Cool Presenters University article by TechSmith’s Betsy Weber.

Screencasting Tips for Beginners

Posted by Todd Dunn, CTS at 11:31 PM .

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From “Top Ten Truths About the Digital Ecosystem“, a recent post on the Dealing with Darwin blog:

“10. Images are king. Verbal content, by virtue of its sheer volume, is increasingly perceived as noise. We are entering a new era of collage, where the mind of the viewer is the assembling artist. Verbalization happens post facto, the residue of headline skimming and subconscious synthesis. The esthetics of digitally enhanced images will become increasingly powerful as a vehicle for cutting through the clutter. Manipulating semantics or semiotics via images will become increasingly sophisticated, both in the private and public sectors. High-definition displays and portable form factors will be popular mass markets. Indexing and searching images, on the other hand, while technologically interesting, will be of peripheral impact.”

Posted by Lee Potts at 8:00 AM .

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Sociable Media’s Cliff Atkinson is featured in an LA Times most emailed story featuring his work on the Vioxx litigation.

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 12:00 PM .

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What good are ingenious ideas or a grand vision if you can’t convey their fabulousness to your audience? Take some pointers from these leaders. The following individuals were profiled in the book 10 Simple Secrets of the World’s Greatest Business Communicators, by Carmine Gallo.

BusinessWeek’s on-line slide show features contemporary business execs considered among the top speakers in Corporate America. These men and women have leveraged their powerful communications skills to build such companies as General Electric, Starbucks, and Apple.

Posted by Peter Durand at 12:50 PM .

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Occasionally, when you are designing a presentation or a web site, you need to get some ideas for likely visuals that could work with your color scheme. You could trawl through the photo libraries, looking for that particular combination of subject matter and hue, or you could use a neat little utility like Jim Bumgardner’s Colr Pickr.
Colr Pickr lets you select a color from a generated color wheel, adjust its brightness if you wish, and then goes off and selects photographic images of subjects that match the selected hue. It finds those photographs from a variety of Flickr group pools such as Color Fields, Macro, Flowers, etc, and returns a selection of them around the color wheel. Clicking the same colour again returns a new set, until it runs out of possible candidates.
This is a fun little tool to play with, but remember that just because it lets you find photographs it does not automatically mean that you can use them freely. All photos on Flickr are subject to copyright restrictions placed upon them by their owners. Sometimes these may be Creative Commons licences that allow you to use them in some ways, sometimes they are quite restrictive – always check before use.

Posted by Roy Hammans at 2:06 PM .

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One in an occasional series of posts about presentation pros who are up to something.

I first met and interviewed Eric and Liz Glaser in the mid ‘90s when I was editor of Multimedia Producer magazine and they were pioneering the use of interactive CD-ROMs for sales and marketing applications. In 1998, they created a nifty CD-ROM that allowed the owners of Domino’s Pizza stores to mix and match food products to create menu specials and related profit analysis. I was struck by how easy and functional the program was and recall actually having fun building my own pizza menus. I got to wondering what Eric and Liz have been up to lately. I recently reconnected with them at their company, Compass Creative in Roswell, GA.

Both Eric and Liz come from ad agency backgrounds and, even though they’ve been in the presentation space for more than a decade, their agency roots still show in their approach to creating presentations for marketing and sales departments in large corporations. Their presentation work is artistically sound, to be sure, but the key to their business approach is hardcore sales functionality. In other words, they unambiguously help clients make money.

By 2000, the ubiquity of PowerPoint was eroding the demand for high-end CD-ROM presentations. The writing was on the digital wall, recalls Eric. “We knew we had to move away from just presentation. The days of the $80,000 contract to create a brochure on a CD were gone.” Eric and Liz sat down with their clients and asked them what they needed to improve their sales processes. “We wanted to find out where it hurt? What was the need?” says Eric.

They realized that all of their clients were standardized on Microsoft Office and by this time those companies were building their own reports, presentations, sell sheets, mini-catalogs and other sales products. But Office, bless its monopolistic heart, is not smart enough to know a user’s unique needs or how to automate and customize task-specific processes. Eric and Liz realized that Office is a multipurpose vehicle in a world that demands custom transport.

Monster Garage Meets Presentations

When their customers began clamoring for an easier ride on the sometimes bumpy and slow road between raw sales materials and customer-ready visuals, Eric and Liz stuck their heads under the hood of Office and rigged the PowerPoint engine to generate on-the-fly, customized sales reports, presentations and catalogs. The result is a series of modified, street-legal apps that scream like a nitrous-injected Honda CRX running a strait LS/VTEC block and a Turbonetics T-66 with .81 AR @26psi. Sweet!

Glaser’s new spin-off company, DXT Systems, now specializes in performance-enhancing middleware solutions for companies that want their salespeople and managers to be able to trick out their own sales sheets, screen presentations and print catalogs at dragstrip speeds and without a Class 3 license. Eric calls the system DXT to signify it as a dynamic extension of Office functionality…and to make it sound cool.

Current DXT clients include a DXT.Presentation Builder for Eastman Kodak, a similar system for a worldwide soft drink manufacturer that doesn’t like its name used by its vendors, a do-it-yourself DXT.Catalog/Sell Sheet Builder for MeadWestvaco and a DXT.Sales Report Builder for Solutia, a spinoff of Monsanto.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Robert L. Lindstrom at 5:29 PM .

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Of all the programs the Presentation Council makes available to the presentation professionals community, one of the most useful is their series of live webinars exploring various presentation tools, techniques and technologies. In case you missed the live events, here are links to the archived versions of the three most recent:

Tom Bunzel, “Using Video Effectively In Your Presentation”

Rick Altman, “Too Many Chefs?: The Fragile Art of Collaboration”

Julie Irvin, “How to Effectively Communicate Data Charts & Graphs”

As the schedule of future webinars are announced, we’ll post it here.

Posted by Lee Potts at 9:33 PM .

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Extending PowerPoint with Freepath by ZDNet‘s Dan Farber — Demo 2006: Grass Roots Software demoed a new presentation application, Freepath (the site is still not live at this writing) that lets you build a playlist by dragging and dropping elements into a composer. The software leverages PowerPoint content and also supports audio, video, PDF, Word and other data types. Freepath is available for $249 ($149 for the next [...]

Posted by Tom Bunzel at 1:34 PM .

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I had the pleasure of hearing Jeffrey Zeldman speak at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, TX. I was impressed with him and all of the folks who have worked so hard to turn Web design into a “practice” based on a growing body of Web standards. Here is a five year old article written by Zeldman and just recently resurrected by the newly launched Adobe Motion Design Center. I think presentation designers can learn a lot from our Web counterparts.

Posted by Robert Befus at 4:49 PM .

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Some of you have BFAs in Graphic Design, or some other form or level of design degree. For those of you who do not have formal training (or those who need a refresher), here is a nice, developing resource on the use of typography. Although it is geared toward Web design, it incorporates classic typography principles that apply anywhere. Typography is an often ignored element of presentation design. If Arial and Times New Roman fonts suddenly disappeared from the planet, so would most presentations.

Posted by Robert Befus at 5:11 PM .

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Marissa Mayer is in charge of defending Google’s Web page from all who would clutter it up. She says Google’s site is like a closed Swiss Army knife. It is easy to get a hold of and slip into your pocket.

Some presentations are just the opposite, complex and difficult to understand. Simplicity and ease of use are not only important in Web or product design. Presentations need to be easy to use as well.

Here is an interesting Fast Company article on the beauty of simplicity.

Posted by Robert Befus at 10:49 AM .

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From the Presentation Council listserv:

“Julie Irvin, President of Keystone Resources, is presenting the upcoming InfoComm International Presentations Council webinar, “How to Effectively Communicate Data Charts & Graphs,” on Wednesday, December 7, 2005 beginning at 4:00pm EST. If you are able to join the webinar, please send a RSVP to Shana Rieger, srieger@infocomm.org. The meeting link and call-in instructions will be emailed to you December 2nd.

* Pie of Pie Charts
* Use of Small Multiples
* Using PowerPoint & Illustrator to enhance basic charts
* The importance of chart labeling, titles and colors
* Other Software & Tools that help you illustrate points”

Posted by Lee Potts at 9:09 PM .

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Every creative person has experienced the feeling of being stuck. A deadline is right around the corner and the ideas just aren’t flowing. When you’re staring at a blank mental wall and can’t seem to get things moving, try visiting this ideagenerationmethods site. You will find lots of ideas for ways to generate ideas… either on your own or in groups. They are listed in alphabetical order, and the best ones aren’t at the top of the list, so try starting at the bottom, or in the middle.

Posted by Robert Befus at 10:22 AM .

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Warning by Nicole Recchia (published by Mark Batty*) presents a compact collection of those ubiquitous warning signs and labels that are meant to make the world safer for people and, perhaps more importantly, to protect corporations from the dangers of litigation. It is of interest to presentation professional for several reasons.

First of all, it’s a graphically striking book as well as a very entertaining “read”. There’s something about the way the imagination automatically constructs narratives around these sparsely drawn and uncaptioned scenarios that absorbs your attention (even as you are repelled by the thought of just how horrible the events that inspired the need for these warnings must have been). Perhaps this inherent horror contributes to the tendency that makes some of the examples abstract to the point of incomprehensibility. Recchia’s clean, uncluttered layout does a good job of letting the images speak, sometimes incoherently, for themselves. To be fair, it should be pointed out that this lack of context might add to the confusion.

Warning is also a place to start if you are ever faced with the task of developing highly stylized graphics that consistently transmits a message in a non-language dependant way. Actually, it might be as good at pointing out what techniques to avoid as it is at providing inspiration.

The real warning here is, of course, to be careful about assuming how an image is going to be interpreted by an audience. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but in some cases it might be a different thousand words for each person looking at it.

*Who kindly provided a review copy.

Posted by Lee Potts at 11:00 PM .

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