If you’re a Mac user like me, you might be aware of those software bundle deals like Mac Heist and MacUpdate Promo. I bought the promo bundle last year, which gave me $500 of legit, full-featured (not demo) software for $50. It’s hard to beat that. This year’s bundle wasn’t as impressive dollar-wise ($376-worth of [...]
As we design more and more slide decks, we inevitably create or consume an ever greater number of images, whether they’re photographs, icons, or whatever. The problem is, however, it becomes a problem keeping track of them all on your hard drive. Whether you’re using Windows or the Mac, this is where you see how [...]
In this article, I’m going to explore how the culture of the workplace can impact the value of our creative work. This not only applies to IT shops, but everywhere, including of course, presentation slide design. Because of the strong civil service protections in government, and in many cases union protection, a culture develops where [...]
If you’re like me, you like to take advantage of the power of visuals to not only get your point across, but also increase retention of that very message. To get those visuals, you can use your own photographs for the ultimate in originality, stock photography for professional, yet expensive and unoriginal images (if you [...]
A couple weeks ago, I issued a challenge: redesign a chart slide that was of little to no use of any audience member in the back of the room. The chart had too many lines and labels, making it much like a confusing plate of spaghetti. Any attempt to interpret the chart, even when closer [...]
As I mentioned in a previous article, I attended the Open Government conference in DC. If you followed my tweets that day, you might remember this one: If you have to tell the audience in the back that it’ll be hard to read your chart, you’ve got a poorly designed chart. #ogi#ppt Well, here is the [...]
All too often, when people are trying to do the right thing by creating a strong visual to represent an idea, they fall back on the literal meaning of the word. This often makes it very difficult to find the right image to convey the idea and will often result in a visual that seems [...]
No, I haven’t abandoned this blog. The gap in between posts can easily be explained. You see, I have been learning how to use Adobe Premiere and Screenflick. The results can be seen below as I share with you how to create effective charts in Keynote ’09. Hopefully, as I do more of these, you [...]
For my previous slide make-over, I gave a slide deck presented by the Coast Guard at a Web 2.0 workshop. This facelift targets a deck presented by the EPA at the same workshop. The issues were different this time and unfortunately, the “Greenversations At A Glance” slide deck was typical of what I see on [...]
PowerPoint’s been around longer than the World Wide Web easily by a country mile. When use of the Web became popular, URLs started invading slide decks. Sometimes they were inserted so the audience could write them down later, or if the slides were abused as handouts, the thought was they could be copied into the [...]
Last month, I attended the Government Web 2.0 Best Practices Workshop hosted by FEMA. As you would expect from events such as this, there were presentations given that included PowerPoint slides. Given my experience, the federal government is a fertile breeding ground for poorly designed and down-right ineffective slides. This event did not disapoint. As [...]
