Personal

Highway billboards are like large scale presentation slides, designed for an audience that is far away, not focused on the screen (presentation = presenter, billboard = car in front of you) and made to be a message that can be understood in a few seconds.

This is one of 20 billboards showing up around San Diego right now that Lori from TLC Creative Services designed for our client. Of course, the huge GB size Photoshop image is a big difference from a slide design project.

– Troy @ TLC

Greetings to all that think I fell off the internet. I did not fall off, just into more projects and work needs than ever expected, which is good, so I am not complaining (but whining a bit)!

July, with Independence Day and celebrations of Freedom, seems like a great time to get things back in motion. The new TLC Creative Services office is up and running, great design projects are in process, and I just finished a fantastic 2 week family holiday that gave me some time to relax and refocus. All together, things are good and I am excited to have a game plan for ThePowerPointBlog again!

A few adjustments have been put in place to assure things are steadily posted:
– 3 posts per week (generally Mon-Wed-Fri)
– The full TLC Creative Services staff is now a part of writing posts
– Posts by guests are in the rotation

So tomorrow, Monday, is the first PPT post, Wednesday is a great 4th of July themed template that anyone is free to download and use, and there are a lot of reviews, tutorials and example posts all created and queued up!

– Troy @ TLC

Amber and I spent the week in Chicago managing the presentations for 130 Doctors. Internal medicine has been revolutionized by micro video camera technology – unfortunately, the same cannot be said for standard video CoDecs and videos working smoothly in every presentation. Happy to report that with very few exceptions, our work pre-flighting (great term from my print designer days) resulted in seamless presentations.

– Troy @ TLC

Just another show, array of computers and nice view of the action from the “front of house” tech table.

– Troy @ TLC

At the end of 2011, we purchased our new office space, had a great contractor handle moving virtually every wall and door (consolidated a few of the workspaces and hallway into a large workspace for most designers to be in), followed by an IT contractor handling the network wiring (his only question was “Why do you need 43 data ports?”) and some creative planning with the IKEA office furniture app. We have settled in (even have art on the walls!) and are keeping busy doing what we enjoy.

Visitors are welcome (but I do tend to be working in a ballroom somewhere more than at the office).

– Troy @ TLC

That is the real program, although a buggy beta version. But it is real, it is installed on one of my test computers and I have a lot of great news, tutorials and examples to share — when it is publicly available and I am clear of my NDA obligations – sorry.

– Troy @ TLC

Flying in from Italy to Seattle is a definite time zone change. But being with the other PowerPoint MVPs affords little time for sleep! Microsoft hosted their MVP Summit at the end of February and it was a great event!

There are over 2,500 MVPs worldwide and approximately 1,500 converged onto Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington campus. There are just under 30 PowerPoint MVPs worldwide and 12 of us were at the summit. I spent the week in sessions with the PowerPoint development team where we previewed new features, talked about upcoming releases and were able to point out the needs of real people (not that the Microsoft developers are not real – they are very real, but do live in a bubble of statistics and theoretical concepts). And of course, each evening was a great time too!

Everything covered is under NDA, which means I am excited to share lots of great things the moment it is made public!

– Troy @ TLC

There has been a lack of activity here at ThePowerPointBlog, but I assure you it is not because I have been inactive! In the past 6 weeks, I have been in 7 cities, 4 states and 3 countries – every one PPT related.

Palos Verdes, CA
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Miami, FL
Rome, Italy
St. Julians, Malta
Seattle, WA
Los Angeles, CA

The schedule is still blessed to be busy and the whole design office is working on projects, and the blog posts are set for the month!

– Troy @ TLC