A Little R&R!
Too many projects can make any designer a bit overwhelmed. Just to show I do have fun, here are a few photos of my recent 2 weeks out of the office as we enjoyed some much needed family and fun time!

– Troy @ TLC
More Show Photos
Here are photos from another show last month. This one was a bit more eleborate staging – and yes the logo on the left is in French. Left screen was French content, Center screen images, Right screen English content.

– Troy @ TLC
Recent Show
The past few months have been busy with lots of travel to shows. Here are a few quick photos from 1 of the 5 meetings/shows I handled the PowerPoint graphics for last month.


– Troy @ TLC
iSpringPro FREE Today!
It is not often that I have 2 posts in a day – but this offer is time sensitive as it expires today! The website “Giveaway of the Day” has an offer to download and install a full function version of iSpring Pro for free – regularly $199.

iSpring is a PPT-to-Flash conversion add-in. It adds a tool bar to PPT and from my initial tests does a good job of capturing animations and visual effects (note: I have not fully tested the iSpring software, but it has been on my radar for awhile. I actually downloaded demo version of software last month, but did not have time to run through my standard series of test files to really evaluate it).
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So if you are interested, you can have it for free. NOTE: it must be downloaded AND installed before the Giveaway of the Day deal ends today (approx. 15hrs from this post). Click here to go to download page.

– Troy @ TLC
Google Search Puts ThePowerPointBlog.com at #1!
So I have not delved into the world of SEO (search engine optimization), but I received a great email that said I should go to google and search “powerpoint blog”. I did and am amazed, and humbled, that ThePowerPointBlog (at least today) comes up as the #1 spot!

This is obviously because of all the great people viewing the site and great sites that link to it – thank you!!
– Troy @ TLC
PPT2007 Effects Respect .PNG Transparency
A great thing about all of the wonderful visual effects of PPT 2007 is that they respect the transparency/alpha area of a .png image. As example here is a quick sample image. In photoshop I dropped out the background around the little computer guy and saved out the image as .png with transparency.

For this example I added the background image behind part of the computer guy to show the transpency area.
Then I selected the computer guy image and applied a nice PPT 2007drop shadow.

Note the drop shadow contours to the computer guy image, not the rectangle shape of the placed image!

– Troy @ TLC
