What really caught my attention with Timeline 3D was its ability to export to Keynote.  If there's one thing that I find most difficult in designing slides, it's putting date-based information (e.g. a timeline) in a slide format that is easy to read and understand and also professional looking.  When giving presentations about the status of a project, this can be a very real and daunting challenge.  Often, people will just copy and paste from Microsoft Project.  The problem is, these are difficult to read and understand, likely to create map shock, and frankly, don't look professional.  This is where Timeline 3D steps in and makes, in my opinion, a valiant effort.  If that doesn't sound convincing or you think I'm advising against this software, read on.  As with anything, the answer to whether you should use this for your timelines is "it depends."

Creating a new timeline

Getting Started

When you first launch Timeline 3D, you're presented with an impressive selection of themes and data import options.  Since your slide designs will likely not match what this software offers, the themes are a decent starting point, but not as important as the import options.  Timeline 3D gives an amazing set of options, including importing from Basecamp, iCal, and RSS feeds.  You can, of course, just work from a blank timeline if you wish.

Adding events is quite simple.  Just make sure that in your date settings that you have the format chosen that works best for your events.  For example, if the day isn't of concern to you, make sure you choose the appropriate format or else the software may yell at you for having an improperly-formatted date.

Visually, what you get is quite impressive.  You can even assign images to your events to reinforce the point.  A nice touch is the ability to pull images in from iPhoto using the built-in "Photos" panel.  However, keep in mind the size of the images when you insert them.  Resize them down to an appropriate size when you can to avoid corrupting your timeline file.  When building a timeline for my day job, I didn't resize my images, many of which were quite large, and my data file edged over 11 MB in size.  At this point, the document became unusable and my system unstable (Timeline 3D trial, 20" iMac w/Snow Leopard & 2 GB of RAM).  After closing the application, I could not reopen the file.  I couldn't even open it on my MacBook Pro (Timeline 3D fully registered, Snow Leopard, & 4 GB RAM.  The file, along with a whole morning's worth of work was toast.

Events with date ranges

Another issue I ran into was the lack of customization.  Though you can change fonts and colors, you're stuck with very thin lines to represent the date ranges of your events.  This makes it quite difficult if your screen isn't big enough for your room (as is nearly always the case where I work).  An option to make the lines thicker is a must-have enhancement that I would like to see in the next version.

Of course, I must mention the 3D aspect of this tool.  This is the key feature that makes your events visible to your audience when a view of the timeline as a whole makes them too small to even be noticed.  They accomplish this by taking the canvas of your timeline and angling it toward the viewer.  Then, as you advance through  your timeline, you move down the length of the canvas stopping at each item as they fly out much like a door.  This can be quite effective as you call out each individual event.  However, this feature still can't save the software from the event range lines that are far too thin.

Another issue that I ran into at work on both the trial and fully registered versions of the software was the duplication of events.  When I went into the bulk edit view (spreadsheet-like option for entering events), each event was duplicated.  This became a problem when exporting the timeline to Quicktime.

Exporting

Exporting is where you get your real use out of this software.  You can export it to email (static image), to certain devices (Apple TV, iPhone, and iPod), to QuickTime, or to Keynote.  When exporting to Quicktime, though you can choose sizes smaller than 480p, it's not advisable.  Anything smaller than 480p is just not readable.  Also note that depending on the size of your timeline, the movies can be really REALLY huge.  I mean monsterous.  This is where the event duplication issue caused problems for me.  It was a timeline with roughly 45 events.  Upon exporting, it processed the events just fine, but when it was done, rendered another 44 phantom events on a completed timeline frozen in time.  This made the movie double the necessary length and had me staring at the portion just a few seconds before the end sequence for half of the length of the movie.  All told, the final movie was 1.6 GB in size.

Exporting to Keynote gives you two options.  The first is static images.  Though this option lacks the dynamic transitions from event to event, it is the most lightweight.  Each fly-out event is represented on a slide in the deck created by Timeline 3D.  Below is an example using my Posterous's RSS feed and the static Keynote export option.

Exporting your timeline in movie format produces the best looking product.  The progression of the timeline is smooth and flawless as long as you go forward in time.  That's because each event is given its own slide in your deck as with the static option, but instead of an image, each slide contains a short movie.  This kind of quality and impressive presentation comes at a cost, however.  Each individual movie is saved in a folder named Timeline Exports in your Movies folder.  For the timeline example below, it saved 22 movies totaling 248 MB.  That's pretty unwieldy if you're ever asked to share your deck or if you need to continue working on it on a different machine.

Below is an example using my Posterous's RSS feed and the movie Keynote export option.

The Verdict

This surely doesn't seem like a glowing review.  It certainly has its flaws.  Depending on how you'd use it, those flaws are either pretty minor or deal-killers.  As with all design tools used in creating presentation slides, this one should be used with caution.  Until the major flaws are fixed, think about your audience and the environment (room, projector, screen/monitor).  Is it worth the $65?  Again, it depends.  For some, it's a no-brainer.  For others, it may be best to see what Bee Documents comes up with for version 3.0.  Do I feel that I got my money's worth?  The answer to that would be a qualified "yes."

If you have an image management application such as Lightroom, Aperture, or iPhoto, you could use it.  They have decent metadata support, but you'd be mixing all of these random images with your own library.

Since I already have a license for Bento, I thought I'd give that a try.  For those who don't know what Bento is, it's the smaller, lighter, and easier to use sibling of FileMaker, a powerful and cross-platform desktop and server-based database.  Though FileMaker is cross-platform, Bento is Mac only.  Bento lets you create new databases, called libraries, easily and with a completely visual interface.  No programming or understanding of databases or how they work is needed.

Now, even if I didn't have to worry about mixing my personal photography with these images I use for my slides, I wouldn't use iPhoto or the like because of the information I want to track with the images.  I want to be able to track and search by the image type and/or keywords and I want to be able to track the licensing information so I know what I can and can't do legally with the images.

The template that I created (the download link at the end of this post) includes the following fields:

• Source
• Background (color)
• Type
• Keywords
• License
• Credit (person or site)
• Source URL
• Attribution

That last field is a calculated field, meaning it takes the license, credit, and URL fields and creates a string of text for attribution that you can use in your slides when attribution is required.

Image Assets Betno Template (download) by Mike Pulsifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The danger inherent in protecting the status quo over the new and creative is that truly innovative solutions and, in keeping with the theme of this site, engaging presentation visuals fail to see the light of day.  Creativity is essential for the success of any individual or organization, public or private.

This article will address three barriers to truly embracing and fostering creativity:  organizational narcissism, the biology of risk aversion, and misplaced perceptions of value.  I’ll follow this up with some ideas of how to stop the madness.

Organizational Narcissism

Creativity comes in many forms, that much is true.  With that said, there is a great deal of “organizational narcissism” at play that fosters a sense among many that will have you hearing claims that the agencies and offices are just as creative as Madison Avenue, even though they haven’t created anything truly original.

Organizational narcissism is just what it appears to be:  the Narcissistic Personality Disorder on a collective scale.  To better understand this, let’s look at the elements of this affliction:

• There is a grandiose sense of self-importance.
• An inflated judgment of one’s own accomplishments.
• The individual assumes that others are totally concerned about his welfare.
• Though overweening ambition and confidence may lead to high achievement, performance may be disrupted due to intolerance of criticism or defeat.

source: http://www.centerod.com/organizational-narcissism.html

Applying these criteria to federal agencies is like shooting fish in a barrel.  Take the first criterion, for example.  Ask employees of any federal agency whether they think civilized society in America will grind to a halt if they closed up shop, and you’ll surely get more than one answer in the affirmative, especially the higher you go.  Of course, none of the agencies are so important that our country couldn’t adapt and adjust to the disappearance of any of them.

The second criterion gets to the heart of my example of repackaging what’s already been done, verbatim, and calling it “innovation.”  Due to the importance of the status quo to organizations such as these, these solutions are innovative only if you exclude the real world and what has been accomplished there.  Of course, this happens because narcissistic organizations are overly focused inwardly on themselves.

The third criterion is one that I believe appears in an organization in a more subtle fashion than the others.  You see it when agencies and their employees expect that other agencies or even the public will gladly seek their council, pay for services, or take the time to learn all about them.  You see it when acronyms (there’s no shortage of those) are thrown about with the assumption that others know what they mean.  You see it when the public is expected to know the organizational structure of a department.  You see it when a support organization expects that the other organizations they expect to support will gladly cut their budgets and off-load the work they had always been responsible for.  You see it when involuntary constituents are called “customers” as though those individuals freely chose to use that agency’s “services” over someone else.

The fourth criterion of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder applied to organizations is where you see the impact on individual creativity.   Intolerance of criticism or defeat is the key ingredient for enforcing the status quo.  Many of us have heard it before.  “Don’t rock the boat.”  “Don’t mess up a good thing [we’ve got going here].”  “Don’t try to change the world.”  “That’s not the way it’s done around here.”  The problem is, if you don’t rock the boat, it’ll never move.  I can’t claim credit for that statement, but I can’t remember where I read it.  It was either in one of the many books I read or perhaps from a fortune cookie.  Either way, it’s a very important message.

This element can manifest itself in different ways, but perhaps the most common in IT shops is through entrenched attitudes and technology allegiances.  In my years in IT, I’ve learned the dangers of the curse of the certifications, especially the MCP and MCSE.  This isn’t a dig at Microsoft per se, but rather at the business of certifications and the overly inflated importance the industry (especially the government) has placed on them.  The process of obtaining and maintaining these certifications often requires a significant investment of time and money.  So much so, that the breadth of products and vendors for which certification is obtained is more often than not limited to one and a small handful of complementary (as opposed to competing) technologies and companies.  Microsoft and the others knew this would happen when they established these certification exams and classes.  Thus, what we get out of this is a technological myopia and a sense (wrongly) that using a technology or product outside of or in competition with the one aligned with their certification is a threat to their job security and thus their livelihood.

It is this IT myopia that makes it difficult for open source operating systems and software to make more inroads than it already has.  It’s also manifested in open hostility to allowing a few Macs into the environment to perform specific tasks that they excel at or even to broaden exposure to different technologies in the IT shop.  In my opinion, a true IT professional can function comfortably in at least two different operating systems.  Any less is entry level.

This is where I tie this all back to creativity.  Creativity involves taking novel ideas or approaches to solve problems, no matter how trivial or complex they are.  Exposure to and understanding different avenues of thought, methods, and technologies open the mind to different, even radically different ideas.

The Biology of Risk Aversion

Creativity, by its very nature involves taking risks.  As Joseph Chilton Pearce said, “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”  Unfortunately, this fear of being wrong and the implications of this, be it embarrassment, rejection, or worse, holds dominion over much of our professional lives.  It is likely the biggest obstacle to overcome in the presentation slide design process and it is often what injects itself into projects.

The Project Management Body of Knowledge defines risk as “an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on a project’s objectives.  Risk has a cause and, if it occurs, a consequence.  Project risk includes both threats to the project’s objectives and opportunities to those objectives.”  In a nutshell, anything you think, say, or do can have unintended consequences, good or bad.

If project managers and those in IT share anything in common, it’s the lust for the orderly and predictable.  Creativity is, by its nature, anything but orderly or predictable.  Taking this a step further, Pablo Picasso said, “every act of creation is also an act of destruction.”  To be creative, you need to tear down the old and build something (even ideas) new, whose outcome is uncertain.  All to often, the fear of this uncertainty leads project managers and the time-crunched IT workers to warp the idea of risk management.  What tends to happen is an effort is made to minimize the risks rather than manage them.

If the PMI definition of risk management were implemented for Apollo 11, then we still would have landed on the moon.  There’d be reams and reams of documents written that nobody would ever read, but we’d get there.  How it’s often implemented, however, would have us still in the design phase of the project some forty years later.  There’s no way one of the risk-minimizers would let you strap three people to a giant rocket that costs millions of dollars, propelled by highly explosive rocket fuel and launch them off of this planet and into orbit around the moon finally landing two them on the surface where one boulder, unaccounted for, could cause catastrophic damage.

Why, then, do we have these risk-minimizers who fear creativity?  Why do some of us fear going out on a limb and buck convention when we design our PowerPoint slides?

In large part, it’s biological.  Two books you should, without question, read are Iconoclast, by Gregory Berns and Brain Rules, by Dr. John Medina.  Together, these books will help you understand why people (including and especially yourself) think the way they do, the barriers to creative thought, and how we can allow ourselves to grow.

The Amygdala In the Brain (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Constudoverbrain.png)

In short, the amygdala is to blame.  Correction:  the inability for one to override the amygdala is to blame.

The amygdala is the region of our brain that processes and prepares for and stores our emotional reactions.  If you learn to question and even override your amygdala when necessary, it can be very useful as a risk management organ, alerting you of dangers and triggering the necessary emotional response to move you to respond appropriately.  Unchecked, however, it can dominate your responses to new or different ideas.

Take for example, someone, let’s call him John Smith, who’s only used Windows sitting down in front of a Mac.  Based on John’s sensory input, his amygdala tells him this is different and he has an uncertain feeling about his ability to use the computer.  Unchecked, his amygdala can trigger a fear response whereby he gives up and/or starts reading off fifteen year old myths to those around him as reasons why this machine in front of him is worthy only of rejection.  However, if kept in check, John can override the fear response and instead learn and try to understand this different way of doing things, writing new memories and associating new emotional responses to this type of stimuli.  This is what separates those stuck in the OS-wars of yesteryear from those willing to get beyond the old arguments and get on with computing.  It’s what separates those who are afraid of creativity or are afraid to be creative from those who are willing to be creative.

Misplaced Perceptions of Value

If there’s one thing we can all agree to disagree on, it’s what the value of an idea, technology, or presentation visual is.  In IT, there is much agreement on how to assign value to an idea or product, yet they’re incredibly out of touch with the users.  This is greatly evident in the federal government where a cost-benefit analysis more often than not seems to address the former and not the latter.

Technical folks, in my experience, see value as a numbers game.  For example, if solutions A and B both meet the minimum requirements and A costs $10,000 and B costs $20,000, the response from most in the field would be that A is a better value.  In addition, they most often see a slide crammed with a couple paragraphs or a dozen wordy bullets as a better value than a slide emphasizing one point visually.

What is often ignored is how the end-user, the public, or customer (in the case of private industry) perceives value.  Judging by how consumers are buying up Macs at a rate well above the other brands, those outside IT clearly don’t see value as a binary numbers game.  They place value in those other intangibles such as ease of use, security, less required maintenance, and yes, design.

In Summary...

It is these three impediments to creativity that are why you don’t ground-breaking web-based interfaces coming out of the government.  It’s why, in my opinion, why so many cling to bullets and openly resist attempts to introduce a new way of presenting information.  You’re attempting to mess up the “good” thing they’ve got going.  You’re introducing uncertainty, and therefore risk.  Good design can’t (easily) be quantified.

So, what can we do about this?  Let’s look at the ways we can address these issues and rather than inhibit creativity, let’s see how we can foster it:

Dealing With Organizational Narcissism

• Refocus on what’s real.  Try to move the group’s focus away from grandiose fantasies and refocus it on reality.  When the conversations start swirling around how great the organization is, change the subject to what the organization should be doing.
• Think outwardly.  The organization’s leadership should be setting the collective sight outside of the organization itself.  Goals should be set for how you can make life better for your constituencies, customers, or audience rather than how good you think this will make you organization look or how powerful it may become.
• Mission first, everything else last.  If you work in a web shop, what’s your mission?  Is it to build web sites and applications that support your agency/company or is it to build web sites and applications that support your constituents/customers?  Are your presentation slides being used as notes or a “record” of what’s discussed (internal focus) or are they being used to help with comprehension and retention of your message (external focus)?
• Expose yourself and your organization to new and different ideas, tools, and ways to do things.  Change organizational perception of the new and different from one of fear and loathing to hope and opportunity.

Dealing With Risk Aversion

• Embrace risk.  Nobody ever got anywhere playing it safe all of the time.  Progress is made when someone goes out on a limb with either an new idea, product, process, or design.  What looks like an invitation for disaster may turn out to be the key to success.  As Mark Twain said, “The fear of death follows from the fear of life.  A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
• Be willing to accept and own up to failure.  In science and in life, far more is learned from mistakes and failures than is ever learned from doing it right the first time.  The former forces you to try new things and different approaches while the latter fosters tunnel vision.  Owning up to failure can also lead to taking ownership of success.  Passing the buck will surely lead to passing the baton.  To quote Marshall Cook, “Creative people must entertain lots of silly ideas in order to receive the occasional strokes of genius.”
• Force yourself to experience and learn new things.  Do you work in IT?  Do you only know Windows?  Take a class in or teach yourself how to use Linux or the Mac.  Are you a designer?  Expose yourself to different disciplines and artists that have a different perspective.  Do you deliver presentations?  Expose yourself to different presentation styles and try them yourself.  Force yourself to broaden your perspective.
• Get out.  Get away.  Meet off-site occasionally to force yourself into a different environment.  If you regularly meet off-site, change up the locations.  Thrusting yourself into new and unfamiliar territory tricks your brain to process your thoughts and external stimuli, cutting-off the emotional shortcuts your brain typically takes.

Reevaluate Value

• Remember who you’re serving.  That web site you’re building isn’t for use by your organization nearly as much as it is for the site’s constituency/customers.  That presentation you’re giving isn’t for your benefit nearly as much as it is for your audience.
• The user/audience experience matters just as much as the requirements.  The functionality may be there, but if the users can’t find it or your audience doesn’t comprehend or retain it, then the whole effort was a waste.
• It’s not a purely numbers game.  A confusing interface that meets 100% of the technical requirements yet costs half as much as an easy to use interface that meets 95% of the requirements is arguably not a better value.  Slides that distract, yet hold all the information you’re sharing are by far a worse value than slides that reinforce the spoken message clearly and efficiently.
• Employ the Golden Rule.  Put yourself in your your constituent’s/customer’s/audience’s shoes.  Ask yourself how you, as a regular person, would want to be treated.

I tend to prefer the latter when I don't have what I need in my own personal library.  Though there are times that call for stock photos, my employer surely won't pay for them.  Searching for the images at the Creative Commons portion of flickr can be time consuming as you're sifting through the stuff that just won't cut it.  Behold.cc is a great service that highlights what appears to be the best of the best from flickr, but I do wonder how much is put into keeping it up to date.

The Viewfinder interface

Enter Viewfinder.  I first heard of this great app while listening to MacBreak Weekly.  In one of the recent episodes, Don McAllister recommended Viewfinder as a great way to get images from flickr.  Intrigued, I decided to give it a try.

The great thing about this application is that you can hone your search in on Creative Commons images, including restricting it to those that are permitted for commercial use and/or allow for derivative works.  You can sort your images by relevance, interest, or date.  You can also specify a minimum image size.  Along the bottom, you can even use the slider to make the thumbnails larger or smaller.  Another nice feature is the quick-look feature that allows you to zoom in on an image with the press of the space bar.  Of course, no image search app would be complete without the ability to set one of the images as your desktop wallpaper.

The image inserted into Keynote

Those features are great in and of themselves.  However, what really sets this apart is the button that inserts the image into Keynote automatically.  This feature cuts steps and makes inserting images into  your slides literally a one-click process.  If there's one feature I'd like to see, it's the automatic insertion of copyright information into the slide.  This is important if you're going to live up to your attribution responsibilities with cc-licensed images.  As of right now, it's up to you to do that yourself.

Now, this app isn't free, but if you're a Keynote user like I am, the introductory price of £15 ($24.48 as I write this) or £19 when version 1.1 ships is well worth it.  A non-expiring demo is available, but it limits you to two downloads per launch and each is delayed by 30 seconds.  Surely fair if you're looking to try before you buy.

Maybe it was summer.  Maybe it was the challenge itself.  Maybe it was because of some other reason I don't yet know of, but we've had one submission.  With that said, I don't want to take anything away from Edward Kavanagh's challenge submission.  It was a really good one.

The deck he designed clearly works best in the SlideShare environment, but I can see how, depending on the speaker's style, this could work in a live presentation setting as well.  The approach he took clearly solved the problem at hand:  convey the message in the complex chart in a clear and easily understandable manner.  In the 12 slides that replace the one, he broke down the data in the chart into three easily digestible chunks.  He first presents each chunk and follows it all up with the essential question.  His answer came in a likewise broken-down manner, allowing the audience to absorb the significance of each statistic.  This is all followed-up by a slide that repeats the statistics along with the central message.

The great things about Ed's slide deck are:

1. The slide is legible
2. The data is provided in easily digestible chunks
3. Charts and tables are designed with a purpose: conveying a clear unambiguous message
4. It tells a story

All of these are qualities that the original slide lacked.

I'd like to thank Ed for his great submission for the Chart Make-Over Challenge and everyone else who helped spread the word of the event.

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 slide in question.  It was presented by Aneesh Chopra, the new federal Chief Technology Officer.  Though well intentioned, the chart was impossible to read or absorb as a member of the audience.

Your challenge:

Redesign the slide to the right so that the information is more readable and, of course, more effectively reinforces the speaker's message.  To participate:

• Redesign the chart slide to the right as one or more slides in PowerPoint, Keynote, or Impress (OpenOffice)
• Post your submission on SlideShare. Please add the keyword of "cc09" and submit it to the Chart Make-Over Challenge 2009 group.
• If you also blog about it, feel free to comment below with a link or email me the link at webmaster@mike-pulsifer.org and I'll post a brief summary here.

The deadline is Noon EST on Sunday, August 16. I'll link to each submission here shortly after the deadline.

Of course, no chart is any good without the context in which it is presented.  You can watch the recorded presentation at this link (discussion of this chart starts at about 1:50).  For your convenience, a transcript of the relevant portion is below:

Let me be begin with just a phenomenal story about our personal lives.  This is a difficult to see graphic for those in the back, but it conveys a very powerful message.  This time in our life, we are seeing a tremendous increase in the adoption rate of new technologies.  The graphic before you shows how long it took the average American household to adopt an innovation. And you can see over the 30s and 40s as we adopted refrigerators and washing machines and so forth.  It took some time.  The slope of the S-curve, as they say is growing but not as steep as in the current era.  In fact, we’re seeing the adoption of cellphones as an example exceeding those of homes with dishwashers.  In fact, if you think about the context, there will be newer and newer services and products that emerge the year post this evaluation, you’ll see the same rapidity.  At the same time, we’ll acknowledge we’re at the infancy of this digital era.

Aneesh Chopra - Federal CTO

Take for example, the concept of the "Open Government Initiative."  The application in this case was a blog, but I thought to myself, "what if we were tasked with creating slides for a presentation discussing this initiative?"  The ideas came flowing in and they were all very left-brain type of visuals; that is very literal:

• The White House
• Flags
• Person at a computer
• Open doors
• Open windows

When attempting to come up with visuals for your message, try first assembling a list of synonyms.  From there, add a series of different types of metaphors that can represent the idea.  For example, for "open," thesaurus.com gives us:

accessible, agape, airy, ajar, bare, clear, cleared, dehiscent, disclosed, emptied, expanded, expansive, exposed, extended,extensive, free, gaping, made passable, naked, navigable, passable, patent, patulous, peeled,removed, rent, revealed, ringent, rolling,spacious, spread out, stripped, susceptible, unbarred, unblocked, unbolted, unburdened, uncluttered, uncovered, unfolded, unfurled, unimpeded, unlocked, unobstructed, unplugged, unsealed, unshut, unstopped, vacated, wide, yawning

How about some metaphors?  Well, these come to mind:

• sky
• open hands
• doorway
• passageway
• portal

Other concepts central to the initiative include:

• collaboration
• transparency
• information
• participation
• feedback
• government
• opportunities
• public

Generate a list of synonyms from that and add to those concepts these metaphors:

• petition
• conversation
• clear water
• bulletin board
• etc.

Do you see what we've done here?  From one simple message, we have ourselves one heck of a list of words we can use to search our favorite stock photo site and/or Creative Commons library to find the image that will help us drive our point home.

Below is a small deck with some examples of using some of these metaphors to strengthen the message visually:

As you can see, there's a lot to read.  The audience can't possibly be expected to read all this and absorb what the speaker is trying to share.  The story was important and of great value.  It's just too bad the slides hurt her efforts.

Below is my effort at redesigning the deck.

As you can see, the deck shrank in half from 22 slides to 11.  Much of the content on the slides were details that didn't need to be on slides.  Even coming up with visual metaphors for each slide or each chunk of content on the slides would have been too much.  The presentation is what she was up in front saying to us in the audience, not her slides.  I'll address each of the new slides and what I did and why I did it.  As always, please feel free to add your comments below.

1. Title Slide - I decided to follow a similar path on the title slide that I took with the Coast Guard make-over.  The difference here is the title and subtitle are moved up to take advantage of extra space and take advantage of the rule of thirds.  For this deck, I used Keynote's "Showroom" template.  I did tweak it a little bit, though, to make it more appropriate for the subject material and to try to avoid the "I've seen that before" that you get when using built-in templates.  The green line ties in with the environmental theme of the Greenversations blog.  I added a reflection to give it a little more thickness without overdoing it.
2. Agenda Slide - For this and subsequent slides, I carried on the line from the title slide.  The agenda items, rather than being bullets in a list, were instead represented by conversation bubbles.  This too was an attempt to reinforce the theme of the blog.  The agenda items are brought in one at a time, allowing for commentary and for the focus of the audience to be squarely on what the presenter is addressing at the moment.
3. Slide 3 - In this slide, you can see an alternative approach to the standard and unimaginative slide title.  Instead of having slide-specific titles, I brought the conversation bubbles from the agenda slide to the bottom of the slide and adjusted the opacity to keep the focus on the content and not the bubbles.  For the "Why?" slide, I decided to focus on her message of putting "a human face on the big blank box (government)."
4. Slide 4 - This slide focuses on the organizational structure that they have for managing their blog.  Though crude and simple, this reinforces the message better than a few slides of text.
5. Slide 5 - When it comes to the important message of encouraging bloggers to reply to comments on their posts, a simple, straight-forward photograph accomplishes this.  A little bit of text in a caption reinforces this.
6. Song of the Coqui - Easily my favorite slide in this deck, this replaces slide 10 in the original deck.  Using a photograph that goes to the edges and shows the face of the frog has far more impact than the embedded photograph looking down on the frog's back.  The commentary was distilled down to concise points that minimizes reading.  Again, the details will be in what the speaker's saying.
7. Weekly Features Slide - This slide needs more work.  However, it's a good start at getting away from the text-heavy original.  Spacial representations work well for time-based information.
8. Flow of the River - This slide's design is similar to the Coqui slide for visual consistency.  Though the image isn't the one she talked about in her presentation (the original was way too small), that's not as important as having a visual to reinforce what she is talking about.
9. Policy & Legal Slide - Here, I'm going for humor.  I'm not going for the laughs (or chuckles) at the beginning of the presentation, but rather at about the 10 minute mark when the brain starts struggling with paying attention to the current presentation.  This little shift in gears grabs the audience's attention anew, buying the speaker more time to get through the talk.  Now, humor isn't something that should be used haphazardly.  If the joke isn't relevant, then you can easily lose your audience.
10. Comment Policy Slide - This is one of those slides where I'm using a bulleted list without bullets.  A list works for what she's trying to get across, but if you can, avoid using bullets themselves.  This keeps the slides clean and you avoid those lethal bullets.
11. Last slide - Here, the audience gets to see the blog with the contents of two slides condensed to one slide and three "bullets."

All photographs are credited in the slide notes.  For the subject matter of the presentation:

• The Greenversations blog
• Greenversations on Twitter

As I mentioned earlier, please feel free to comment on my slide make-over and/or suggest alternative approaches in the comments area below.

The problem with putting URLs in your slides is that though the intent may be noble, the end result is the opposite of what was intended.

Take, for example, the slide deck I made over recently:

On the second slide, we have a list of URLs.  The intent here is that the audience could either click on the links when they received the electronic copy after the presentation or they could copy them down (and possibly visit them) while he was talking.  Instead, what we, the audience were presented was a distraction.  They were a visual distraction that took our attention away from the important points, even if they were in mind-numbing bullet points.  If any of us had the wherewithal to copy them down or even go to those sites on our phones or laptops, then we're even more distracted.  There would be no hope at all for our paying attention to the presentation.

If the intent was for the speaker to click on those links and demonstrate the sites, then it's an invitation to disaster.  Granted, there are plenty of examples where the web page launched successfully, but this practice is just inviting Murphy to make a grand entrance.  Rather than clicking on a link on your slide, instead have the page already loaded in your browser.  That way, the audience won't have to wait for any HTML, graphics, Flash, or any other components to load.  If you lose your Internet connection, you'll at least have something to show.  Another thing to consider when launching links from within your slide is that it takes time for your computer to switch to your browser, open a new window (or tab), and start the page load process.  Granted, it may take only a few seconds, but that's enough time for your audience's attention to be commandeered by something else.  You also want them to be focused on you, not what your computer is or is not doing.

So, what to do?  Leave the URLs and links out of your slides.  Instead, put them in your handouts.  The purpose of your slides is to function as a visual aid, and not a detailed information resource.  That's the purpose of your handout.

Top Image credit: frankfarm, used under a Creative Commons license.