This is brilliant: Broken library communications and how to fix them

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Very occasionally I feature someone else's slides on this blog, and this is one of those times - because this presentation brilliantly elucidates almost everything I feel about modern library communication.

Broken library communications and how to fix them from Information and Library Services, Cambridge Judge Business School

(Andy and Ange are on Twitter if you want to follow them for more.)

I worry that there's a sort of echo-chamber thing here, where people who already think like this nod and go 'yes absolutely' and people who don't agree shake their heads and say 'but what about [insert reason to carry on doing things ineffectively here]?' and none of us really change our thinking - but I hope that's not the case.

I think some people might think that the issues described in the presentation above are window-dressing or otherwise somehow superficial, but they absolutely are not - communication is at the heart of what we do in the information profession.

All of these things add up to make a huge contribution to the user experience - and ultimately the user experience defines whether your library is successful or not.

So in keeping with the advice in the slides, let's end with a call to action - is there one change you can make to the way you or your library does things, based on the above? Whether it's simply amending your signs so that if they say 'You can't do X here' they ALSO say 'but you can do it in location Y - here's how to get there' or a full-scale review of the communications in your institution, try and make a change! 

A file-format decision tree for saving PowerPoint presentations

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So which file format is best for saving your slides? It depends on the situation, but it's almost never the default .pptx you're offered. I made a little graphic below to act as a decision tree for choosing how to save your PowerPoint - click on it to be taken to a larger CC-BY-SA version on Flickr.

What it comes down to is this. Saving your slides as a .ppsx file - a PowerPoint Show - is usually the best option, because it opens the PPT up in Presentation View right away. This looks SO much more professional than the default .pptx PowerPoint file, which opens in edit view, revealing your notes if you have them, and the first few slides. Your audience seeing behind the curtain in this way isn't the end of the world, but why do anything to reduce the impact of the presentation you spent ages creating?

A .ppsx file will keep any animations you have in your slides (and embedded video and audio) and unlike a PDF it won't compress your images, so they'll remain high quality. 

However, sometimes you need to use a PDF - mainly when you've used non-standard fonts. PowerPoint claims to be able to embed fonts that aren't included in the Office Suite (but which you download yourself) so they'll work on other PCs - I've found this to be lies, lies, and more lies... It simply won't work - either for presenting on another PC, or for uploading to Slideshare. So saving as a PDF sorts this out - it retains your exciting font choices, and keeps things the right size and shape (you may have to go into the Save Options and untick the ISO box if your PDF doesn't behave itself the first time you save it - for example if Transparency effects aren't correctly rendered).

I also use PDF if the PC I'm presenting on has a different version of PowerPoint to the one I made the slides on - or if I don't know ahead of time whether it will. The version of PowerPoint shouldn't matter but it does, and the other day I had to subtly reformat a whole slide-deck after checking it on the latest version of Office and finding it had mucked around with the font-size for no good reason.

PDFs are the safe option. They work on pretty much ANYTHING. Lots of people never present with PDFs because it simply never occurs to them, but trust me it works fine! I do it 99% of the time because 99% of the time I use non-standard fonts - just click View then Fullscreen Mode and it works exactly like a PowerPoint in Presentation View (including using a clicker to move the slides along).

(There have been a couple of occasions where I've forgotten to do this, and turned up with a regular PowerPoint file to present on a machine with none of my special fonts installed. This has resulted in frantic downloading and rediting and saving in a panic, and is not recommended...)

NB: Never ONLY save your slides as PDF or PowerPoint Show - you need the .pptx file to actually come back and edit them later.

So next time you're saving your file, check if you really need to use .pptx, or whether another format is more appropriate.

You’ll find details of my Presentation Skills or PowerPoint workshops here: you can book an all-day or half-day session for your organisation, online or in person.

The 4 Most Important PowerPoint Rules for Successful Presentations

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I have been working on these slides, 10 minutes at time here, 15 minutes there, for MONTHS! I finally uploaded them to Slideshare this morning.

There are a few reasons for making these. First of all it's separating out what is essential in slide design, to what is merely desirable. There's a million and one guides to creating nice PowerPoint slides and a lot of them focus on what is desirable, but that can often be too much information if you want to improve your presentation materials but you're not sure where to start. The presentation below focuses on the four rules which REALLY matter (backed up by actual research) - and as it says in the slides, an attractive presentation is actually just a byproduct of an effective presentation. Follow the four rules below and you will be making effective PowerPoint slides which communicate effectively and make your message stick.

The 4 Most Important PowerPoint RULES for Successful Presentations from Ned Potter

Another reason to make these is my understanding of what matters with slide design is evolving over time, so this reframes some of the things I've highlighted in previous presentations. It covers some of what we talk about in my Presentation Skills Training; I realise not everyone who wants to attend these can get to them, so wanted to disseminate some of the guidance they contain more widely. (If you're already booked onto a workshop don't worry though - the information above is a small part of the full content of the day!) 

I hope people find these useful. In my experience the easiest way to make a big difference to how effective your presentations are is to start with the materials (for teaching as well as conference presentations) - a great set of slides makes the audience sit up and take notice, which in turn gives you the confidence to deliver a better presentation.

If you'd rather use a design tool to help craft your slides for you, check out Canva and Haiku Deck from Presentation Tools Week.

Presentation Tools 5: Colour

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So we come to the final day of Presentation Tools Week on the blog! Day 1 was about fonts, and then we had three alternatives to PowerPoint for making slides: Haiku, Canva, and Prezi. (Also don't forget Adobe Voice as another slide-alternative.) The final post is about colour, and tools which relate to colour.

Design Seeds (design-seeds.com)

Design Seeds is a colour palette search. It allows you to see groups of colours which work together for design - obviously I'm thinking of colour in presentations here, but of course it can apply to posters, an organisation's branding, or indeed any other aspect of design.

I like this site because how colours work together is something I'm interested in but have no real knowledge about. I like seeing things happen successfully, but it's all trial and error for me. With Design Seeds there's some real expertise to draw upon.

There are countless existing palettes of six colours, but you can also choose a colour as a jumping off point and it finds a palette to match, which I think is the most useful aspect to Design Seeds. If you want to use your organisation's main branding colour to underpin your presentation, but want some nice colours to go with it (for the font, shapes, icons, blocks etc) this is a great way to find the colours. Here's a screengrab - I've put in the approximate colour of the hyperlinks on this website (my favourite colour, sort of green but with a bit of blue in it) and it's given me two palettes to choose from:

Click to go to the Design Seeds website

I'm going to use this tool in the next set of slides I make from scratch.

Pictaculous (pictaculous.com)

Pictaculous isn't entirely dissimilar to Design Seeds in that it's a colour palette generator - but it works in a different way. The idea here is that you upload an image (it could be your organisation's logo, or a key picture in your presentation, or you could use it for every image on a slide by slide basis) and it gives you the component colours and suggests a palette to go with it.

Here's a screengrab:

Click to go to pictaculous

I uploaded the picture which appears in my blog header (a photograph taken by Matt Fairview, which I found on flickr. It is a picture of the M5 Wicker Man, in Somerset; the original can be seen here. Matt has kindly given me permission to use the image on my site) and you can see it's broken the image down into colours, then provides suggested palettes from Kuler and Colourlovers (all of which are clickable so you can view them in larger sizes). If you work with InDesign you can also download the Adobe Swatch.

Multicolr Search Lab (labs.tineye.com/multicolr)

TinEye Labs provide a couple of useful tools - the first is a reverse image search engine. Upload the image you've got saved on your PC, and it will find examples of the image online - handy if you've saved something and forgotten where you found it, but also handy if you want to know if anyone is using your own images without proper attribution!

The second is the more fun tool - the colour search engine. It searches 20 million Creative Commons Flickr images, not by keyword, but by colour. People LOVE this tool when we try it out in Presentation Skills workshops, and they find it addictive for reasons which are hard to explain but you'll know when you try it...

You can select the colours of your organisational branding and it will bring back a staggering amount of pictures featuring just those colours (allowing you to make a presentation which stays 'on brand' without using the dreaded PPT template). You can also select a dizzying selection of 5 different colours just for the sake of it, then move the sliders around so some colours are more prominent than others, and be amazed at how many images match your absurd criteria...

Click to go the colour search engine

So that's the end of Presentation Tools Week - click the pic below for a link to all 5 posts in one go. Any useful tools I've missed? Let me know in a comment.

Presentation Tools 4: Using Prezi to make NORMAL slides

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Yesterday in the post about Canva, I promised Prezi but not as you know it... This is because we're not going to be using Prezi to make a Prezi, we're going to use it make regular slides.

Using Prezi to make normal slides (prezi.com)

If you want to take advantage of some of Prezi's features (particularly the symbols, shapes, graphics, and templates) but don't want an actual Prezi with all the zooming and swooping which can make people feel ill, you can just create a Prezi to work as a PDF. The slides below are both an example of this and an explanation as to how:

How to use prezi to make quick and easy (non zooming) slides from Ned Potter

Of course, you may want to use Prezi as Prezi themselves intend, in which case have a read of this guide to preventing motion sickness in the viewer. If you want to use Prezi in the academic environment, start here. And, although it's a little out of date now, my 2013 mega guide to using Prezi is here.

The final post of Presentation Tools Week is tomorrow, and focuses on 3 different tools that help you with colour.