters can learn from the world of food. If you’re not familiar with Zagat’s rating system, you might be surprised to know that only 1/3 of a restaurant’s total score is for the food. Think about that. The overwhelming majority (2/3) of the rating that decides the best restaurants is for service and decor. It doesn’t matter how good your food is: If your restaurant’s presentation skills are not up to snuff, you’re not getting anywhere near the overall top ratings.

This isn’t to say that there’s no place in the world for eateries who only care about the food, but…

Below are dishes from two Zagat-rated NY culinary institutions. Out of a possible score of 30 for each category, you can see that Zagat readers gave the restaurants exactly equal marks for food, but only one restaurant gets top marks for presentation (decor + service). 

 

The result is that the restaurant on the right has long been a “go to” spot for important occasions, and is often called NY’s “most romantic” place to eat. The one on the left serves (in my opinion) the best burger in 5 boroughs, but is it ever going to be one of the City’s top dining establishments? Which one of these places charges $9 for a meal, and which can get away with over $100 a person?

Now…if your presentations were food, which restaurant’s plates would they look like?

Just as with Zagat, your presentations should be thought of as having 3 equally important components: 

  1. CONTENT (Food)
  2. DESIGN (Decor)
  3. DELIVERY (Service)
The design and delivery of your content is just as important as the content itself. Sure, you can get away with focusing only on 1 or 2 of these 3 intertwined aspects. But do you want people to pay $9 for your product? … Or $100?

Now, who’s going to be first to email me the identities of the two above restaurants…?

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Categories: Visual Thinking.

The Three Essential Books on Presentation, Part 3: Made to Stick

My favorite read from the past year is undoubtedly Chip Heath’s and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick. Inspired by and very much in the vein of Malcolm Gladwell, the book explains what makes an idea or a story compelling and memorable. 
From urban legends (why is it exactly that everyone knows about the bathtub of ice kidney thieves?) to the deceptively simple mission statements of successful companies such as Nordstrom and Southwest Airlines, Made to Stick is about telling stories that people remember.

So how will this make your PowerPoint better? All presentations are, ultimately, stories. You’re not presenting last quarter’s sales figures, you’re telling a story. Or at least you should be. You don’t present data, you present the meaning of your data. People remember and are moved to action by stories–not by charts and bullet points.  Chip and Dan identify the 6 essential components of a sticky story, breaking down their analysis into the acronym SUCCESs: 

  • Simple  
  • Unexpected
  • Concrete
  • Credible
  • Emotional 
  • Stories

Unlike Presentation Zen and Slide:ology, this is a book you can’t just flip through, picking out sample slides and ideas. But it’s also far from academic and dull. If you enjoy Malcolm Gladwell’s writing, you’ll appreciate this one.

The brothers also maintain a Made To Stick website and monthly column in Fast Company Magazine.

STICKY PRESENTATIONS

Chip and Dan don’t specifically discuss on-screen presentations much in the book, but they have written a small document called “Making Your Presentations Stick.”You can find it as an “extra resource” on their website.

 

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Categories: Books.

The World’s Best Presentation Contest

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

People MAKE bad presentations because they SEE bad presentations.

It’s just that simple.

If your CEO or manager gives a talk to his employees with something like this…

…then he’s set a precedent for what is acceptable at your company, and the new hire fresh out of school will understand that THIS is the way he should present.

So, go and SEE good presentations–as often as you can. One good way to find good presentation design (and ideas to “borrow”) is to head over to SlideShare.net and take a look around at the presentations that users have uploaded to the site–especially in their Featured and Spotlight areas.

But to see truly excellent work, take a look at the winners of their just-finished World’s Best Presentation Contest.

But before you take a look, just imagine how YOU would create presentations about

  • Kidney disease
  • An African orphanage
  • The current healthcare debate (come on, this one’s an easy subject…) 

Now, take a look at how others told these stories.

(How many bullet points, templates and pie charts do you think you’re going to find?)

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Categories: Reducing Text.

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth

If the creation of PowerPoint in 1984 was a turning point in presentation from overhead transparencies to computer slides, then Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth also marked a new juncture for presentation design: A slideshow, even one composed of intensely scientific data, needn’t look and behave like a dull academic lecture.

To be fair, the presentation ball had been rolling in this direction for a while, but Al Gore’s partnering with Duarte Design and the Oscar-winning documentary brought this new graphic and emotion-driven style to a much wider audience.

Gore and Duarte Design employed Apple Keynote for the presentation which allowed them, among other things, to move seemlessly back and forth with video elements–something which is just not possible with PowerPoint. (No, all the animations you see are not possible with Keynote alone.)

Garr Reynolds details Duarte’s contributions to the presentation here.

If you haven’t seen the movie and still think that your slides really need 5 bullet points a slide, paragraphs of text, multi-colored charts with tick marks and multiple photos on each page, do yourself a favor and watch the movie.. 

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Categories: Visual Thinking.

The Three Essential Books on Presentation, Part 2: Slide:ology

Arguably the most important person in presentation design today is Nancy Duarte, owner of probably the world’s largest presentation-only design firm, the northern California-based Duarte Design.

Nancy and her firm have been at the forefront of the recent revolution in how information is presented visually, with her biggest claim to fame so far being her firm’s work on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

In 2008, Nancy released her primer on presentation design, slide:ology. It remains one of the most important books around on how to put together a visual story in the form of an on-screen presentation.

In contrast to Presentation Zen, slide:ology is more technical and comprehensive with more philosophy and technique. But the book is still very accessible to all. It covers…

  1. Creating a new slide ideology
  2. Creating ideas, not slides
  3. Creating diagrams
  4. Displaying data
  5. Thinking like a designer
  6. Arranging elements
  7. Using visual elements: background, color, and text
  8. Using visual images
  9. Creating movement
  10. Governing with templates
  11. Interacting with slides
  12. Manifesto: The five theses of the power of a presentation

Though is doesn’t read like a textbook, it could be used as such for designers and non-designers alike. There are sections on creating easy color schemes, using animation to tell your story (why else would you use animation…?), understanding basic design concepts such as grids and image placement, how to create a template, using diagrams effectively and much, much more.

Nancy sprinkles the book with real world samples from Duarte’s portfolio, so you’ll find tons of quick and more involved ideas to inspire your next presentation. And you’ll see throughout that you don’t need a fancy template to communicate your ideas; Nancy is, as I am, a big advocate of designing content, rather than the frame around it.

This is a book you’ll definitely want as a constant reference.

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Categories: Books.
visual training presentation