Sticky Notes for Card 22
Nick who was with TLC Creative took on the challenge of The Better Deck Deck, card #22 – Sticky Notes, with a fantastic presentation-ready slide full of colorful “sticky notes” vs. the before boring bullet list.
Christie’s Card #1
Christie followed up her card 39, Speaker Notes, by converting the same book page of text on “The Poison Garden of Alnwick Castle” into a simple, quick to follow, Better Deck Deck card #1 – Basic Chunking.
Christie’s Card #39
Christie has been with TLC Creative for almost a decade (wow!) and is an amazingly talented designer. She drew card 39 – Speaker Notes. To paraphrase, the idea is to take a slide with too much text and create a simple visual to talk to. Christie embraced that with moving the paragraphs of bulleted text to the Speaker Notes and developing a beautiful slide in both imagery and typography for a presenter to tell the story of “The poison garden of Alnwick Castle” (it’s a real place!).
Jake’s Card #48
Jake drew The Better Deck Deck card 48 – Timeline. This is a great before (standard bullet list) to after (visual timeline of content)!
Karen’s Card #49
Karen is one of the newer designers on the TLC Creative team (okay, she has been with TLC Creative for a year) and she drew card 49 – Path. 
Lori’s Card #1
Starting things off is Lori Chollar, CEO of TLC Creative Services, who drew card #1 – Basic Chunking (I am admittedly biased, but this is a great slide design, and why Lori is always in demand for presentation design!).
Our Isometric Bar Chart Process
For our Creative Challenge #5, the design team utilized Isometric Illustration for the collaborative bar chart. If you’re unfamiliar, isometric illustration is a type of 3D drawing perspective that is based on using 30-degree angles. By using the same scale for every axis, the image remains proportional and non-distorted. Isometric design also creates a uniform footprint for elements so they are interchangeable with other elements and provide a consistent layout perspective across elements, and slides. For this project, the isometric layout guaranteed that each designers art for their assigned country would appear consistent and uniform with all of the other elements. The bar chart bars also were based on the same isometric 30-degree angle perspective.
In the previous blog posts on our COVID Design Challenge #5, you saw that one of the main goals was to collaborate through Microsoft Teams. This included dividing up the bar chart by country: each designer was assigned one country to create isometric artwork for. Here is an example of design process of one building, and country “tile”. Kelli on our design team was assigned Iceland – pretty fun, until she realized there aren’t a lot of isometric designs out there for Icelandic landmarks! So, she made her own! Here is a walk through of her design process:
Kelli identified this building, the Hallgrímskirkja Church in Iceland, as a notable and recognizable landmark:
(Image courtesy of Nordic Visitor Iceland)
Beautiful – and very complex! Kelli broke down her design process for turning this Icelandic landmark into an Isometric illustration.
- Original vector artwork she created
- Sheared the artwork at a -30° angle
- Reversed the center part to create the main tower
- Sheared and adjusted the top of the tower to make it dimensional
- Built out the curved “wings” of the building
- Added the back part of the building
The Hallgrímskirkja Church was integrated into her version of the Iceland landscape and set atop one of the bars in the chart assigned to her.
Here is the Design Challenge #5 Isometric Chart
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
The Design Challenge #4 Designs!
It has been a fun week designing a WOW slide – and working with a Microsoft Teams workflow! The TLC Creative design team’s entries for Challenge #4 are in and they all succeed in going from the boring bullet list to a spectacular WOW slide design.
As a reminder. the design team was tasked with not only a slide design, but to work from one shared presentation file hosted in a Microsoft Teams project channel. The design team had a fun time getting familiar with accessing PowerPoint within Teams – and not having a ‘save’ button. Here are our COVID-19 Design Challenge #4 results!
“40 Lines” Animations!
The TLC Creative design team Challenge #3 entries are in! All layouts and animation done entirely in PowerPoint, enjoy!
Troy @ TLC