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In the last few weeks, the PowerPoint Queen has received many contacts from some interesting marketing characters (yes, it takes lots of wonderful charm and character to be in marketing!) Many of them are asked to spiffy up their client’s PowerPoints. And many of them can do just that, but also have come to the conclusion that hiring that added level of professional help is a wise investment. After all, if you exceed your client’s expectations on a “simple” PowerPoint, image what you can do on that next “_______” (trade show, ad campaign, you-get-the-picture).
Marketing is in my background and I get it and see it’s opportunity. But some marketeers forget to focus on what they do best and move into the designer-phase alone. Smart ones hire the right professionals to get the job done. And it doesn’t have to break the bank or go over budget. Believe me, I’ve seen it before – tempt a client with a fabulous comp and educate them on just WHAT PowerPoint can accomplish and the right budget is agreed upon by all involved and no one feels shorted AND it leads to happy clients. Happy Clients = More Work. More Work = More Paychecks. More Paychecks = Confidence and More Clients.
Did you know that you can have internal links within a PowerPoint and can click on that link and get to another page within that same PowerPoint?? That they do not have to be viewed LINEARLY, page-by-page, click-by-click? Wait? You didn’t know that? Well come on in… let’s talk some more…
Many times, PowerPoints can be more than 20 pages or more, with some averaging about 40-60 pages. My largest PowerPoint was 180 pages. Now let’s think about this for a moment. There are two ways this will possibly be viewed:
1) Showing the presentation
2) Providing it to an end-user to view themselves
If you are showing the presentation, and you’d like to hop around the presentation in a super-slick manner, having internal links to specific categories or sections is the best way to navigate a large PowerPoint. Think of it like a localized web site. If you pass it along to an end-user to view, they can click around, just like a web site. How cool! Let’s look at some examples.
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Horizons Media — San Diego, CA. Not only is this PowerPoint very bold in style and color, it has many pages and needed to be organized in an easy-to-use manner.
Each “title” section had it’s own sub-sections. In the above example, the Expertise shows four links that you can click onto to get to that page, instead of using the mouse or clicker.
The “Case Study” section has three main categories to show-off: web, branding and print support. The clear, well-colored and large internal links are obvious to the user, remind the of a web link and makes it intuitive to click on. When they click on “branding” they suddenly are brought to another page, about 6 pages into the presentation, and they can look at that section. And if they want to go back to the previous section, they simple click that link and they go back. But they do not know what page they are on — they are just moving about. Enjoying the ride. With a PowerPoint? Really? YES!
Once you are within a sub-category, you can go even more specific. In this slide, you can see those small golden/green links under the words “Case Studies.” Those are links to even more detail. See where this is going? Now look at this next slide…
Oh no wait! This IS the actual web site for Horizons Media. My mistake. But hey, with the things you can do with internal linking within PowerPoints, you would never know the difference, would you?
There are many PowerPoints that require a map. Sometimes showing where your company has locations. It can be a US map, or the span the entire world. Having a simple static map can be a little ho-hum, so one idea is to add some simple animation to jazz it up and perhaps even get your viewer to look at where you are located!
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MVTS Technologies — Located in Carlsbad, CA, MVTS has many locations. In order to focus the attention, each of the golden boxes “wipes” either left, right, up or down, as the end-user clicks, so you can stop, read the location and absorb the vastness of their company expansion.
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Pioneer Pacific Community College — Wilsonville, OR. Pioneer Pacific Community College (PPCC) was in need of a Admissions presentation that they could show to incoming students. They also have multiple locations, but wanted to keep it clear and simple. Using the school’s color palette, the dots and key animated by having each dot show up first, then the location, then the next dot, then the next location and so on. This was self-animated – happening once the end-user clicked onto that slide.
Each year, the Portland Creative Conference comes to town. Last year (2008), I had the honor of working with Steve Gehlen on the main presenter presentation and actually received a few calls from the event from those who saw my name in the program and enjoyed the show. That was very exciting! It was rewarding to see it so well-received.
 Portland Creative Conference '08 This year’s event will be equally exciting. It takes place on September 12th and has a long list of exceptional creatives who will be speaking and teaching us all day long. And the evening wrap-up party always rocks! Hope to see you there!
 PowerPoint for the Portland Creative Conference '08  PowerPoint for the Portland Creative Conference '08 (Photos courtesy of Steve Gehlen creator of the Portland Creative Conference – thanks Steve!)
After nearly 20 year in the design biz, I have been lucky enough to see my work printed in magazines, splashed onto huge screens at trade shows and events, on local college and hospital shelves.
Well, most recently, a package design that I have been working on for Color Me House made it onto the shelves of Costco! Very exciting to see it there — but not only that — very excited to hear that when it was mentioned to some of my contacts, friend and family, they had already seen it. It has already caught their eye. Some had even purchased it!
 Color Me House package design at Costco The family that created this product is wonderful, so if you are so inclined, pick one up for the kiddos – they will delight in it. Want to have the BIGGEST holiday present this year?? This is is! Want to surprise a little one by bringing the most unique gift to a birthday party – this is it! Okay, you have your marching orders – off you go…
PowerPoint has one main function: to tell the viewer a story. There is a message that needs to be conveyed. And most times, it is a complicated concept that needs images, graphs, charts and lots of verbiage to get the point across.
I know of some other PowerPoint designers that prefer to use mostly images, less text. I am not sure who their clients are, but let me tell you, most of Corporate America and the Marketeers I work with have a ton of content they are trying to cram into 20 slides. And under 45 minutes. And it is doable. Believe me. I create them all the time. You just have to be creative!
Here are a few samples of flow charts, graphs and illustrations that assist in conveying concepts that enhance the presentation.
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INTEL — Intel, in Portland, Oregon, has many corporate templates that they use. They have branding style guidelines that need to be followed. Color palettes that are set. Fonts that are predetermined. However, there are ways to stretch the material, make it more interesting and provide it some added highlights.
Working with the Portland offices of Opus Creative, I tackled a short, but poignant PPT. This first slide shows a typical bar chart, but by overlaying it on an image, it is more interesting and has more depth than simply placing it upon a white background. There are tricks the Intel PPTs use, as part of their guidelines, such as the text being highlighted in a clear and concise way knocked out within a blue bar. They prefer clean, less cluttered pages.
On another Intel project that I worked on with Waymon, who is from the Creative Resource Network (a fabulous group of creatives that are part of my design team in the Portland, Oregon area). Here, we are showing off the specs between a first and second generation product and another product. Simple shading, a choice of just a couple of colors, arrows to draw the eye to read the information as desired and the product images help convey the information in a clean, professional manner. Intel PPTs include resting space, or white space, all the while cramming the info within.
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GoGoGREENER — For a California start-up company, pitching the use of a card for customers to use that tracks their purchases, donating amounts to green-lifestyle industries, it was important for the steps to be clean, clear and friendly. And, well…. green. By using numbers and generic, simple graphics, their message was easy to read and understand.
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MVTS TECHNOLOGIES — Showing the way their business model runs and how they function, where they are located and what they bring to the table was their latest PPT message. Using an interactive dot-style map, working with Hinge Design in Carlsbad, California, we placed the elements on map, had them animate when clicked, and each area had a specific description about the process that takes place in that area of the world.
This graph below, describing the Equipment Lifecycle, maintains the look and feel of the rest of the PPT, using soft edges and colors, arrow movement and careful composition in order to clarify the description.
What do you get when you ask a Marketeer to create a PowerPoint? Granted there are some that are very handy and can get through a presentation well enough to get their point across and keep their job. However, another 80% of them try to throw every trick in the book at the presentation to make it “pop” but the result can look amateurish and not very professional.
Adding animation to a PowerPoint presentation can boost it’s energy level and make the viewer excited to view the content and — gasp! — even study the charts! (Seriously? Is that possible without incentives of coffee or snacks?).
Below are a few recent examples of PowerPoints that were smacked around with some fabulous animation. Now actually making the animation in PowerPoint can be frustrating. The layers, the arrows in the Custom Animation menu can make you want to throw something at your computer screen. Maybe one day (one day!) the Gods of PowerPoint will make it easier to use (please, please!!). Maybe we should consider a sacrifice to satisfy their needs for this change…. Hmmm…
Ehem, but I digress… friend or foe? My opinion is friend. But if you have more than 2 items animating per page (and it is not a sequence of chart elements in the works) than it could be bad news. Reel it in.
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MOTOROLA — This presentation, worked on in conjunction with the Design Ranch, a fellow PowerPoint design studio in Portland, Oregon, uses subtle mood changes with transparencies, speed of color shifts, and elements coming on and off the screen in surprising manners. If you didn’t know any better, you would think this was created in Flash! Simple animation styles, such as wipes, can enhance any presentation simply. Using no more than 2 main animations, with possible one POP animation, can do wonders for any presentation.
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LED LENSER — Probably one of the most fun projects I ever worked on. No, really. I am being sincere. I had to mimic a Flash piece in this PPT for the flashlight company. How much fun! The timing had to be just right — it had to run automatically and was timed per page — and the elements had to flow and show each step of how the flashlights worked, including what makes their bulbs so much brighter. The dudes over at Labworks Design enjoyed hooking me up with this gig and I would do more of this type of work in a heartbeat!
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LOCAL CLINIC — While working with SpotColor Studio in Lake Oswego, Oregon, this example shows one section of a chart explaining the check-in process and experience that a patient would have at this clinic. This animated by having each piece of the piece “pop” out to the side, offering more detail and explanation per piece. The graphic was created in Illustrator and brought into PowerPoint as artwork and using simple animation styles.
Hello PowerPoint enthusiasts! Yes, there are some of us who are very enthusiastic about PowerPoint design and development. Over time, I am hoping to explore past and current examples of PPTs, to show the vast stretching that a PowerPoint Presentation can do. My experience spans New Jersey, New York City, Texas, Arizona, California and Portland, Oregon! If you put in PowerPoint design+Portland, OR or Portland+PowerPoint Design into Google = The PowerPoint Queen!
If you’d like to see more examples of my work, please visit my Portfolio link at the left. I have included some Case Studies as well, to show how I problem solve for my clients. These design examples include print, web and illustration as well.
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Below is a recent PowerPoint project for ebioscience in San Diego, which is also included in full detail in the case study section. The graphics were created within PowerPoint, although there were some elements created in Illustrator and then brought into the page as images. The background was created in Photoshop and is a Master page file. Each new Title section had a different background image.
See more recent posts and other PowerPoint examples using the left navigational links! Enjoy the ride!
You are herby granted permission to enter the ‘Queendom.’ Tread carefully as you explore my Domain and enjoy its Bounty.
Within this Domain, you may learn all about the PowerPoint Queen and how she can help you with your PowerPoint Template and Design needs. Animation, templates, illustrations, flow-graphics, charts, custom Photoshop images – the Queen, with her trusty servants – can do them all!
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