‘Made You Look’ is THE book
This is a “textbook” – big, bulky, heavy, but filled with knowledge that will be referenced again and again over the years. The brain science of how to make a presentation memorable is a pretty deep read but makes so, so much sense and is a game changer in slide design thinking. The hundreds of inspiration-filled slide examples alone make this book a worthy resource.
We had a wonderful time talking with Dr. Carmen Simon on my podcast about this book. Find episode 204 of The Presentation Podcast in major podcast apps or listen HERE.
-Troy @ TLC
New episode of the Presentation Podcast with Dr. Carmen Simon
Carmen Simon, the cognitive neuroscientist behind the amazing 2016 book Impossible to Ignore now introduces a seismic shift to presentation slide design planning and execution with her latest book, Made You Look. Based on her extensive research on how people retain presented information, this is a textbook worth internalizing if you present or design slides. Inspirationally designed and rich in content, readers will rethink how they approach presentation flow and content design. On this episode, Troy, Nolan, and Sandy have a great time talking with Dr. Simon about how to make presentations memorable!
Backstage Pass – How Stuff is Really Made @ the 2024 Presentation Summit with Lori Chollar
I am really excited to be presenting at the annual Presentation Summit which is approaching quickly with 2 attendance options. The in-person conference is October 20-23, 2024 and the virtual conference is November 3-6, 2024.
What makes this talk extra exciting is that it’s part 2 of the “Backstage Pass” talk I gave in 2020. Four years ago, I covered a plethora of real-life PowerPoint presentation project examples, including repurposing a confetti animation into a bubble animation (and glitter animation and coffee beans animation). I also showcased a San Diego ComicCon teaser video that was created entirely with PowerPoint slides.
For the 2024 edition of this talk, the TLC Creative design team and I have been busy diving into current projects and searching our archives to pull out really cool examples showing some of the unique ways we use PowerPoint in presentation design, and I have a fresh plethora of examples!
This year includes a chart that was converted into a roller coaster metaphor and expanding a crazy long timeline seamlessly across a dozen slides to make the content presentable. I am also setting aside time to pull apart some of these examples so we can see how they were created. Hope to see you in October!
Lori @ TLC
Amazing Workflows with PowerPoint Add-ins @ the 2024 Presentation Summit with Troy
The Presentation Summit event is almost here – mark your calendars! October 20-23, 2024 for the in-person conference and November 3-6, 2024 for the virtual conference.
Troy is busy consolidating his ideas and notes into what promises to be a fun and fast-paced session – all on how to make the PowerPoint workflow better and faster with a range of PowerPoint 3rd party add-ins.
For example, demo #5 will show how Troy and the TLC Creative team create optimized individual slide decks from a master meeting presentation, just by using a combination of 4 PowerPoint native tools and add-ins.
But you will have to be there to see everything included in the “optimized” part of the process in the final individual slide decks
Quick Brown Fox
Fonts are the unsung heroes of PowerPoint design, shaping the way we perceive and engage with content. Our July 11 post was focused on the mayhem of unintended fonts that accumulate in PowerPoint slide decks. We received several questions about the blog posts’ opening animated graphic, which directly relates to this – the choice of what font to use.
Designers invest a lot of time carefully testing and experimenting to select the perfect font for each project. However, if you read our deep-dive into the subject of PowerPoint’s font mayhem situation, you might have wondered why we used “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” as our example? It is the most famous pangram in English as it contains all 26 letters of the alphabet. Using pangrams for font selection is extremely helpful since every letter is displayed making font selection a bit easier. Of course, the sentence is also short so it’s easy to view, and to remember.
Fun Fact: the pangram is commonly mistaken for “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” But that is incorrect because “jumped” instead of “jumps” excluding the letter “S” being represented.
By understanding the nuances of font selection and leveraging this quick and easy to use pangram, it makes font selection for PowerPoint templates and presentations much more visual, which the TLC Creative team always finds easier to work with!
The Presentation Podcast with Troy and Lori!
The business side of presentation design is hard. Setting up processes and workflows is also hard, but they minimize the business side time needs and maximizes the design side time. Troy and Lori of TLC Creative Services, Inc. share a behind-the-scenes look at the project management system in place and the multiyear evolution to get it to where it is now. Click here for the conversation!
Picture Placeholder Bug
We recently came across a PowerPoint bug while working on a client project. And because there is no update coming to resolve it, if you found this post, our hack will hopefully solve the problem for you as it did for us. For reference, a Picture Placeholder is a pre-formatted object on a Master Slide Layout. On a slide, a user clicks the preset placeholder to easily add images. In addition, the image has a preset shape, size, and formatting, all to make it easier to format slides quickly and consistently. Picture placeholders are a great time saver when creating slides, and assure styling is consistent throughout the presentation.
On a recent template design project, the goal was to create visually stylized image frames with a preset rounded corner shape, drop shadow, and outline. For this specific template, we stylized the picture placeholder frame with PowerPoints’ 3D effects. The 3D effect automatically adds a frame to the photo that is colored (with a template color), subtle bevel and lighting effect.
But we discovered a bug in PowerPoint, illustrated in this animated .gif. Attempting to click the icon to add a picture to the placeholder did not open the insert picture dialog. Instead, PowerPoint acts like the placeholder is a text box and adds a cursor to the shape – not what a user needs!
During troubleshooting, we discovered that if the 3D bevel and lighting effects were removed from the picture placeholder, everything worked (eg. click the icon and the dialog to select a picture opened).
We knew it was a programming bug because with the 3D styling effect removed, the insert picture icon once again was clickable and brought up the image selection dialog.
We reported the bug to Microsoft. But more importantly, we figured out a hack to “fix” the problem. And it is easy to do.
The placeholder “Click icon to add picture” text is by default set to the Middle vertical alignment. Moving the info placeholder text so it doesn’t overlap with the “Click to add picture” photo icon solves the problem! Simply change the text vertical alignment from MIDDLE to TOP (or bottom) and everything works as intended.
This allowed us to deliver the Microsoft PowerPoint template with styling as we intended. The modified Picture Placeholder looks like this – and the insert picture icon works again!
Microsoft PowerPoint is the most powerful and flexible presentation software available. My guess is, it also has the largest Dev team of any presentation software. However, the frustrations of coding bugs, or just plain software limitations, exist. At least there is an easy solution (aka hack) for this frustration.
~Special thanks to Amber on the TLC Creative presentation design team for assisting with this post