Yesterday was quite a big day for this little blog. Advance Your Slides was chosen, out of the 16 million WordPress blogs out there, to be featured on WordPress.com’s Freshly Pressed section and it’s still up there as I type this. The resulting spike in traffic has been enormous, at least by comparison to anything else I’ve seen in my short blogging career. The blog was viewed a nice, round total of 1500 times yesterday, and already has 325 hits this morning. The post that was featured, Five Ways To Improve Your Skills, got 1, 123 views and received 25 comments. So today, I’ve decided to share the top ten things I learned during all of this. Some of the things are specific to blogging, but some of them apply to life in general. I hope you enjoy.

As a side note, if you’re someone who came and visited for the first time yesterday and have decided to return today, I want to say thank you for doing so. This isn’t the kind of thing I typically cover here, but I’ll be back to my old tricks starting tomorrow. I hope you’ll continue to check back in the future, but thank you very much for visiting yesterday and having the confidence in me to visit again today.

On with the countdown.

10. Blogging is a viable medium. I’ve heard a lot of talk recently about how blogging is so out of style. There are too many of them, it’s too easy to get one so how can they be credible, etc. Up until yesterday by busiest day on the blog was 138 viewers, but yesterday pushed that total to over ten times that number. In a single day. That’s probably the largest audience I’ve ever had for anything I’ve ever done, and I’ve done some acting, spoken at a conference, and written a good bit in the past. Blogging may not generate those kinds of number everyday, but the potential is there, and that’s a powerful thing.

9. Don’t moderate your comments. Until yesterday, I had my discussion settings for my blog set to ask me to moderate all comments. I had never received more than three or four comments on a given day before that. But the events of yesterday convinced me that this is not the way to go. It was too difficult to try to keep up with all of the comments as they came in, and the spam filter on WordPress.com is really good at catching the spammy comments, so that only the good ones actually made it up there. Of course, I still have the ability to remove comments if they become negative or inappropriate, but not publishing comments immediately can cause you to miss out on some good discussion or reply comments.

8. Use post tags. I only started using post tags to add metadata to my posts about a month or two ago. I just didn’t know how that worked before. But it turns out that tag pages are how WordPress.com chooses blogs for the Freshly Pressed section. If I hadn’t been using them, I wouldn’t have been found. Aside from just becoming eligible for Freshly Pressed, though, there’s no telling how many other readers can find you that way. It takes all of two minutes to add them, so why not do it?

7. Be a person. Most of the time in the past I’ve tried to be somewhat formal in my posts, discussing things like I would expect them to be discussed in an instructional booklet. Yesterday’s post, however, was much more personal, discussing my recent transmission problems and the goals I’m setting for myself as a presentation designer for the coming year. While most people read Advance Your Slides for the benefit it will bring them as speakers or slide designers, I’ve definitely noticed that the posts that include some amount of personality are more popular. It took some getting used to to expose some of my human vulnerability in such a public forum. But if you can get over that you become much more interesting to your readers.

6. Try to be broadly applicable. Of course, much of what I right here concerns public speaking and design, but many of the pointers I give apply to much more than just those two areas. By writing in a way that expresses the core ideas behind your specific topic, you can make your content appealing to a broader audience, which increases the potential readership for your stuff.

5. Use headings or make the key points bold. This helps people scan your post quickly to see if it’s worth reading the whole thing. Blog readers may check hundreds of blogs in a day via RSS or sites like StumbleUpon or Digg. They’re in a hurry and want to know that if they spend the time to read your whole post it will be worth the time. Adding content cues helps convince them to stay.

4. Content is king. It’s nice to have a pretty blog with lots of cool graphics and such, but I’ve always been a fan of keeping it simple, which is why the design on this blog is so minimal. I want it to be attractive, but emphasize the content of the posts. It seems to me that blog layout and design, while important, can almost be a distraction from good content. If yesterday is any indicator, people come for the content, not the pretty window-dressing.

3. Use images. Okay, I didn’t do this yesterday, but I should have. One of the things I noticed during all the commotion yesterday was that the picture accompanying the link to my blog on the Freshly Pressed page yesterday was just a screenshot of my blog. I like my blog’s look, but many of the other pictures from other blogs were more captivating. I should have found a more compelling image to capture people’s attention. You can find an image to supplement nearly any post and I should have taken the time to find one.

I probably would have benefited from having chosen an image.

2. Use good headlines. Your post may be great, but the headline has to convey that. It’s the first thing the audience sees and if it’s weak, they may “celebrate the passover” on  you altogether. Don’t be gimmicky and use misleading titles, but spending a minute to make yours catchy and enticing is worth it.

1. Be patient. I’ve been blogging seriously since fall of 2009. Not a terribly long time to stick with something, but I had wondered if I would ever get any significant traffic. Is all my effort worth it? First, I would say that the ability to help even one person that I might not have reached otherwise is very rewarding. Second, I’d say that I’ve derived great value out of the exercise of sitting down to write everyday. Even if no one reads it, at least I took the time to organize my thoughts and share them. What happens after that doesn’t matter as much. And lastly, I know now that if you stick with it long enough, eventually you’ll get better at writing (or whatever it is you do). And if you get good, people will read it. And hopefully tell their friends about it. And that’s good for everybody involved.

Image by Jorbasa via Flickr

Well, loyal readers, you’ve made it through the week. This is the fifth and final post in this series on how I redesign slides. Here’s a reminder of what we started with.

Over the course of the week we’ve covered how to break slides up so there’s one idea on each slide, and how to choose a color scheme, a font, and images. Today we’ll be combining everything we’ve done so far into a finished product.

Resize images

Step one is to resize our images. This may be as simple as changing the height and width to 800 pixels and 600 pixels respectively. But not all images are the proper proportions to do this and some may require cropping to make them work. It’s easy to do both using MS Paint, or a more powerful graphics editor if you have access to one.

Place Images as our Slide Backgrounds

I’m using the same slides we ended up with on Monday, the plain white slides with a few words of black text. I’m adding the images from yesterday (Thursday) in the order in which I attached them to the bottom of the post. My slides now look something like this.

Making the images slide backgrounds is better than simply adding them as pictures because it keeps the images behind the other elements on the slide.

Make sure that you remember the image attribution, otherwise you’ll be using these images illegally. I usually place the attribution in one of the corners of my images by adding a simple, subtle text box with the words “Image Credit:” followed by the image creator’s name.

Positioning the Text

The next step is to move the text to where we want it. Many people don’t move text boxes around, they just leave them wherever PowerPoint places them. This is usually not a good way to go. You can place elements anywhere on the slide, so it would be best to place it exactly where you want it to go. If you imagine a grid of four lines, two vertical, two horizontal, that divide the slide evenly into nine equal parts, it’s best to position items of interest where the lines cross. These points are called “power points” believe it or not and placing elements here is a technique used by graphic designers, photographers, etc.

Where the lines cross are called power points.

The first step is to apply the font we chose on Tuesday (part 2) and get the font size set. This will help us figure out how much room the text will take up. We could position the text before we typeset it, but we’d probably just end up tweaking things and moving them around later. Remember that the font we chose was called “Savoye LET”. I’ve chosen a font size of about 72pt.

You also need to eliminate the bullets. You should really only use bullets if there are at least two of them. You can turn bullets off by highlighting the text and then clicking the button with bullet points on it, shown below.

Ensure Contrast

The final step is to make sure your text will be visible when sitting on top of your image. If there isn’t sufficient contrast between the text and the background, I usually choose to place a shape behind the text to make the text stand out. I chose to set the type in the Yellow Green color from Tuesday (RGB – 159, 219, 67). This is a fairly light green when compared with the background images we’ve chosen, so I placed a simple rectangle behind the images. I formatted that rectangle by removing the line (set the line to “no line” in the “Format Shape…” dialog box) and giving it a gradient fill. I chose to give it a radial, centered background with two stops. The first color stop is the lighter brown from “Spring Garden” which is RGB – 56, 30, 16. The second stop I set to the same color then just used my color picker to darken it a bit.

Here are the finished slides.

Here’s the finished PowerPoint file for you to download so you can take these slides apart and see how they work if you like. (You need to have the font Savoye LET installed on your system or the slides won’t appear as they do here. You can download the font for free, here.)

So that’s how I work. Thank  you so much for following along this week. I hope it’s been enjoyable as well as beneficial for you. If you have any questions about any part of this process that I haven’t answered sufficiently, please leave a comment below. Otherwise, best of luck creating your next set of slides!

This is the second in a series of blog posts about how I go about redesigning slides. Yesterday, I covered the first step: isolating ideas on their own slides and removing as much text as possible. Today, I’ll show you how I choose a good color scheme.

Color matching is one of the areas I’m least confident in. There are so many choices that it’s difficult for me to find a good starting place to build from. I definitely need a little help.

If you’re like me, you’ll probably be thankful to learn about Kuler. Kuler (pronounced “cooler”) is a tool developed by Adobe (the same people who gave us Photoshop, InDesign, and a host of other professional-grade creative tools), that helps you create and share color schemes. If you’ve never tried it you need to check it out.

The Adobe Kuler homepage.

As I mentioned, Kuler allows you to create and share color schemes. You have two choices if you want to create your own: from scratch or from an image. If a client sends me a presentation with some imagery included, I might start by uploading one of the images to Kuler and seeing what kind of color scheme it comes up with. (For more information about how to use Kuler’s many features, check out this excellent post by Garr Reynolds.) For this project however, we don’t have any existing imagery, so we’re kind of free to try whatever we think is good. In that case, I usually use the social, sharing aspect of Kuler to browse color schemes that have been created by others. There are tons of different variations to try and you’re free to choose whichever one you think works well, but here are some things you should keep in mind while browsing.

Contrast

First and foremost is contrast. You need to make sure that whatever color scheme you choose has sufficient variation in it to allow the font color you choose to show up well against the background color you choose. Experiment with the color and shades you find until you find one with sufficient contrast.

This color scheme doesn't have enough contrast.

Even though this color scheme is just shades and tints of the same hue, there is sufficient contrast between the dark and the light to make text legible.

How the colors make you feel.

This might sound like I’m getting a little frou-frou, but stay with me. Another thing to take into consideration is your subject matter. This slide is about enticing butterflies to stay in your yard or garden, so cold, steely blues and grays are probably not going to give us the right feel. If we used colors like that, the look of the slide wouldn’t match the ideas we were presenting. Remember that we want all aspects of our slides to reinforce the overall message of the presentation.

In this case, I might choose colors that are reminiscent of a physical garden: green grass, brown soil, and bright, flowery pastels. In fact, just typing “garden” into the search box on Kuler yielded several good choices including the one below which its creator titled “Spring Garden.”

"Spring Garden" created by monnacat.

I like this color scheme because it will allow us to have a nice, two-tone background on which the bright greens will stand out nicely.

Kuler will then tell you the exact RGB values for each of these colors so you can reproduce them in PowerPoint or Keynote. The RGB values for our Spring Garden are:

Darker Brown: R – 33, G – 21, B – 8

Lighter Brown: 56, 30, 16

Blue Green: 69, 148, 31

Yellow Green: 159, 219, 67

Light Green: 195, 255, 110

Alternate approach.

A second way to go about this is to search Flickr or iStockPhoto for an image that has the look and feel that you want your presentation to have. As I said earlier, Kuler has a way to find a color scheme based on an image. Once you’ve found an image you like, upload it to Kuler and a color scheme based on that image will be generated. You can then tweak that color scheme as desired until you get to something you like. You can then use that color scheme even if the image you used to create the color scheme never appears in the presentation at all.

So that’s how I would select a color scheme. Not too painful, right? Tomorrow I’ll discuss the process of selecting good fonts.

To make sure you don’t miss the rest of this series you can subscribe to Advance Your Slides via RSS or email or just make sure to stop by here again tomorrow.

In a recent comment on my personal Facebook page, a preacher friend of mine asked about presenting to audiences that want to take notes. He’s heard me say before that you ought to have one idea per slide, but I think he’s concerned with folks who may write slowly and want to glance back at the previous point. Are they just out of luck?

Optimizing your presentation for note-takers is a good question, and one that I’ll admit I hadn’t given much thought to. So I went looking to see if I could find any research that’s been done on making slides note-friendly.

The results were pretty sparse, and most of what I found were for note takers, not presenters. It seems most people agree the responsibility lies with the note-taker to keep up with the speaker rather than the other way around.

In looking back over a few of my presentation and cognitive theory books, though, I did run across a few things that I think presenters ought to keep in mind to help their audiences capture their ideas most effectively.

1. Provide a handout.

Starting on page 66 of his book, Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds talks about the liberating power of a handout, which can serve many valuable purposes.

First and foremost, it allows you to include much more detail about a given topic than you can hope to cover in your speech, leaving you free to focus on just the most salient points. Audiences can your points written down for them to digest  later, and dig deeper if desired.

Many people also leave a copy of their slides behind as the handout. Reynolds warns against this, though, because this forces you to put all of your information into your slides; a big no-no. “Instead, prepare a detailed document for handout and keep the slides simple.” (Presentation Zen, page 66)

From a note-taking standpoint then, publishing a handout is a good idea because it will allow you to de-clutter your slides, while still enabling your audiences to refer back to an earlier point if necessary.

2. Communicate in pictures more than words.

John Medina makes this point verbatim on page 238 of Brain Rules, his excellent and very readable book about how our brains work. There are a couple reasons for this.

First, pictures deliver information far more efficiently than text. You’ve heard that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. Just think of how much more quickly you can process a picture than a thousand words ( 3-4 pages of text?). You do have to be creative in order to find pictures that illustrate certain ideas but it’s usually possible. (Chapter 2 of Slideology by Nancy Duarte is all about strategies for how to do this.)

Another reason considers the way our brains process multiple streams of input. They’re great at processing verbal and visual input at the same time (think of a movie), but if you give them two streams of verbal information, they’re forced to chose one or the other. Hence, if you put too much text on a slide, the audience will either read it or listen to you, but they can’t do both.

Use pictures to reinforce your spoken words, and the note-takers should be able to grasp your ideas long enough to get them down.

3. Speak your main points.

This may seem like it goes with saying, but your audience must be able to understand your main points even without the slides. If the only way they know what your points were is by copying them off the slides then you’re in trouble. What would happen if there was a problem with the projection system?

Any time you make a point it ought to come out of your mouth. And don’t be afraid to repeat yourself. Obviously you don’t want say the same sentence multiple times in a row, but it’s okay to say something important two or three times during the course of making that point in order to make sure it sinks in.

It’s always a good idea to consider how your audience learns and design your presentation accordingly. If they learn by taking notes, it’s in your best interest to accommodate them. Hopefully if you abide by the tips above your audiences won’t have any trouble following along.

What have I missed?