This week has been great! Being together with people, in person! Presentation people! And at the beach!
So much great content. So many amazing conversations. Several fantastic podcast recording sessions. Opportunity to present on presentation design (both Lori and Troy). And being a part of the conference team providing the onsite technology equipment and live stream AV team. A week of little rest, but huge rewards!
Troy @ TLC
The TLC Creative Services presentation design team created a series of inspiration slides using quotes. The results were great, and we are sharing some of the team’s slides over the next few weeks in a series that will hopefully provide inspiration for slide design and provide PowerPoint layout and text formatting tips. So, as my intro image (composited in PowerPoint and exported as a image) says, “Let’s talk about quotes …in PowerPoint design”.
Troy @ TLC
I read this quote recently and it resonated enough to be something to share. Mr. Kleon continues on saying creativity is not a talent, but a way of operating. That we should not think of creativity as a noun – something you have, but as a verb – something you do.
TLC Creative Services has a VERY talented team, so it is noun – something we have! And it is a verb, everything we do – the creative and the “non-creative” aspects of our work – is approached with attention to detail, a perfection mindset, and creativity. Even this blog post is an unintentional example, the above quote typography and layout was composited in PowerPoint (our design tool of choice) vs. typing out a preformatted bullet line of text with quote marks 😊.
Troy @ TLC
2020 became a major restart.
We restarted TLC Creative Services with a new offering: virtual corporate events on a secure, scalable, and highly visual customizable platform. With the loss of nearly 100% of live events, we had time and a team of talented people to focus on the VXP Meeting Platform. And, we continued to provide presentation design, template development, and graphic design services (though like most of the world, at a reduced volume of requests).
2021 is time to restart The PowerPoint Blog!
Here, The PowerPoint Blog, went on an unofficial hiatus. More things to focus on than time allowed. Business development, platform development, and client requests came first. The PowerPoint Podcast came next and many other TLC Creative projects went on hold – including our time here.
Ideas
This is not to say my list of presentation examples, PowerPoint tutorials, and resources stopped. The list of blog topics has continued to grow for literally a year and it is now overflowing! The TLC Creative team is still busy (thankfully!), and The Presentation Podcast is going strong (with topic planned into 2022). The VXP meeting platform is less in a development stage and is now a stable functioning offering. All of these things make May 2021 the time to restart The PowerPoint Blog.
Welcome!
If you are new here, welcome! and search the archives. There are 1,ooo’s of blog posts (seriously, there are a lot, spanning back to 2006!) with lots of great how-to tutorials, examples of presentation design, and reviews of presentation design resources.
If you are a long time visitor, welcome back! Sorry for the pause, but the world gone crazy with a global Pandemic forced reshuffled priorities. Now we are focused here, on The PowerPoint Blog once again 🙂
your friend,
Troy Chollar
Welcome back!! (sort of)
As you can see, The PowerPoint Blog has experienced a major glitch and went offline for awhile. The good news is, we have regained access to the blog. The better news is, we discovered the issue (malicious code injected into the WordPress database). The ironic news is, as we have ramped up our virtual meeting platform and are setting up new websites literally daily, we have not had time to look at our own websites and social media! Now that we have access, and a backup, of The PowerPoint Blog, I am reviewing new WordPress blog themes and will be updating the entire site and its catalog of posts to something new, modern, and stable. Then it is time to get into the backlog of PowerPoint and presentation posts that I have been accumulating!
Troy @ TLC
Our very creative design team took this week’s highly collaborative challenge and turned it into something incredible! Not only did they communicate and collaborate efficiently and effectively, but they took the idea of a bar chart to a new dimension (or perspective)!
The TLC Creative design team kicked off the project with a group call using a Teams’ video meeting. The discussion was focused on ideas of what they wanted the result to visually be, how to divide the tasks, and assign roles and responsibilities. They used the Posts tab in the designated channel to post a recap of what was covered on the call for those that couldn’t make it:
The design team decided to maintain the bar chart concept, but with a more decorative and visual styling. Color scheme identified, perspective agreed upon, and graphic style to represent each country established. Each team member created their assigned country’s artwork and data viz graph. Each was merged into the core PowerPoint file hosted in the Microsoft Team.
The next phase was another group collaboration meeting to discuss options for moving from good to a great visual. Here is the final team collaboration chart and slide layout:
All text is editable in PowerPoint. All elements are imported .svg graphics that can be adjusted in PowerPoint. The entire process of working from a central Teams file with everyone’s edits automatically incorporated for the other designers to instantly see and work in tandem with each other was a success! Our design team did a great job on this challenge and, as a bonus, our design studio is using Microsoft Teams more than ever now for communication and collaboration!
Troy @ TLC
Sometimes things work together amazingly. This is a first for us – and it was great. Troy and Lori had separate shows in Europe, were able to coordinate an extended stay and enjoy a weekend in Vienna before flying back together!
Podcast recordings are always fun when it is a group gathered together (most episodes are recorded with everyone in remote locations). I have assembled a pretty robust portable studio setup for the live recordings, including 6 channel discreet recording, separate mics, each with color coded cabling and foam heads – the open bar is an optional element 🙂
Going through photos I found this nice one of Nolan Haims, Sandra Johnson, and myself (Troy Chollar) at the 2019 Presentation Summit from our week together in San Antonio, Texas last month.
This week is San Antonio, TX at the 2019 Presentation Summit – definitely the place to be for all presentation designers! Lori wowed a full house with her talk on Collaborating with everyone on a design project. Troy had a great walk-through of PowerPoint’s Presenter View from corporate meeting use perspective – and later today is walking through how to design PowerPoint template for Ultrawide screens in his REALLY BIG session. And there is more fun to go!
