Episode #99, Being a Remote Presenter (with Ken Molay) is up!We've got a rather timely conversation in this edition of the podcast as we talk to online meeting and webinar expert, Ken Molay of Webinar Success.As communications so quickly and completely moved online in recent weeks, everyone is scrambling to "do it right." Ken, Troy, Sandy and I discuss best practices for slide design, hardware, audience management and connecting with our audiences across screens.Take a listen!Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.

The ability to import SVGs into PowerPoint was a huge and long-awaited improvement to the software. A logo or illustration in SVG format—which is a vector format—will be crisp and perfect at any resolution or zoom level and will generally be much smaller in file size than a JPEG or PNG. Additionally, SVGs can be recolored within PowerPoint and even converted to PowerPoint shapes for editing or further control.

For all these reasons, we generally now use the SVG format for logos and icons inserted into PowerPoint. But if you're thinking about using SVGs to help control file size, be aware of this gotcha: In order to maintain backwards compatibility with versions of PowerPoint that do not support SVGs, PowerPoint will automatically create and save a PNG of your SVG upon import, and will do so at an appropriate size for how you have sized the SVG.

If you inset a 20KB SVG logo into PowerPoint and size it up to full screen, PowerPoint will create a companion PNG that is much, much larger than 20KB just in case someone with a legacy build of PowerPoint opens up your file. Additionally, that 20KB SVG may also have been resaved by PowerPoint and may have increased in size.

Here's an example where I inserted a 46KB logo ("BirdStudio") and sized it to almost full-screen.

By breaking open the PowerPoint file through an UnZip trick, we can look at the media files. And what we see is that PowerPoint has resaved and renamed the SVG as Image2.svg and it has increased to 61KB. And, PowerPoint has created an image1.png file that is 361KB!

This may not seem like a big deal, but if you're in one of those situations where a client is insisting on getting a file under 5MB or even 1MB (I've been there!), for purposes of emailability, this is something to keep in mind. 

Episode #93, Investing in Our Presentation Design Business is up!Troy, Sandy and I kick the new year off with a discussion on just where we put our money to invest in our presentation businesses—everything from what's physically in our offices to software and subscriptions.Take a listen!Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.

Episode #92, Our Presentation Year in Review 2019 is up!Troy, Sandy and I run down the best and worst of 2019 in the world of presentation and talk about our favorite books, add-ins, projects and events.Take a listen!

Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.

 Episode #87, When Scientists Present (Conversation w/ Mike Morrison) is up.

Troy, Sandy and I welcome Mike Morrison, someone who has been making some waves in the world of scientific presentation with his proposals for better and differently designed science posters.We have a wide ranging talk about how scientists present, how they can present better and why graphic design might be the key to curing cancer—well, kind of. But you'll have to listen to hear more about that.Take a listen!

Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.

Episode #84, Presentation Professional Certifications are Here! (with Echo Swinford and Glenna Shaw) is up.Last time we talked about the brand new Presentation Guild Professional Certification with some of the beta testers. Today we talk to Echo Swinford and Glenna Shaw from the Presentation Guild on how it all came to be and what it's really all about.Take a listen!

Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.

 Episode #83, We Took The Presentation Professional Certification – and Survived! is up.The Presentation Guild will soon launch their Professional Certification, and a few hearty souls have already beta tested the test. Join Richard Goring of Brightcarbon, Tara Sheffield of SlideRabbit, Lori Chollar of TLC Creative Services, and Troy Chollar of TLC Creative Services as they discuss the process of the test and certification.Take a listen!Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.

 Episode #80, Should You Use Canva for Presentations? is up.Troy, Sandy and I get our hands dirty playing with Canva and creating a sample presentation. Is the online software ready for primetime when it comes to presentation or is it still best left as a social media graphics creator? Tune in to find out our thoughts...Take a listen!Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.

Episode #79, Writing for Presentation with our guest, Mort Milder, is up!Troy, Sandy and I welcome an old friend and colleague of mine, and we talk all about what a professional writer can bring to a presentation.Take a listen!

Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.

When you need to include a news headline or an article in your presentation, very often we turn to the jagged newspaper tear style.Here's a tutorial on how to create and work with these newspaper tears all within PowerPoint—no Photoshop necessary.

 Episode #76, The Consequences of Good Presentation Design is up! Join Troy and Sandy as we delve into the actual benefits and results of good design for clients, stakeholders, audiences and even fellow designers.Take a listen!Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.

The Interaction Design Foundation has a fantastic (and brief) primer on how to use hierarchy in design.

Take a look!

PowerPoint’s Format Painter can save you endless hours with shapes and text boxes, but it doesn’t work on charts. There is, however, a method to save and paste design formatting from one chart to another. So, let’s dive into the mysterious world of Chart Templates and .crtx files.

We’ll start with data sets for the highest paid athletes in 2018 and 2017 and a default chart style (click the images below for a closer look)...

Continue reading the entire article over at CreativePro.com.

And don't forget, I'll be speaking at CreativePro's CreativeProWeek Click Presentation Conference in June in Seattle! (Discounted registration available until April 15!) 

Stephanie Evergreen will soon be out with another book for the data visualization community (to coincide with the second edition of her phenomenal first book Effective Data Visualization). This one is called The Data Visualization Sketchbook, and in it Stephanie gives readers multiple templates for use in assembling data reports, handouts, dashboards, presentations and more.The templates and overall approach are a nice reminder that diving into Tableau or Word or PowerPoint is not always the best or most efficient course of action. Sometimes getting pencil and paper out helps organize your data and information and simplify your message.Below are a couple of Stephanie's templates I used to prep for an upcoming data report project.

Take a look and also take a look at Stephanie's site for tons of great info on visualizing data.

 Episode #75, Live from the The 2019 Microsoft MVP Summit is up!This week we gather around a table at the Microsoft MVP Summit and have a casual conversation about all sorts of stuff with our fellow MVPs.Take a listen!Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.

It continues to be a struggle to find quality stock imagery that addresses diversity, but there's a new gender-inclusive collection out from Vice that's worth bookmarking.In their own words...

The Gender Spectrum Collection is a stock photo library featuring trans and non-binary models that aims to help media better represent members of these communities

It's only 180 images and many actually manage to still feel stocky, but it's a helpful addition to the market. Check it out!

The addition of 3D object support for PowerPoint last year was a huge leap forward by Microsoft. Naturally, first generation features always come with limitations, confusions and questions by users. That was definitely the case with 3D, but Microsoft has continued to improve the feature (animations!) and is committed to its future.Since 3D is such a dense and multi-faceted thing, Microsoft just released content guidelines for users and creators of 3D objects. A lot of what's in this new documentation can get pretty technical ("Joint Count Mapped to Vertices Maximum on an i5 vs i7..."), but it's going be vital to a certain crowd trying to figure out why the 3D model of their new engine isn't rendering correctly when the CEO is introducing it on stage.You can read it all here and download a PDF or, of course, a PowerPoint version of the document.

CreativeProWeek is the country's premiere "how-to" conference for design professionals. Their unique format divides the week into various subject areas including InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and more. And last year for the first time, the conference added two days focused on presentation design – that all-too-important topic that doesn't always get much love from the more traditional worlds of print and graphic design.

This year, CreativeProWeek is again offering two days of intensive focus on presentation design in their conference within a conference called Click. And I will be speaking in Seattle the week of June 10th along with some other industry pros including Julie Terberg and Richard Goring.

I will be giving sessions on Alternatives to Bullet Points and Visualizing Data for Presentation.If you are professional presentation designer or if you're a graphic designer who often gets frustrated when called upon to design presentations, this is the conference for you. Come for just the Clickportion or come for more. Personally, I'll be there all week eagerly soaking up the InDesign and Photoshop sessions. There's always more to learn!

And if you are thinking of going, definitely register by April 15th when the early bird discount expires.

Take a look at the full conference agenda, list of expert speakers, and register now at CreativeProWeek.com.

Please don't hesitate to reach out with any questions on this (or anything else, of course) if you have them!

Episode #73, Presenting in a Non-Profit World (with Andy Goodman) is up! This week we ditch the corporate world to talk about presentation in the world of cause-based organizations. Andy Goodman of The Goodman Center joins us to talk about his career teaching storytelling and presentation to non-profits, NGO's and foundations. And we dive into his seminal 2006 book, Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes which you can download for free here.

Take a listen!Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.

Episode #72, No Formal Design Education brings Bryan Jones and Stephy Lewis to the podcast a long with Lori Chollar to talk about non-traditional paths to the world of presentation design.

Take a listen!Subscribe on iTunes and check out the show notes for more info.