A nice overview of “Design Systems” and collection of examples from Smashing Magazine.
Episode #119: Our 2021 Presentation Part 2 is up!We continue our 2021 Presentation Predictions in part 2 this week.And if you do listen before Friday, February 5th, you'll have a chance to win a free registration to the upcoming PowerPoint Presentation Design Deep Dive event put on by CreativePro February 18-19.I'll be giving three sessions over the two-day event: Formatting Charts Like a Pro, Beyond Bar Charts, and PowerPoint for Print Documents. I will also be joined by some of the great voices in the presentation industry including Mark Heaps, Richard Goring, Bethany Auck, and more. I'm really excited for this new event, but if you don't win of the two registrations we have to give away, you can still register and receive $100 off using my code: CPNNH. I hope to see you there!And take a listen to the Podcast!
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your Podcasts, and check out the show notes for more info.
Episode #118: Our 2021 Presentation is up!This is going to be a two-parter for us to cover not only our predictions for 2021, but also how we did predicting what we would see in 2020.Take a listen!Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your Podcasts, and check out the show notes for more info.
It's long overdue, but as we're in a new year and hopefully very new age, we have completely redesigned and relaunched NolanHaimsCreative.com, the business arm of this whole presentation thing we do.Take a look and learn how we work with brands big and small to communicate more visually and with fewer words.
Episode #117: The (in)Effciency of Presentations - with Simon Morton is up!We welcome our old friend Simon Morton from Eyeful Presentations to talk about his recent study on presentation and efficiency in organizations. And best of all, you'll learn lots of new British expressions!Take a listen!Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your Podcasts, and check out the show notes for more info.
Episode #116: Our Presentation Year in Review 2020 is up!We're covering the good, the bad, the ugly and the let's-just-not-talk-about-it items from 2020. It's been a year, but we got through it. Take a listen to just how we and the presentation industry has weathered the past 12 months.Take a listen!Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your Podcasts, and check out the show notes for more info.
Episode #112: PowerPoint and Adobe Creative Cloud Pt. 1 is up!This week we welcome presentation design and Adobe guru Mark Heaps to talk about—what else—how Adobe plays with PowerPoint and vice-versa.We're releasing this on the first day of AdobeMax2020 which, conveniently, Mark is also speaking at. And because this is not a small topic, we're splitting the episode into two parts so we don't have to skip over anything important as we talk about using Creative Cloud libraries, Adobe fonts, and workflows for going from PowerPoint to Adobe and back from PowerPoint to Adobe.Take a listen!Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your Podcasts, and check out the show notes for more info.
I'm beyond excited for a brand new add-in for PowerPoint called Slidewise from the good folks at Neuxpower.com. Finally, you now have the ability to analyze your PowerPoint file for bloated images and video AND replace fonts painlessly without frustrating errors.Slidewise is being early-released in a pre-1.0 version at a reduced cost, because the creators just want it in as many hands as possible as soon as possible. I already have made this a part of my regular workflows for client projects, and I would urge everyone who has ever wondered why their PowerPoint file is so large or why they just can't get rid of that instance of Arial, to take a look and try it out.This is the kind of add-in that pays for itself pretty quickly, but if you would like an opportunity to win a free license, listen to episode of #109 of The Presentation Podcast (releasing today) as we have licenses to give away!At this point, it is PC-only. Here's a little tutorial I put together on Slidewise.
Episode #110: The PowerPoint Backstage Experience is up!Click the "File" menu in PowerPoint and you're taken into a "Backstage" world of endless features, preferences and options. Today we dive into how to navigate and what to do when you're Backstage in PowerPoint.Take a listen!Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your Podcasts, and check out the show notes for more info.
Episode #106: Resources for Presentation Designers is up!This week we're gathering together a huge list of resources for presentation design covering conferences, social media channels, books, forums and even other podcasts.Take a listen!Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your Podcasts, and check out the show notes for more info.
I recently discovered a fantastic podcast on speaking and presentation from down under called The Presentation Podcast, hosted by Thomas Krafft and Kate Norris.In a unique approach, they rotate weekly among three different formats: An interview with a figure in the presentation or speech world, a speech breakdown in which they play a speech by a public figure and critique it, and an topic episode in which they cover a particular aspect of presentation.I was on this week's installment, Episode #64. Check it out here!
Episode #104: How Are the Remote Presentations Going? is up!This week it's a casual conversation about how all of our remote presentations and meetings are going.Take a listen!Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your Podcasts, and check out the show notes for more info.
Episode #103: Presenting With Your Voice (with Jackie Gartner-Schmidt is up!Troy, Sandy and I welcome Jackie Gartner-Schmidt of Voice Now to chat all about how to use and not misuse our voice when presenting.Take a listen!Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your Podcasts, and check out the show notes for more info.
Episode #102, It's 2020, Does PowerPoint Co-authoring Work? is up!Google has long been ahead of PowerPoint in terms of collaboration and simultaneous editing of presentations, but Microsoft has done a lot of hard work on catching up. How smooth is the process of co-editing and collaborating on a PowerPoint deck these days? Let's find out as Troy, Sandy and I do just that and tell you all about our experience.Take a listen!Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your Podcasts, and check out the show notes for more info.
Episode #101, Slide Design for Remote Presenting is up!We're continuing our conversation on presenting in a remote world, this week inviting on PowerPoint MVPs Richard Goring of BrightCarbon, Mike Parkinson of Billion Dollar Graphics, and Cliff Kennedy. We have a spirited conversation about the differences between live and remote slide design.Take a listen!Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your Podcasts, and check out the show notes for more info.
PowerPoint has a new and long asked for feature up its sleeve that could save you a ton of money if you're in the market for stock imagery. Until just recently, there were only two ways you could insert high quality stock imagery from within PowerPoint:
Insert Online Pictures performs a Bing Image Search for you. But as we're all aware, that's the Wild West, and while you might find a decent Creative Commons image (the default search criteria which can be changed), the quality is limited, and who knows if it's actually Creative Commons.
Office Add-ins such as those for Pickit, Pexels, AdobeStock and Shutterstock, allow you to search and insert imagery from 3rd party sites, but often these require paid accounts.But now, under the same Insert menu where you have Online Pictures, you'll notice an option for Stock Images.
This brings up a new window with four categories: Stock Images, Cutout People, Icons and Stickers. Icons is simply the icon collections we have had for a while, but the other three categories are new and curated by Microsoft. Stickers is cute, but might have limited usage in a business context. Cutout People is a collection of transparent poses categorized by the model themselves, so you can get 50 shots of the same model to use throughout a presentation.
The real prize though is in Stock Images, where you can search and insert high quality professional stock imagery from places like Getty and iStock, and as long as you use them within the context of Microsoft Office (the feature is available in all Microsoft 365 applications), there is no cost to you. Microsoft doesn't tag the images with their origin, but a little reverse image searching reveals that you can use a particular image without cost OR if you're so inclined, you could go to Getty and pay a lot. For example, searching "Laptop Japan Man" in PowerPoint returns the images below. You can use that cool shot in the second row for free in your presentation (provided you're a Microsoft 365 subscriber)…
...or I suppose you could also go to Getty Images and pay upwards of $500 for it.
There are a few caveats here—mainly that you can't extract Office's stock images for use outside of Microsoft Office. So, while you can use them in presentations all you want, you can't use them on your website or in a marketing brochure—unless you design the marketing brochure in PowerPoint or Word, I suppose. Also, the feature is currently not available on the Mac. Anyway, we've come a long way from ClipArt!
Microsoft's introduction of cloud fonts was a huge step forward in finally moving beyond Arial and Calibri and bringing more elegant typography to Office and especially PowerPoint. Users can now make use of fonts like Avenir, Gill Sans Nova, Source Sans Pro and Neue Haas Grotesk.
But, of course, the implementation was not ideal. Users not on O365 or PowerPoint 2019 can't make use of these fonts and will not have them when sent a file designed with them. (You canembed cloud fonts, however, which might be the safest route when using them.) And Microsoft provides no indication of whether a file is making use of cloud fonts. Also, once you download and begin using a cloud font, the little cloud icon disappears, and you no longer know which fonts in the dropdown are cloud, system or local fonts.
Here's a tiny bit of help:
Microsoft provides an up to date list of cloud fonts here. And the list is slowly being added to (although Microsoft to date has provided no pushed information to users when the list changes as it did late last year.)The forever awesome Julie Terberg has an excellent rundown of cloud fonts along with a visual guide.
And if you ever want to "reset" your cloud font downloads to see all those little cloud icons again, you can do so by deleting the cloud font files here:
PC: c:\Users\[name]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\FontCache\4\CloudFonts
Mac: Users\[name]\library\group_containers\UBF8T346G9.Office\FontCache\4\CloudFonts
Episode #100, 100 from 100: Our favorite tips and moments from the first 100 episodes is up!
I can't believe we made it 100 episodes, but we're still going strong. Every couple of weeks, I get to spend some time with two great friends and co-hosts talking about this kind of weird and definitely niche industry we all find ourselves working in.Troy, Sandy and I look back at over four years of memorable moments, episodes and guests in this week's podcast.Take a listen!
Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.
The The Let's Hear It! Podcast is covers the world of foundation and nonprofit communications, and I have known Eric Brown, one of the hosts for more years than I can count. So I was excited to be asked on as a guest to talk about effective presentation design with a particular bent towards the nonprofit world which I have been working in for as many years as I have known Eric.
It's a great and funny conversation that has covering a lot including why you want to "make your content like a Twinkie."
Take a listen!
As we all communicate online more and more, I see some people nervous about "doing it right."While you should try for clear sound, well-lit video and a clean shirt, you don't necessarily have to set your home office up like the evening news. I've been coalescing around the idea that there is a continuum of communications and a lot of gray areas even within the same software platform. And it's okay to slide along this continuum and ramp up your effort accordingly: