DIY Stock Photography
Have you run into a situation where you need a photo for a slide and you either can't find one that works and looks just right on services such as iStockPhoto or for a shot like this, you can't justify paying for a photo of some Sharpies? You can try the Creative Commons route at flickr, but even then it's a crap-shoot whether you'll find something worthy of being included among your slides.
Well, a lot of us presenting slide design bloggers have suggested using your own photos in place of stock photos when you can. Not only can it be cheaper, but you're guaranteed to be the first to use that particular photo.
I faced this particular issue recently when working on a personal project of mine. I needed two different photos: 1) Sharpies and 2) Tools that can support the message "layout." Nothing good was coming up on iStockPhoto and frankly, for at least the photo of Sharpies, I just couldn't bring myself to spend the $3 for it. Nothing of use was coming up on my http://www.behold.cc search either. So, what could I do? Well, there are a couple do it yourself options.
DIY Studio Lighting
In the ShutterTalk article, "Putting Together a Budget DIY Lighting System," they show you how for about $75, you can assemble a decent on-the-cheap lighting system to help you photograph items indoors. It's something I definitely intend to assemble at some point, especially when I don't have reliable weather to make use of the cheapest lighting around: the sun.
A Solution For the Really Cheap
Sharpies
However, on this occasion, I didn't have the time or the $75 (I really need to replace my 5-year old computer). What I did have was a $15 white board that I use for my brainstorming and slide design work. A white sheet would have been better, but I'm working with what I've got.
I also had a clear day with plenty of sun. It was 10 AM, so the lighting was awfully harsh and taking the shot within two hours of sunrise or sunset would have been better, but with the winter sun as low as it is this time of the year, I thought I could get away with it.
Tools
I set up my white board on my driveway and arranged my subjects on the white board with the composition I was looking for and with the sun to my side. For those who may not know, I chose to have the sun at my side so I can get the shadows I need to give my photos a feel of some depth and not something that feels flat.
I took my shots, cleaned them up a bit in Photoshop and got myself the slide images I was looking for for a grand total of $0. If you don't count the fact that I already owned the white board, then the cost for this set up was $15 for the white board or $19 for some white sheets at Walmart.
If you use your own photography, then you can avoid appearing unoriginal. For as little as $15 or $75, you can give yourself the tools you need to help you get the shot you've been looking for.
The Scourge of Arial
Can you tell which is which?
I was reading this article by Mark Simonson where he writes a brief history of Helvetica and its Frankenstein-like relative, Arial. It's, in my opinion, a very interesting read, covering areas like font studios, companies' different strategies dealing with font licenses, and how a simple desire not to license the already well established Helvetica font led to Arial. If you've ever used a Microsoft product, it's a guarantee you've seen text in that font. While Apple licensed Helvetica (Apple's core pro customer base needs it), Microsoft decided to go with the cheaper knock-off. Arial has always looked a little odd to me and I could tell the difference between the two. I just never figured out why until I read this article.
Monotype, the creator of Arial, took the high road, and instead of copying Haas Foundry's Helvetica like many others were doing, they took a similar font that they owned and tweaked the proportions and weight to bring it in line with their competitor's font. What you have, then, with Arial is a font that has the same dimensions and weight to Helvetica, but is just different enough to not be an absolute rip-off to those knowledgeable enough to tell the difference.
Arial appears to be a loose adaptation of Monotype’s venerable Grotesque series, redrawn to match the proportions and weight of Helvetica. At a glance, it looks like Helvetica, but up close it’s different in dozens of seemingly arbitrary ways. Because it matched Helvetica’s proportions, it was possible to automatically substitute Arial when Helvetica was specified in a document printed on a PostScript clone output device. To the untrained eye, the difference was hard to spot. (See “How to Spot Arial”) After all, most people would have trouble telling the difference between a serif and a sans serif typeface. But to an experienced designer, it was like asking for Jimmy Stewart and getting Rich Little.
Reading The Information Design Handbook has gotten me thinking quite a bit lately about fonts and how to use them. This article, though, just spurred that interest on even further. The two have me constantly evaluating the one or two fonts per slide deck that I use and putting a lot more thought into my font choices. Issues such as whether it's a decorative font (e.g. Arial Narrow) or not, its x-height, its weight, and the size of counterforms are all things I think about now when I consider which font to use since each of those factor into the legibility of the text.
Those font characteristics are all things to take into consideration when you consider your audience. How far away are the Bob Uecker seats? How old is your audience? What's the lighting likely to be?
I won't get into the nitty gritty about all these characteristics. There's just not enough space and I'll leave it to the pros. However, I do think that Jenn & Ken Visocky O'Grady's The Information Design Handbook
By the way, the one on top is Helvetica. 
SlideRocket: A Review
A while back, when Googling for a PowerPoint alternative (competition is good for consumers, and Microsoft too), I stumbled upon SlideRocket. The concept was intriguing. An online service that provided an alternative to PowerPoint and even Keynote, allows you to share your slide decks online, and even deliver them remotely in a meeting. What's more, since it uses Flash and AIR, the decks can be viewed offline. Even better, they offered a 30-day free trial with which to try it out. Given all of this, I felt it would be foolish of myself not to give it a go.
Features
SlideRocket gives you a copious amount of features that you would expect to see in a PowerPoint alternative while also providing features that you would not expect, but after some reflection, fall in the category of, "well, duh!" You can import existing Powerpoint documents into SlideRocket or create your own within their Flash-driven interface. Unfortunately, if you're a Keynote user, SlideRocket doesn't support your documents. Your only option is to export your slide deck to PowerPoint first. With how SlideShare now supports Keynote, this is a pretty glaring omission, in my opinion. Because it's Web-based, you can access your slides from anywhere, as long as you have an Internet connection. Also, as I mentioned before, because they leverage AIR, you can even download a copy of your slide deck and use it offline. The catch is this will not work on the free account.
If you are in the need of stock photography, you can access images from fotolia and flickr directly from within the interface. If you're using other people's flickr photos, you can even restrict your search to those in the creative commons. One word of caution, though. If you intend to use your slides commercially, then the flickr search built into SlideRocket isn't restrictive enough. You'll still have to find the photos you need the old-fashioned way. With that said, this integration with image sources on the Web is powerful and can be a huge time saver. Hopefully, they'll integrate with more stock photography sources in the future. It also appears as though they will be adding the ability to access icons, templates, stock audio, fonts, and cartoons in the future. The only other service online at the moment is to have special printings of your slide deck done through Mimeo.
Taking a page from services such as SlideShare, you can share your slides with the world (found under "Publish," not "Share.") through either a direct link or embedded in a Web page. Graduating from the free to either the individual or business accounts will give you more options, including restricting who has access and removing the SlideRocket branding.
Business accounts give you additional capabilities including the ability to have a team work on the slides with multiple users available in the business account. You can even set permissions for each user. You can deliver your slides to remote members of a meeting as well, with you as the presenter in full control of the slides. Additionally, you can access metrics on you slide decks, seeing how many people viewed your slides and how long they spent on each slide. Now, if you're giving a presentation, the slide can't really stand on their own anyway, so you may find some of the features useful and some not so.
Pricing
For the feature set they promise, the cost of using SlideRocket seems fairly reasonable. You get the basics at no cost with two at-a-cost options. $10/month will give you more features than the free version and $20/user/month will give you the full suite of features.
The Test Drive
For my evaluation of SlideRocket, I created a PowerPoint document to serve as my control in this little experiment. I encourage you to look at the original document so that you can get a clear glimpse of what they're supposed to look like. If you've read my earlier post on chart design, then you should recognize many of the slide and the subject matter I used to come up with them. I then created two slide decks on SlideRocket. One was an import of my PowerPoint slides and the other was an attempt to recreate those slides as faithfully as possible with only the SlideRocket tools. The slides are generally how one should not design slides, though my intent was to look at features used quite often in slides that either I create or I am subjected to. Among the features & effects I included in the test are:
- Blocks of text
- Bullets (gag)
- Gradual build of bullets
- Shapes
- Bar charts
- Pie charts
- Charts with an alternative background color
- Embedding images
- Embedding images full bleed
- Embedding video
- Multiple shapes, including varying fill options
Importing A Slide Deck
Epic Fail
The process for importing a slide deck was easy enough. They even give you two options for importing. One is to import the slides as images and the other is to convert them from PowerPoint slides to SlideRocket slides. When attempting to import them as images, I was greeted with an error message when the process failed. I'm not sure what in the slide it couldn't handle, but when you look at the original deck, there's nothing outrageous.
I next imported the slides to be converted into the SlideRocket format. This type of import as a little more successful. That is, I didn't get any errors. What I can't say, however, is that it went without a hitch.
The first thing I noticed is that the font sizes were not respected. This seemingly simple effect, font size, was too much for the import. Everything on the title slide was shrunken down to 18 (point I assume). It also had difficulty with text inside drawing objects. Though the font was preserved, it too was reduced in size.
SlideRocket handled JPEGs well, at least those used as slide backgrounds. Additionally, it did give provide one feature I wish PowerPoint had: the ability to extract a slide background for use elsewhere.
Drawing objects were a mixed bag. SlideRocket converted the thought balloon and donut to rectangles and the pattern fill (which I wish people wouldn't use) used in one rectangle was lost. In the last slide of the deck, I threw a lot of drawing objects at SlideRocket, with the intent of uncovering redrawing of the diagram should it have any issues. With the exceptions just mentioned, it handled the import fairly well.
Charts were a mixed bag as well, though more risky, it seems, than the drawing objects. The bar charts were converted to images that didn't appear to be the right size and/or scale because the text and numbers show signs of disproportionate scaling. With these charts imported as images, all hope is lost of editing them without reimporting a replacement slide or recreating the chart within SlideRocket. The pie chars fared much worse with text labels being cut off, and the legend getting carved up. The pie charts themselves were also skewed oddly and moved to the far left edge of the slide. The line chart fared much better, though the legend in this chart was sliced nearly in half, just like the others. The moral of the story: if you have charts that you want to import, don't. If the charting capabilities of SlideRocket doesn't give you what you need, then save your chart as a graphic first and then import that.
PowerPoint 2004 has a nasty habit of flagging PNG files as needing QuickTime and a decompressor. Every other software package and project that uses images can support these files. However, in true Microsoft fashion, they fail to support open standard they themselves don't own (MPEG-4 video is another). My question during this evaluation was, "can SlideRocket see this PNG for what it really is and display it?" The answer: no. If they're using Microsoft libraries on the back-end, then this result should come as no surprise. With the color depth of JPEG, the losslessness of GIF, and transparency support far superior to GIF, there is no good or justifiable reason for Microsoft to not support PNG properly.
PowerPoint has the same problem with QuickTime movies (MPEG-4). Again, a standard they don't own, and thus don't support. Now in this case, Microsoft isn't the only one to blame. It's at this point that I stumbled upon a limitation of SlideRocket. All video that you import needs to be Flash Video (FLV). I'll cover this some more later.
Builds within a slide also did not make it through the import. On the slide with the iPhone screenshot, the two bullets are supposed to appear one at a time. This was not preserved.
In summary, when importing PowerPoint slides, you do so at your own risk. Expect to redo elements of most of your slides and the entirety of many others. Lack of Keynote support is also a huge downer.
The final imported product:
Creating A Slide Deck From Scratch
One of the selling points of SlideRocket is how it is an alternative to PowerPoint and Keynote altogether. Thus, the next part of my evaluation was an attempt to recreate the slide deck from scratch. Though SlideRocket bills itself as an alternative to Keynote, my using it as an alternative requires more than just copying some build effects and slide transitions. If it's not as easy (or easier) to use as Keynote, then it's got a hard sell.
As a design tool, SlideRocket lacks a lot of what the standard tools have, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Presenters need to show more restraint anyway and tools that force a little bit of that restraint are doing a service (think Keynote's chart palettes). However, ease of use should be something that's just nice to have, but rather it should be a functional requirement. This is where I feel SlideRocket comes up short. The toolbar to the left is a nice touch, but the properties panels to the right took quite a bit of getting used to. The library link on the bottom isn't your asset library (which I can't seem to learn), it's your slide library. Keep in mind that you don't have any slides in there unless you explicitly add them to your library. The menus at the top are particularly annoying to me. As a Mac user, I have certain user experience expectations. The design of the menu system, however, has its own expectations: that I'm a Windows user. To be on a Mac and forced to deal with Windows user interface conventions was quite jarring. The copy and paste keyboard commands that I expect to work don't. I have to constantly remind myself (they think I'm using Windows. It's Ctrl, not Command. Worse yet, the copy and paste was not responsive many of the times and I often found myself pasting what I copied previously, not what I just copied (or thought I did).
SlideRocket does offer a modest selection of simple slide templates. Fortunately, they don't hit you with a bunch of horrendously complex templates like some applications *cough*PowerPoint*cough*. The five they do offer, all-white, all-black, a gradient theme similar in concept to what Apple uses in their keynotes (small k), "Elegant" (a lighter gray gradient theme, and "Ripple," which I think we can all do without. In the future, they'll be adding the ability to share themes and layouts with other SlideRocket users.
Adding new slides is fairly simple, with it giving you the layout of the last slide you created as a default. Using the panel to the right, you can change it to five other layouts if you wish:
- Title slide
- Text (think default PowerPoint "you know you want to use bullets!" slide layout)
- Title only
- Blank
- Picture - horizontal
- Picture - vertical
Adding elements is fairly easy and is the best part of the UI. Click an icon and often either the appropriate drawer slides out or you're presented with an asset library. Text boxes are simple to add, for example. However, once you need to modify properties, you're faced with a rather confusing properties panel with some odd UI conventions that either don't seem to make sense or just don't seem to work, period.
There's a decent amount of shapes available that can be drawn to the slide. Again, the properties panels to the right leave a lot to be desired. A LOT; as in, you can't do squat. Come to think of it, instead of complaining about the panels each time I cover a feature, let me make it clear right here: they suck. They're so bad, it's one of the main reasons why I felt very limited when using SlideRocket and why I felt frustrated with how I was unable to bend it to my will. The manipulation of shapes and positioning and formatting of them was torture. Add to this the copy+paste issues I mentioned earlier, and suffice it to say, I was relieved when I was finally done. If given a choice next time, I'd rather choose waterboarding.
Adding images worked well. To be honest, with the exception of the asset library, it's hard to screw this up. With that said, I did like the way they implemented the asset library. It's also from here where you can access image sources such as Fotolia and flickr.
My attempt at adding video left me, well, sad. I knew I had trouble when I tried to upload my short QuickTime movie and it didn't want to let me select any. It would have been better, much better, if SlideRocket let me know up front that Flash Video and only Flash Video can be used. This left me in a bit of a quandary since I don't have any software that I'm aware of to convert my movie to FLV. After a while spent on Google, I came across Zamzar, a free service that will convert your movies to any one of many different formats. Using Zamzar, I was able to convert my QuickTime movie to Flash Video and upload it to SlideRocket. I really wish SlideRocket was more upfront with this restriction as it's one that will surely leave many people quite puzzled.
Wrong Colors
Shapes left me mad, images made me happy, video left me sad, and charts, well charts just plain old let me down. Knowing that SlideRocket is built in Flash and that Flash is a vector-based application, I held quite a bit of hope in their chart capabilities. Alas, it was not to be. Bar charts were quite limiting. I could not choose between data labels or the Y-axis. I got the Y-axis, whether I wanted it or not. Where it put the labels also failed to impress. You had the choice of outside (only if the bars didn't go to the top) or inside and inside meant dead-center. You couldn't isolate individual data points for their own color in the way that would be easiest, but even using the Keynote method leaves unimpressive results.
Pie charts had their own frustrations. For example, SlideRocket's chart's legend is ridiculously small. There's no way on this green earth that anyone in the back of a conference room could read the legend. Also, when you change the start angle so that you can more intelligently orient the slices, SlideRocket conveniently forgets your stated intentions and reverts it back to what it's default to as soon as you move away from the slide.
Where's My Data?
Line graphs were nothing short of amazing; utterly amazing in their ability to trash the visual display of my data. Not only did it fail to use the line colors I chose for the data series, but in the final product, data points that it still maintains fail to show up on the chart at all. You better hope your data points don't go something like 48, 34,0,25,0. That 25 will not show up on the chart whatsoever.
The final product, built within SlideRocket:
Remote Delivery
One of the enticing points of SlideRocket is the ability to drive the slides while your audience, located anywhere in the world, can listen to your presentation (over the phone, Skype, etc.). I tried this out on my computer using two different browsers to simulate the presenter and audience and it worked well. I rehearsed several times in the conference room where I was due to present (a different slide deck than these examples, of course) without a hitch. I even was able to use my presentation remote just fine.
Come show time, SlideRocket failed me miserably. When attempting to advance to the second slide, the second window that had the slide playing went to the back, giving me the the regular SlideRocket interface. To make matters worse, the moment that happened, Safari froze solid. The only thing I could do was move the mouse and do a hard reset. Even command-option-escape didn't work. Fortunately, I had rehearsed enough so that I could keep going and get the remote folks back up to speed quickly once I rebooted and relaunched Skype and the SlideRocket deck. This surely didn't give me confidence that SlideRocket was indeed ready for prime time. It's too bad it waited until then to teach me that lesson.
Summary
SlideRocket is a service whose concept genuinely has promise. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it just fails to deliver on many counts. The ability to embed full-featured slide decks in a Web page, a fail-safe mechanism when presenting on the road, integration with online services such as Fotolia and flickr, and an alternative to the software out there now make SlideRocket and services like it something I'd like to see succeed. However, the UI frustrations, limitations, and broken charting functionality make the extra effort to create slides in SlideRocket an effort I would rather not undertake. If they can fix these problems, I would love to give it another thorough review because as I said, based on what they promise, I'd like to see them succeed. However, they first need to deliver on those promises.
What I’d Like To See In Slide Design In 2009
Over on the Speaking about Presenting blog, Olivia Mitchell asked what everyone else would like to see this year in slide design. I've got a really long list of things I'd like to see this year, but I'll focus on the top 3 on my list:
Less Organizational Inertia
Quite often, one of the reasons why we get battered with walls of text, riddled with bullets, beat senseless with charts and diagrams is organizational culture. It's they way it's been done for years and the bad habits have permeated the organization to the point of it being very much part of its culture. Well, organizational culture is one thing. Organizational Inertia is another. This is where the culture of PowerPoint abuse goes beyond culture and becomes either law or accepted truth.
The former can be addressed because there's opportunity to sell the organization on a better way, especially since a case can be made for the positive effect on the bottom line. The later, accepted truth, is what drives the most intransigent forms of organizational inertia. Here, you're dealing with small minds. People too closed minded and set in their ways to consider oportunities for self improvement. Why strive for self improvement when there's nothing to improve, right? "It's worked this long (meaning, people haven't actually died from it), and it's what people expect, so why change it?" I've heard that enough to make my ears bleed.
There's no easy solution and each organization requires a different approach to countering organizational inertia, but the less of it I see in 2009, the happier I will be.
Simpler Diagrams
Working in the world of IT, I probably see more than my fair share of overly complex diagrams slapped on slides. Someone starts feeling a little industrious while slapping together their barrage of bullet points to create highly detailed diagrams. Many of these are created in Visio and pasted into slides. Many others are created within PowerPoint itself. The thought that does not appear to go into these diagrams concern the very people that need to interpret them.
Text is inevitably too small. When pasting these big diagrams onto slides, quite often the diagram itself has to be shrunk to fit onto the slide. What results is text that is far too small to be read by most people. If they're sitting in the back of the room, you might as well forget it. Simplicity and information (not data) density are goals that would aid legibility. Edward Tufte's books are a great resource in this regard, especially Envisioning Information
Metaphors get lost on the audience. Quite often, visual metaphors in the diagrams, whether or not the creator realized they were creating them, don't jive with the expecations and understanding of the audience. Where I work, these kinds of slides are shown to audiences that are mixtures of technical and non-technical people. Within the group of technical people, you'll have varying degrees of expertise and specialties. Metaphors need to be kept simple and as universal as possible.
There's often just too much stuff. They're just too complex. Presenting your audience with very complex, even if just visually complex, diagrams steals their attention away from you. In The Information Design Handbook
An End To Slides As Handouts
All too often, slide decks are assembled with the intention that they also serve as handouts. Well designed slides are terrible handouts since they lack the on-slide text necessary to form an informative narrative. What the audience is left with is a presentation that is ineffective and handouts that have no value to the people they're passed on to or kept by because they still need explanation. You can never fit enough text on a slide to make them useful handouts. At the same time, you all too can easily have too much text on a slide, rendering them useless in a presentation.
There are many solutions to this approach, but one that I think helps by not only creating handouts (that are distributed after the presentation) but also helps you prepare your talk is to write out a narrative of your talk. Include the visuals. You're not going to write every last thing you're going to say. However, you'll have enough down on paper to be useful while giving yourself a chance to learn your presentation before you even start rehearsing it.
These are the top three things I'd like to see in slide design this year. Do you have any others? Have you run into the same issues I have? Feel free to comment below.
My Thoughts On the MacWorld Keynote
In this post, I'm not going to focus on the products that were announced. Granted I can't wait to see the changes to Keynote beyond what was discussed, but I'm more interested at this moment in Phil Shiller's delivery of the keynote itself.
Early on in his pitch, it was clear that he was nervous. He was racing along at a fast pace and at about 6 minutes and 40 seconds into it, he turned back at the screen, not to point something out, but to gain a visual cue for himself. It's a classic example of someone whose nerves are getting the better of them. However, as time went on, it was obvious that he was starting to hit a groove and feel more comfortable up there. In the end, he seemed on his game and did as good a job as anyone could be expected to (except Steve Jobs himself, but Phil's not Steve).
One thing he did do, though, that I couldn't help but to notice every time he advanced to the next slide is he held his remote out there for all to see and made sure, unconsciously, I'm certain, that we all saw him click that remote. You can hold remotes like that more discreetly such that even if your audience knows you have a remote, they're not focusing on it and each time you move to the next slide it appears to be through the very magic you're trying to create on stage.
Yes this has got to be one of my shorter posts in this category, but not every one needs to exceed 1,000 words. 
Did you see anything else that Phil Shiller did well or could have done better?
