Dealing with potential audience colorblindness isn’t as mysterious as it seems. (And as an added bonus, by way of handling colorblindness, you’ll also fortify your work against the dim bulb in the projector or the color settings on the presenter laptop that skew your established color scheme.) One product,…
PowerPoint
Slow Reveal
Most of the time I advocate for replacing words with images when presenting slideshows. But sometimes the slide just needs to have a lot of words, like this: But when we have a lot of words on a slide and we’re truly trying to get people’s…
Kuler/Color
Here’s a procedure I use all the time to help me select color combinations for my reporting. It makes use of this great, free, online program that takes all the scientific color theory stuff and translates it for those of us without a MFA. First, I head to my client’s…
On the Struggle of Locating High-Quality Images
I’ve been pretty vocal about the need for greater use of images in our evaluation communications. And while I can get most people to vow to halt the use of clip art, finding high-quality images can be a total pain. What’s at our fingertips (i.e., available on Google Images) is…
Atomic Slide Development
Seth Godin recently published a blog post on the atomic method of creating slides. He put into words what many of us have felt about the overuse of bullet points. But more than talk about it, he detailed a method for actually moving from a typically bullet-pointed slidedeck to…
Report Layout in PowerPoint?
I was recently workshopping with a group of evaluators who had bravely submitted their work examples for group critique. In one instance, they had admitted that what I thought were text-heavy slides was actually a full written report. That’s right – they’d used PowerPoint for written report layout. Mind. Blown.
I Think Powerpoint Just Did Something Right
It is so awesome to see Microsoft addressing the misuse of Powerpoint (I mean, did they really have a choice? One of their main tools has been so badly knocked in the media for its contribution to harming understanding, it was either address it or repackage!). Though the storylines were…