Marketer extraordinaire Seth Godin has a wonderful little post on his blog entitled “7 Tips for Amateur Type Designers.” Here are the first three, just to get you started…
1. If you want professional results, hire a professional.
2. Don’t use the built-in fonts that come with your PC. (Type is cheap. Invest.)
3. Headlines in sans serif. Body in serif. (Easy tip—headlines are bold and condensed.)
The tips are also available in illustrate PDF form. Be sure to check out this post and implement the tips in your next presentation!
iPresentee.com has a whole bunch of “Objects” for PowerPoint, Keynote, and pretty much any publishing software available for free download right now! In their own words…
iPresentee presents free Keynote Objects for Apple’s Keynote, iWeb and Pages! The package combines 100 easy to use and attractive objects. The background of all objects is transparent and can be used on any colored background. Each object can be changed in size, rotated, increased or decreased in opacity, fitted with shadows or even overlapped with one another to create extra effects. Keynote Objects are compatible with Keynote, iWeb, Pages, Microsoft PowerPoint and Word.
Here is a quick and great video by Tom Peters about the importance of salesmanship in all professions. In it, he says: “What do I sell? Passion, ideas. I’m desperate for people to change.” Selling ideas, eh? Trying to change people, perhaps the way they think? Sounds a lot like what lawyers do to me…
If you’ve ever created a PowerPoint presentation with many high-resolution graphics or, even worse, video content, you know that the file size tends to skyrocket. Further, if you’ve ever tried to email such presentations, you’ve probably run into roadblocks because your email program wouldn’t let you send attachments over 10 or 20 megabytes, or the person you were sending them to couldn’t receive them. In short, trying to email big PowerPoint is usually a huge headache. Fortunately, it can be done fairly simply and, in fact, pretty easily!
If your PowerPoint contains videos, the first thing you’ll need to do is save the file as a “PowerPoint Package.”The reason you’ll need to do this is because, for some unknown reason, PowerPoint refuses to embed video… Meaning that when you save a PowerPoint with videos as a .ppt file, the file contains only links to the videos and not the videos themselves. This means that unless your recipient has the exact same video file in the exact same place on their computer, they will get a big blank space or a big red X, depending on the version of PowerPoint they are using. Fortunately, this is really easy to do: Just select “Save As…” from the “File” menu, and when the dialogue box pops up, choose “PowerPoint Package” from the “Format” drop-down menu.
