Relational Presentation Blog – Flexible PowerPoint

By Robert Lane     www.aspirecommunications.com

While training in the UK recently I ran across Jamie Garroch, a brilliant entrepreneur behind a potent new PowerPoint addin called “ActivePresentation Designer.” Interactive speakers may want to give this software a serious look. Although PowerPoint already contains basic tools for creating hyperlink-based navigation within slide shows, this software grabs hold of PowerPoint and automates many of the otherwise labor-intensive steps for creating non-linear navigation menus.

Using the addin, for example, it’s easy to build a 2- or even 3-teired navigation menu for a slide show within minutes. Then, during a performance immediately access any slide needed to answer questions or spontaneously display extra detail about a particular topic. I was impressed with its ease of use.

Two other features caught my eye as well:

The addin automates the use of “triggers,” a very little-known yet extremely useful aspect of PowerPoint’s functionality. This feature lets you quickly display or hide popups on individual slides—on demand. For example, a presenter might wish to have several contrasting views of products available on a single slide, or control access to sensitive information that is appropriate for some viewers, but not all.

And if you’ve struggled with the issue of how to make a “handout” when delivering interactive talks, check this out. Let’s say your interactive slide show contains 200 slides, but during a given performance you display only 30 of those slides. The Export Wizard in this addin can track which slides you showed, and note confidentiality levels set by the author for each one. Then it creates a customized slide show for you (that can be emailed or used to print a handout) based solely on the slides displayed during the talk and whether those slides may be distributed or not based on their confidentiality setting. We’ve wondered for years why PowerPoint couldn’t do that all along!

One need for future development—from my perspective at least—is expanding the ActivePresentation Designer current potential so that it goes beyond working only with single slide shows. In other words, it will be a stronger tool when the presenter can link together multiple separate slide shows as well, rather than working merely within a single show—basically giving PowerPoint the networking potential of FrontPage or Dreamweaver. Jamie says that kind of functionality is in the pipeline for an early 2011 edition. For the time being, manually linking to external shows using PowerPoint’s standard features is still a viable option.

Filed under: Interactive, Products, Software on December 17th, 2010 | No Comments »

By Robert Lane     www.aspirecommunications.com

The color combinations you place on slides significantly affect their visual impact and appeal. Keep in mind the following characteristics: Reds, oranges, and yellows are referred to as warm colors. They tend to pop out and attract attention, especially red. Greens, blues, and purples are cool colors. These colors recede into the background and draw less attention (Figure 1).White and very light colors also catch the eye, whereas black and very dark colors generally are less noticeable.

Interestingly, the above effects are not absolutely fixed. They can flip, depending upon the quantity of one color present compared with another. For example, if you were to place a small black shape on a solid white slide background, the black shape would pop out as more noticeable than the white background (Figure 2).

In this case, the brain is looking for meaning in the display rather than simply reacting to color characteristics. Not surprisingly, some optical illusions take advantage of this phenomenon. Realize, therefore, that the quantity and contrast of colors can be important to slide designs. This issue is most critical in a PowerPoint sense regarding text usage. Use opposite extremes of light verses dark between text and backgrounds. If the slide background is light, use black or very dark text for best results (Figure 3)—unless, of course, you are intentionally creating some form of subtle effect, such as making Navigation Elements less distracting.

There is an interesting and complex interplay between color characteristics, contrast, and quantity. We’ll focus here on color characteristics and interactions. How you combine colors definitely affects a design’s overall desirability.

NEVER do what is depicted in Figures 4 and 5.

If you stare at either of these images for very long (especially on screen), your eyes begin screaming. Mixing bright blues and reds is a terrible practice to inflict upon an audience, and unfortunately it happens more often than one would hope. The same goes with mixing reds and greens. The color interactions are harsh and fatiguing to the eyes.

A red and green combination also brings up the issue of color blindness, which apparently affects somewhere around 7 percent of men and less than 1 percent of women. Difficulty distinguishing between red and green is the most common form of color blindness. If you place green text on a red background, and there is not a lot of contrast between the colors, some viewers will not be able to read the text. Avoid such problems across the board by never mixing these two colors, especially in a text-background combination.

An interesting technique florists sometimes use is to fashion a bouquet of uniformly colored flowers—say yellows or oranges—and then throw in two or three bright red flowers, off center and at different levels in the bouquet. Your eyes are naturally attracted to these bright red spots, but your brain can’t really make up its mind which red flower should be the focus. So it shifts back and forth between them, causing you to inadvertently scan the entire bouquet. In a related way, dark green foliage is often included with a bouquet to act as a frame and allow bright, warm-color flowers to stand out and attract more attention.

When it comes to mixing colors, here are broad guidelines:

As a rule, mixing warm colors with each other or mixing cool colors with each other is safe. You’ll notice Aspire’s color scheme featured throughout the Web site and Relational Presentation books stays with warm colors. Most companies prefer a cool combination, especially blues, grays, teals, and black.

Black and white work fine in combination with all other colors, as does beige, surprisingly. For example, you can get away with having light beige text on a dark blue background equally with placing it on a dark red background. Browns, however, are best combined with warm colors (Figure 6). Grays fit better with cool colors (Figure 7).

Mixing warm and cool colors is risky and is best left to graphic design contexts. Such color combinations can look fine in graphics (Figure because graphics often use complex gradations and mixtures of colors. Without such subtleties, mixed warm-cool colors on slides tend to portray the gaudiness of sports uniforms.

With text, the same mixing guidelines apply. For text used as content, we almost always use white or beige on a dark background, or black on a light background. Above all else, you want observers to be able to read the text easily. When text is graphical in nature, such as a label or title that is part of a picture, just about anything goes. Again, such text should be easily readable, but color and design can vary considerably.

Filed under: Uncategorized on July 23rd, 2010 | 3 Comments »

By Robert Lane    www.aspirecommunications.com

When building or modifying navigation elements in slide shows, it’s very important to be rigidly systematic with the steps followed. Developing good, methodical habits at the beginning of your journey not only helps preserve your sanity, it greatly improves efficiency. The more efficient you become in your design activities, the more time you will have for perfecting other skills. Even more critical, methodical building habits translate into less (and generally zero) errors at show time. The best way to guarantee your platform’s structure will work as expected on stageis to discipline the design process.

I realize those of you who have freeform and rebellious personalities (as do I)  are cringing about now because order and predictable procedures seem so … common. Think of it this way: The more efficient you become with the nitty-gritty details—the mechanics of relational design—the more energy you can put into creative activities. So take the plunge. It’s not that bad.

When creating any form of navigation, try to follow the formula in Figure 1 as much as possible. Let’s say you are building a panel navigation element. Create one button first, with all aspects of the desired look and feel. Copy and paste that button as many times as necessary. Then add your links. Finally, copy and paste your completed panel onto other slides if necessary. When making In-line Navigation, first build one strip on one slide. Next add your links. Then copy and paste the strip. Always complete these processes starting on Slide 1 and work your way down.

When editing navigation components, DO NOT change the individual links on all the slides. Change the links on Slide 1 only, and then copy this master set, delete the old navigation, and paste the new set throughout. If you are placing or editing navigation that spans multiple shows, first open all the shows at the same time. Place (edit) the navigation in one show only. Copy this navigation. Save and close the show. Go to the next show. Paste the new navigation. Save and close that show. Go to the next.

These procedures may seem tedious but they minimize the chances of making mistakes, such as forgetting to change a link in the middle of a show. Don’t take that chance. Discipline your design habits or spend a lot more time later fixing mistakes. Can you tell we learned these lessons by hard experience?

Filed under: Design of Platforms, Interactive on June 30th, 2010 | No Comments »

By Robert Lane        www.aspirecommunications.com

Placement Consistency is a very important principle in visually interactive presentation design, both for professionalism of slide appearance and as an aid to a presenter’s navigation activities.

Navigation: For example, primary navigation buttons (Figure 1)—navigation elements that allow movement between major branches in an interactive presentation platform—should ALWAYS be in the same place on every single slide. Don’t make exceptions here. If plans go awry during a performance, requiring a change of directions, the presenter must know for certain (without even thinking) that these primary buttons are available and where to find them. Nervous speakers sometimes have a hard time thinking logically as it is. They should never have to try and guess where to locate critical links. Finding primary buttons should be as automatic as pressing a car’s brake pedal in congested traffic. Consistency of positioning with other types of navigation is not as critical, but a certain amount of uniformity is comforting and makes a presenter’s job easier. For example, we almost always place navigation panels on the left side of the slide and bars at the very bottom (Figure 2), as opposed to the right side or the top. Technically such positioning doesn’t really matter, but it aids flow and visual consistency when moving both between slides and between shows.

Content: When several content pieces are the same size and each piece exists on its own slide (such as video clips included as part of a video switchboard—see Figure 3), we like to keep the positioning of each piece, on each slide, exactly the same.

That way moving between the slides creates an illusion that one piece of content simply replaces the other. Furthermore, if the backgrounds of all these slides are exactly alike, the content is the ONLY noticeable change. That is, the resulting transition is very smooth. You can improve this transition effect even more by adding a Fade Smoothly slide transition. Then one piece of content seems to fade gracefully into the other. If, on the other hand, content positioning is not consistent across slides, it appears to jump sideways or up-down with each transition.

Text: If you use shapes to create text boxes (our recommendation), be aware that text, by default, is aligned at the middle of the shape (vertically—see Figure 4).

This can cause a problem from an aesthetic standpoint. Let’s say there are several slides in a row and each contains similar text boxes, such as Figure 5 followed by Figure 6. What happens during transitions is that text seems to jump up and down when there is more or less text on subsequent slides. It’s a good idea, therefore, to change the vertical alignment of the text so that it is anchored at the top of the shape.

Then at least the upper position of the text stays stationary with each slide transition. In other words, there is less distracting movement.

To change the text anchor point, click the shape to select it.

On the Home tab Paragraph group, click the Align Text button.

Click Top.

Filed under: Design of Platforms, Design of Slides on May 19th, 2010 | No Comments »