Just added a new piece to my Work page. These slides are from the Intergraph SG&I President’s keynote at the Hexagon 2012 Conference, which I had the privilege of working on.

The slides were created for the incredible screen at the conference which was around 80 feet wide, which explains the unusual aspect ration. It was challenging to create slides to take advantage of that kind of real estate, but it was amazing to see our work projected on such a huge canvas.

Many of the slides are empty on the right-hand side, which was intentional so we could have video of the speaker superimposed over the screen at that time. You can see this effect if you watch the YouTube video of the speech.

More on the Work page.

Yesterday, Duarte Design released a new service called Diagrammer. Like a stock photo site for PowerPoint diagrams, Diagrammer offers respite from the uninspiring diagram templates included in PowerPoint. Visit the site to watch a short video explaining the service.

Those familiar with Slideology will recognize the (somewhat altered) diagram categories: Flow, Network, Stack, Segment, and Join. Many of the diagrams are editable versions of those sketched out for us in chapter three of Nancy’s book.

Most of the diagrams have multiple versions to facilitate different needs. All are just $0.99. And all are intended as starting places that can be manipulated, altered, and resized, etc.

This is a very exciting announcement and a very cool tool that makes it much easier to create diagrams that formerly would have required lots of time and possibly other design tools.

Yesterday Nancy tweeted that you can use the code 3forfree to get three free diagram downloads. But be careful. Once you have the first taste it may be hard to stop. :^)

Information and image via the Duarte Blog

I just posted a new set of slides on Slideshare this morning. They’re from a humorous speech I gave at Toastmasters this week. I modified the slides so they would make sense without me being there to speak.

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting everyday anymore, as I was doing up until a few weeks ago. Based on some thoughts that were inspired by a note on Facebook by Jesse Desjardins (which I couldn’t find today. Jesse, if you read this, can you post a link in the comments?) I’ve decided to spend more time on making my posts more visual by actually creating slides instead of just text. Posting text-based posts every day was making me a better writer, which is good, but I wasn’t really becoming a better presentation designer, which is one of my goals with this blog. I also hope this will make my posts more interesting and enjoyable for you, and that that will help the ideas I share here to spread farther than before.

Basically this change means higher quality posts less often. I’m still spending a similar amount of time per day on the blog, but I won’t have something new to share everyday. There will probably still be text-based posts from time to time, but I hope to make presentations like the one above the norm. As always, you can also follow me on Twitter to get your daily dose of great presentation articles and links.

I’ll give this a shot for a while and see how it goes. I’d love to have your feedback. Do you like the slides above? Did you like the old way better? Let me know!

PowerPoint. Keynote. Prezi. SlideRocket. GoogleDocs.

Tools are like languages: they may look and sound completely different, but the ideas and emotions behind them are universal.

There are all kinds of tools out there to help you build stunning presentations. All of these, no matter what they tell you, will also help you build garbage slides. The difference is in how you use them. That’s the stuff everybody wants to know but so few actually seek out. It used to be hard to find good instructions for using slideware, but in the past few years all kinds of resources have emerged in the form of books, blogs, webinars, and in-class training. Nowadays, just seek and ye shall find.

The skills to look for in a presentation designer (or to develop in yourself if you’re becoming one) are not whether they can speak Photoshop, or Adobe Premiere, or really even PowerPoint, although fluency in all of those tools is certainly a plus. What you want is someone who knows how people learn. Someone who’s good at understanding and explaining. Someone who can quickly grasp your information and then help you turn it into story.

Unfortunately it’s harder to display those skills on a website.

But once you acquire THOSE skills, once you speak presentation, you won’t worry so much anymore about tools. You’ll still need to have the latest tools and know how they work. But people never change and neither do the basics of how to reach them.