Personal

I have been enjoying time in Madrid, Spain touring museums. Two days ago, Lori and I spent the majority of the day at the Prado National Museum – doing the 3-hour self-guided tour in just over 6 hours. Yesterday was spent at the Thyssen-Bornemisza, also part of the National Museum, where tired feet prevailed, and we did the 2-hour tour in just over 2 hours!

Within the massive Thyssen collection is a fantastic nineteenth and early twentieth century section of art covering impressionism, cubism, art nouveau, and whatever we call Picaso-ism. And in this specific area of the museum (basically an entire floor), my mind shifted to work and graphic design. Photoshop is part of my creative process, along with using many image filters. But looking at these artists from a hundred years ago (that was epiphany number one, art from the 1920’s and earlier is now 100 years old!) – what was their inspiration? Beyond mastering painting technique, they were inventing image styling that today we easily achieve with digital filters (epiphany number two!).

The art in Madrid is amazing. The museums are amazing. The people, food, and drinks of Madrid are all amazing! Amazing!

(all images take at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional).

Troy @ TLC

Last week I had the amazing opportunity to be at the Microsoft Bay Area campus and meet with the PowerPoint team. It was an amazing day experiencing the campus, hearing about the focus of the Dev team and demonstrating real-world presentation formatting workflows.

The key takeaway is, the Microsoft PowerPoint team is actively looking at the real-world use of the software and those needs take a priority, along with the big initiatives (e.g. AI integrations with CoPilots).

Troy @ TLC

For the 2023 Presentation Summit, TLC Creative Services sponsored the attendee t-shirts with some PowerPoint design fun .

“Be part of the solution. Create gooder slides.” We laughed, and hopefully the group of presentation experts that made it to Monterey, CA for the conference wear the conference swag with a smile!

Troy @ TLC

The 2023 edition of the Presentation Summit conference was this week in the Monterey, California area. The setting was a rustic conference center with meeting rooms that were lodge great halls and all meals with everyone gathered in a central dining hall.

It was an in-person only event this year (e.g. not a hybrid event with virtual attendees joining via live stream) and had a smaller number of attendees than in past years.  This year due to scheduling I was not on the presenting team, and not involved with the AV Production. But I was able to enjoy the event Sunday and Monday before flying out for a corporate event TLC Creative Services was supporting. A few photos of the general session “great hall”, breakout rooms, and yes that is a photo of the dining hall, because there was a lot of informal conversation and presentations happening everywhere making this also one of the valuable meeting rooms!

Overall, between the conference grounds setting, the easy to meet everyone size of the event, and personally being clear of presenting and AV production meant I truly had the most conversations with other presentation designers than any previous event. Thank you Rick Altman, for putting on another wonderful presentation focused event and thank you to everyone for the wonderful presentation conversations!

Note: there is a virtual only version of the Presentation Summit, November 5-8, 2023 using Zoom as the platform.

-Troy @ TLC

I had to share this setup from a recent corporate event. I am onsite managing the presentations for a large event, in what I call my “office for the week”. But this one was a bit unique.

First the tech setup was a single 8′ table for 3 techs (I generally have a 6′ table for my computers, monitors and space to have presenters review, and edit slides). Fortunately, I include a computer stacker in my tech kit. But what made this really unique is where the tech area is. I am generally backstage, or sometimes front of house. But for this meeting, the room was a bit small and in order to maximize attendee seating (~250 attendees), I was outside the meeting room in the hall!

On the positive side, I did not need any of the work lights I pack for the dark backstage environment!

Troy @ TLC

I hope everyone had a great summer! It has been busy here at TLC Creative Services, and the PowerPoint blog summer hiatus enabled me to focus on some specialty projects.

My original thought when setting up the summer break was “how much can happen in PowerPoint, the presentation industry, and at TLC Creative over the summer?” Well, turns out it was a busy summer and there has been a lot of change and news! One planning update is The PowerPoint Blog will have fresh presentation and PowerPoint posts every Tuesday and Thursday, starting today.

-Troy @ TLC

The PowerPoint Blog is going to pause through the summer and resume in August (of this year!). At TLC Creative Services we are happily busy. And we are busy with finalizing a major roll out of a new virtual meeting service and Meeting Planner tools, which is a big time commitment on my part. I have a list of blog posts to write up, but not enough time to get to them right now. So I am doing an official pause on blog posts through the summer months (June and July).

Have a great summer! See you in the Fall!

Troy @ TLC