New and bee-youtiful, any one of these free fonts would look great in your next presentation. I just downloaded them myself and they’re pretty rockin’.
Download them all here.
Discovered via imjustcreative and typophile
Stuff to make you a better presenter.
Archives for category: Design
I’ll never be able to afford one, but the painstaking attention to craft and detail in these Oxxford suits is awe-inspiring. What a great video.
Great speeches and presentations are like this, too. They’re not created the night before in a burst adrenaline. They take shape slowly. Care and attention is paid to every detail along the way. And of course, it takes years of practice to get everything right.
If you’re looking for the quick fix, use the PowerPoint Content Wizard. If you want quality results, accept the fact that you’re gonna have to invest some time.
via Signal vs. Noise
There’s nothing wrong with making learning fun, simple, and concise. In fact, there’s a lot right with it. Take, for example, Google’s explanation of a relatively abstract and complicated topic.
(via @swissmiss)
Okay, you have to tell me what you think of these videos.
They come from a series of videos called Wee See, which is designed to introduce babies to the visual world. But I find them somehow really relaxing and inexplicably trance-inducing.
I really can’t tell you why this appeals to me, but I could watch these all day. I think my visual/spatial right brain gets it right away, but my left-brain, being logical and verbal (of which these videos are neither), can’t make sense of it and thus can’t develop words to tell you why I like it. But that’s just a theory.
What do you think? Do you like them? Would you play them for your baby? Would you watch them yourself?
When I found out a few years ago that designing PowerPoint presentations could be a career, I immediately went into consume-everything-I-can-find-on-this-topic mode as I am wont to do when something strikes my fancy (hello Beatles, Pixar, Star Trek…and LOTS of other things). I still haven’t recovered from this obsession yet, but recently I’ve become aware of more fuel for the fire. Below are some of the up-coming books on presenting and slide design that I’m WAY excited about: Three from authors with an established track record and one from a promising first-timer. I can’t recommend them since I haven’t read them yet, but I’m such a fan of all of these authors previous works that I’d order them sight unseen. One thing’s for sure: presentation design fans will be at no loss for input in the coming months.
The Naked Presenter – Garr Reynolds
Garr just released his follow-up to Presentation Zen, Presentation Zen Design, so I was shocked to see this as I poked around Amazon today, but Garr’s already working on book number 3, apparently. Garr has mentioned the idea of “naked communication” on his blog before, but I had no idea that he’d be developing the idea into a full book and the description on the Amazon pre-order page has me very excited. It wasn’t long after I started looking into presentation design that I realized how much of creating a great presentation wasn’t laying out the slides themselves, but organizing and planning the entire presentation. I’m excited to hear Garr’s thoughts on how to apply his signature Zen aesthetic to presenting in general.
UPDATE: Garr just mentioned that he’s writing the new book today on his Posterous site. Head on over there to read the post, as well as my thoughts about “naked” presenting in the comments section.
The Presentation Zen Way – Garr Reynolds
If Presentation Zen and Presentation Zen Design are the required slide design text books, then The Presentation Zen Way is the accompanying lab fee. Shaped like a Japanese bento box (from which Reynolds drew inspiration in his first book), this contains everything you need (short of a laptop running slideware) to start creating killer presentations. Included are a 50 minute video in which Garr explains many of his slide design techniques, a notepad for story-boarding your slides, two packs of post-it notes, two pencils, and a coupon worth $300 from iStockPhoto. The DVD is the most exciting part of the set, but as a slide designer, you’re gonna be purchasing all of those other things anyway, so why not get them all together in one package? Pretty cool.
Resonate: Present Stories That Transform Audiences – Nancy Duarte
I’ve been looking forward to this for a while, as Nancy and crew have been talking it up on the Duarte Blog for several months now. But today I noticed the detailed book description for the first time, which reveals a little about how the book will be organized. The thing I’m most excited about is the allusion to the audience as hero and the presenter as mentor. What an amazing metaphor for that relationship. Given the way the Slide:ology fundamentally changed the way we see presentations and slide design, I’ve been wondering if Nancy would be able to come up with equally ground-breaking ideas for her sophomore effort, but what we’ve seen so far bodes well. The fact that it comes out a week after my birthday has to be a good sign, too.
How to Be a Presentation God: Build, Design, and Deliver Presentations that Dominate! – Scott Schwertly
I’m very excited to hear that Scott has a book deal. This will be his first, but if the kind of content he produces regularly on both the Ethos 3 blog is any testament, this book will rock. Scott’s distinct tone and style is starkly different from most others on the presentation design scene and I find his tongue-in-cheek presenters tips to be both humorous and enlightening. I can’t wait to add his tome to my ever-growing presenting library.
This is a simple little tip but it really helps.
The next time you choose an accent color for a row or column of a table, try to choose the lightest accent color that will get the job done. Often times it feels like we need to pick a bright, bold color, because we really want to accentuate the information, but less is more in this case. The truth is, our eyes are very good at discerning even very slight differences in the hue or saturation of a color, and a much lighter color value will still have the desired effect.
The main reason it’s so tempting to pick one of the brighter, bolder colors is, I think, due to the way the color picker is laid out in most applications: little swatches of varying shades and tints of a color. Presented this way, the darker shades are much more noticeable, and since that’s the effect we want for that row of the table, that’s the one we go with.
When presented this way, the darker hues appear much more noticeable, which makes them seem like the best choice for an accent color.
But look what happens.
In the slide below, I’ve chosen colors at the darker end of the spectrum of options given by the color picker. They’re much bolder, but they make it a little difficult to read the text. Even if you were to change the text to something with a higher contrast (such as white) the text would be more readable but the overall look of the whole table would still be fairly hard on the eyes.
Bolder colors are harder on the eyes.
The only thing I changed from the slide above to the slide below is to select color values from the opposite end of the light/dark spectrum. You can see that even though the colors seem weaker in the color picker, they still offer plenty of contrast with the plain white rows around them and it’s much easier to read the black text.
Lighter colors are easier to look at but still draw attention to the important rows.
As is usually the case, good design is often about being subtle and understated. By understanding a little about how amazingly sensitive our eyes are it’s possible to achieve big effects with less color.
The video below was produced by the folks in Mozilla‘s User Interface (UI) department to explain why they are choosing to move from a tabs-on-bottom to a tabs-on-top layout in the next version of their popular web browser, Firefox. Their argument for tabs-on-top is well-reasoned, and I appreciate their taking the time to explain to their users why they’ll be making such a drastic change to Firefox’s look and feel. It also demonstrates just how much thought (DESIGN!) they’ve put into every aspect of their product, a trait that I recommend when it comes to building slides.
I particularly liked the way they illustrate the point about the Conceptual Model of Firefox. This happens in the video at around 1:25 minutes in. What I like is their use of color to make a fairly abstract point perfectly clear by color-coding the elements they’re discussing. This enables us to quite literally see why the tabs-on-top layout is superior. This would have been a tough point to get across in words alone.
When you build slides, always strive to show your audience as much as you can about what you’re saying. That’s why the slides are there at all: to supplement your words and communicate things that are just easier to understand when you see it. If you don’t have anything like that in your presentation, why not go slide-less?
via HolyKaw
Great post today from Duarte on the trend of using complimentary colors in movie posters and how to do the same in your slides. Check it out.
via Duarte Blog
Color is an important part of any design. It’s incredible to see how complicated and nuanced something as basic as color choice can be. This video from Pantone shows a little glimpse into what it’s like to be in charge of the world’s color standards.
The commentary by John Maeda and Tina Roth Eisenberg is just bonus.
360° Color: A Peek Inside Pantone from Base on Vimeo.
via imjustcreative
Discovered Dan Roam’s client history while poking around on his site today. Not surprised that he represented it visually, but he did it in a particularly interesting (and fun to play with) way.
