Presentation Tools 3: Canva

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Day 3 of Presentation Tools Week. (See the previous posts on Fonts, and on Haiku Deck.) Today, a more complex tool.

Canva (canva.com)

Canva, like Haiku Deck, is an entirely self-contained alternative to PowerPoint. It's more complicated than Haiku, but with the added complication comes more flexibility and more style too.

I haven't found it quite as intuitive to use as Haiku, and it's based on a freemium model which encourages you to purchase images for $1 a time, but it can be used with the decent supply of free built-in images and the results are excellent. There's also a wealth of insight into what makes design work, available as part of their tutorials. I love learning that sort of thing; sometimes it turns out there's a reason to back up something I already do, and sometimes I end up completely changing what I do to something more effective...

Canva does a whole load of stuff besides slides, and I like the distinctive design feel that runs throughout their products. We'll focus on presentation-making today, though - here's what the slide design view looks like:

On the left are various extremely stylish and useful layouts. I don't know how well you can see in the pic but the very first layout at the top-left, and the one below it, have a sort of criss-cross fence effect over them - that denotes that the picture needs to be purchased (for $1). Images without the criss-cross effect, like the one in my example slide, are free to use. Like Haiku Deck, Canva uses filters to allow a uniform feel to your presentations and make it easier to write directly onto slides - you can see I've got the filter options open above, and there's plenty of filters to choose from.

I think Canva versus Haiku is the classic effort versus reward conundrum - with Canva you need to put a lot more effort in, but you get a lot more out if you do. My only reservations with it are that the templates are literally for one slide at a time (whereas Haiku templates are for the whole deck) and it's a bit fiddly to build your own content until you get used to it. As with Haiku I think this tool would be more useful for conference presentations than for internal infolit materials, although [this an update from the original post] you can use your own images  (e.g. screengrabs) in Canva, which I previously hadn't thought possible - thanks to Danielle for pointing this out in the comments!

I feel like I don't want to spend too much time learning a new system if there's a chance I'll end up needing to pay for just the right image (which I'm unwilling to do, as there are so many great sites out there for freely available images). I actually think it's a great business model though, and I think Canva gives a lot of itself away for free so you don't HAVE to pay, which is great considering how contemporary and chic the templates are.

If you LIKE good slide design but don't feel like you know where to start in achieving it, Canva does a lot of the hard work for you and gets you a lot of the way there. Here's an example of a Canva slidedeck uploaded to Slideshare:

The Art of Branding by Guy Kawasaki from Guy Kawasaki

If you sign up for Canva and like using it, check out the aforementioned plentiful (and genuinely useful) design tutorials. If you've used Canva and like it, please leave me a link in a comment so I can see your presentation! I'd love to see what Information Professionals are doing with it.

Tomorrow on the blog it's Prezi, but not as you know it!

Presentation Tools 2: Making Slides with Haiku Deck

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It's Presentation Tools Week on the blog; yesterday was all about using non-standard fonts in PowerPoint, and the next few days are all about not using PowerPoint at all. Here's the first of three useful alternatives to PPT.

Haiku Deck (haikudeck.com)

This a very easy to use, very useful tool for making slides. It almost forces you to make attractive and effective presentations, by limiting you to only desirable options (whereas PowerPoint is full of features which actively harm your presentations!).

Haiku Deck is free to use on the web, or you can download the iPad app, also free. It gives you templates - not ugly PowerPoint templates, but attractive ways of doing slides using semi-transparent text boxes and large fonts, a method I recommend on my training courses. The software encourages you to use images effectively, not pack too much text in, and make one point per slide - all absolute essentials for good presentations. (Unfortunately there is actually a 'bullet point list' option for slides, but luckily most users seem to ignore this.)

Here's a nice Haiku Deck example I found, from Tricia LaRue:

It's Banned Books Week! - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Haiku Deck is entirely self-contained - you choose a style (which includes fonts), slide templates, and even find your Flickr CC images, all within the package online. This screengrab shows you pretty much all the important things at once:

You can see I've chosen CINEMATIC from the themes along the top - this dictates the fonts, and also put a filter on all the images, which is a nice touch. There are different filters for each theme, and they're there to make the text easier to read and to help get a consistent feel to the deck. Down the left-hand side are the various layout options for this particular slide. To find the image in my example I just typed it into Haiku's own search box - it hunts for appropriately licensed Flickr images to match your search terms, and automatically credits the author and provides a link! Which is an excellent thing. (Here's an example of that, with the image credit for the pic in my screengrab, which is by ectaticist.) Along the bottom is the Add Slide button, and the preview slides (of which there is only one in my example) for you to cycle through and edit. 

Overall I think Haiku Deck is an excellent way to put together effective and attractive slides quickly. The only disadvantage is it is relatively inflexible - but of course this is also what makes it so good. It's quick, and you're locked down to only the most useful options.

When you want to present data or graphs (or your own screengrabs), or have a very varied slide-deck, Haiku perhaps isn't the right option. Otherwise, give it a shot: haikudeck.com.

Next up on the blog tomorrow, Canva.

Presentation Tools 1: Fontsquirrel

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I love a good presentation. I think they're often the best way to communicate information, and I create them as stand-alone online objects as well as for actual talks to an audience. So it's Presentation Tools Week on the blog - seven different useful tools from the list below, explored over the next five days.

These fall into two broad categories: tools for creating presentations from scratch, and tools for making PowerPoint presentations better in some way

When I began giving presentations 5 years ago, I remember looking at Bobbi Newman's, Buffy Hamilton's and Helene Blowers' Slideshare accounts and being amazed that slides could look so beautiful. My horizons were truly expanded; previously every PPT I'd seen had been functional, boring, and (as I later learned) ineffective as a communication method. I learned by trying to expose my brain to as many great ways of putting together a PowerPoint presentation as possible, and trying things out to see what worked for me.

These days things are a lot easier, as there are several helpful tools which assist you in creating effective and pretty slides. Some of them do a lot of the work for you, and some of you provide a helping hand for specific elements of a presentation. I've summarised the 7 tools I think Past Me would have found most useful. Hopefully if you're reading this you can take something from one or more of these platforms too.

Tomorrow we'll look at an alternative to PowerPoint, but for now we'll look at working with it, using non-standard fonts. It took me a long time to realise just how important fonts were to a good presentation.

FONTSQUIRREL (fontsquirrel.com)

FontSquirrel is a website full of downloadable fonts, and I use it ALL the time - it's the first port of call for non-standard fonts. I think using new fonts which we're not all over-saturated with from the Office suite can make a HUGE difference to how good a presentation or poster looks, and everything on FontSquirrel is free even for commercial use.

Examples from FontSquirrel

I use Megalopolis Extra in loads of presentations, along with Aller, Caviar Dreams, ChunkFive Roman, Quicksand Book, and Pacifico. You need admin permissions to install fonts on your PC, so if you can't have that permanently at work, try and get it for a couple of hours, go onto FontSquirrel, and go mad downloading interesting fonts. Once you install them they install across the Office Suite, so you can use them in Word as well. Try it!

(NB: An alternative to FontSquirrel is DaFont, which I've heard people recommend, but I can't vouch for it as I've never used it myself.)

Remember to save your PPT as a PDF when using non-standard fonts! Otherwise when you come to present on a different PC without the fonts installed, it will almost certainly go horribly wrong.

Some guidance around fonts - generally it is thought that you should use a maximum of 3 fonts per presentation (although as with all 'rules' around presenting, feel free to break this one if you have a good reason), and my personal minimum font size is 36 for slides.

Font-pairing is an art I feel like I've not mastered at all, but would like to - I found the following (albeit very brief) presentation helpful:

The Ultimate Guide to Font Pairing from Guy Kawasaki

3 Training courses coming up this Winter in London

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Click the pic to go to the upcoming events page

Just a brief post to draw your attention to three workshops I'm running in London in November and December. All of these are open for anyone to book onto (unlike some of the things I do for the British Library, for example), and full details of each can be found on the Upcoming Events page.

People have fun on these courses and find them genuinely useful - the idea is to give practical advice which can be applied the minute you get back to your desk. You can see feedback from previous workshops via the links on the Training page. Any questions about content etc, let me know!

Prezi Guide: The 5 Essentials To Stop Your Audience Feeling Sick

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Prezi is nothing if not divisive. Some people love it, some people hate it - I'm in neither of those camps. I find it very useful in some situations, but still use good old fashioned PowerPoint Slides for more than half the presentations I give. Prezi should be used for a reason.

Prezi is relatively new (it's been around since 2009), it's getting more popular (there are around 40 million users now) and it's improving its interface all the time. Some people accuse it of being style over substance, but for certain ideas (interactive maps, for example) it provides substance that slides simply can't bring to the table. For me, Prezi can be fantastic as long as you adhere to one maxim above all: don't let the medium get in the way of the message. Any presentation materials should be there to support the presenter and work FOR the audience in adding to their experience. Do that, and Prezi can really raise the level of an audience's engagement.

Potentially, a great Prezi has the wow factor. So why would you want to completely undermine that by creating something which makes sections of your audience feel motion-sickness? It's up to you, the presenter, to minimize the possibility of this as far as humanly possible. Here's how. (For the short version, view the Prezi about it.)

1. Positioning

The single most important thing about creating a Prezi is the positioning of the objects on the canvas (and directly related to this, the order in which they're visited on the path). Position your materials sympathetically, people! By which I mean, rather than moving haphazardly around the canvas and disorientating the viewer, move from left to right, or from top to bottom - move in a way the human brain is used to.

2. Distancing

But positioning is about more than putting your objects in a coherent pattern - it's about having a uniform (and short) distance between them. The closer you place your objects together, the less zoom and swoop there is in your prezi. Place them right next to each other and it won't zoom out at all, it will just slide right over from one object to the next.

3. Sizing

As with distancing, uniformity is the key to sizing too. Put similarly sized objects together - ideally make them the exact same size. This means there's no need to zoom in or out. Contrast this to having a small object followed by a much larger object and then a small object again: the zoom is flying all over the place.

4. Rotation

99.9% of rotations and barrel-rolls in Prezis add absolutely zero value to the presentation.

I just made that stat up but I'm sure it's true. In fact most of the time rotating actively detracts from a Prezi. It is the Number One cause of queasyness in the viewer. It can be used with a good reason (a visual metaphor of some kind to better express your ideas) but otherwise, why would you? It just gets in the way of your message.

5. Pacing

The ability to zoom in and out is both Prezi's strength and its weakness. It's what allows you to show the relationship between objects on your presentation, it's what allows the element of surprise for the big reveal, it's what lets you put your own hierachy onto your information rather than having it dictated to you. But it's also at the heart of what can induce nausea in your audience.

So, pace your Prezi like you would regular slides. Don't move it on every few seconds - arrive at point on your path, talk about it for two minutes, or five minutes, or more, and then move on. This means there are fewer zooms per presentation, and less quickly following one-another. But you can still take advantage of the zoom's ability to enhance your presentation.

One last note on zooming

If you double-click the right arrow to move your presentation on (or left arrow to move it back) it zooms twice as fast. This can be effective in reducing the sea-sick effect - after all it's the transitions which cause the problems, so if you only transition for 50% of the time you did before, that helps. The only downside is it feels risky; if you triple click by mistake, you'll miss your path point entirely and have to go back...

Here's my Prezi on this whole topic - it explains what I've just said in a visually illustrative way (which is sort of the point of Prezi after all):

Finally

All that said, if members of your audience are particularly susceptible to motion-sickness, even doing ALL of the above may not be enough. So only use Prezi for a specific reason. Use it to do something PowerPoint can't, rather than as a direct replacement for the sake of it. Use it to cover several dispirate topics, or to make something interactive, or to visually explain relationships between ideas. But if you don't need to do any of those things, and it's a regular presentation, just use regular slides. Just be sure to use them well.

Which leads us to a bonus option:

(6. The nuclear option)

Prezi can be a very useful way to make a nice looking presentation: the fonts, icons, ease of importing images, and themes, make smart presentation materials without the need for a huge amount of effort or design knowledge. Once you get over the initial learning curve, it's quicker to make a nice Prezi than nice slides. So if you want to take advantage of all that, but want to 100% eliminate the possibility of motion-sickness, simply save your Prezi as a PDF, and use it as you would slides. Every path point on your Prezi is a full-page of the PDF so it ends up looking like a (nice) PowerPoint.

To save a Prezi as a PDF, click the share icon and choose the relevant option from there.

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Disclaimer: Prezi will always make some people sick - they dislike Prezis intensely, and it's very important to them that they bring this up a lot. I offer no judgement here; I do the same with LinkedIn. But this guide is about stopping an audience feeling motion-sickness when watching a Prezi - if you aren't prepared to take steps to do this, you shouldn't be making Prezis!