Slide by Slide - PowerPoint Design, 506 Mondrian Residences, Filinvest Corporate City, Alabang (2026)

29/06/2014

PowerPoint has worked hard since its inception, some might say too hard, so let's get it a bumper pack of popcorn and hold it by the hand and take it to the movies. But wait, it doesn't need its...

11/06/2014

PowerPoint - 'Use the experts or risk going bananas'

Bananas, oranges, apples, melons, grapes, pineapples, plums, raspberries, cherries & strawberries: now you're off on your weekly shop. No list, mind, although without that you'll struggle to remember all ten amidst the mental clutter of yoghurt, pasta and high-octane alcohol, or whatever gets you through the night to overcome a bad case of PPSD (post-presentation stress disorder). Anyway, let's say the above are your favourite fruits; that's why you're buying them, but from memory alone it's likely you'll get as far as apples with maybe a strawberry or two. So why then should you be expected to remember a PowerPoint presentation involving 60-plus bullet points backed by text about a subject that often only truly engages your interest come pay-day – aka, your work?

Of course, you owe it to yourself and your employer to grit your teeth come Monday morning whilst remembering that only last Friday night the weekend with its limitless possibilities stretched before you until in the blink of an eye you find yourself in a meeting. OK, like Monday mornings, presentations are unavoidable, but we're all in this together; the captive audience and the presenter. It's the latter's role to make Tuesday the new Monday.

Presenter: get engaged. No, not a water-cooler romance; simply remember to engage your audience, put yourself in their shoes, remember that we live in an age where there's an infinite variety of visual stimuli available to us all, and then remember that in the right hands a PowerPoint presentation can match the best. Think of what you'd want to see and try to replicate that. Start with the idea, what you need to convey, then engage a professional, low-cost designer and let them do what they do best. They probably can't do your job; don't try to do theirs.

Simple, image-based presentations have been shown to work best, so long as you avoid clichéd stock imagery like you would an angry Honey Badger. They're nasty, pound for pound making the Tasmanian Devil seem like a Gerbil. Text is fine, but keep it minimalist. Remember, what looks good on your screen may not work best across a crowded meeting-room. Use animation. Use originality. Use humour. Use music. Try as much as possible to give the bullet to bullet-points. Seemingly there to simplify, they instead encourage information-overload by making it possible to cover too many subjects in oversimplified detail.

Face your audience, not stand in front of the screen as though reading the presentation for the first time. You're the originator, so come presentation day you should have mastered your subject matter. Don't be like those TV weather forecasters who stand in front of their symbols. You know, right over the place where you're about to take your summer break. Ultimately it's about your audience. A presentation is there to back you up; you're not there to validate the presentation.

According to Microsoft, the average PowerPoint session lasts 250-minutes. The Wolf of Wall Street runs for 180-minutes, and even then people are saying – Marty, Marty, Marty, less is more, mate. Remember that people need to get back to their jobs with their memory and will-to-live intact, and with the time spent in the meeting having a positive effect in the workplace.

Can't remember that list at the top? No problem; you don't need that much fruit. They say it's a bit of a sugar rush. Stick to five a day. Far easier to remember. And do eat your greens, as I'm always telling my granny.

08/06/2014

PowerPoint – the elixir of youth

Cardio, strength-conditioning, a Mediterranean diet, and enough alcohol to give you beer goggles but not enough to see you in a police cell on a Saturday night, is one recipe for a long and hopefully happy life. But if all this sounds like too much effort, there's another elixir of youth with absolutely no potions and lotions. Let's hear it then it for our sometimes friend and frequent foe - PowerPoint. Can this be the very same PowerPoint that's destroyed your will to live during endless presentations, has made you question why you're not diving for pearls to earn your daily crust; you know, something simple, involving no more risk than facing a hungry Moray Eel in the ocean depths and possible death by drowning, like the female Ama divers of Japan? Well, according to a woman who hails from Cartagena, the short answer is … yes.

Lourdes del Castillo de Rumié not only has an impressive name, but at 77 years old she has an impressively unlikely source of inspiration and joy. No, it's not watching Hummingbirds flit among the trees in her native Columbia, nor has she expressed a desire to swim with Dolphins. Instead, she embraces PowerPoint. I'll write that word again in case you don't think you read it correctly the first time – e.m.b.r.a.c.e.s. I'd use caps, but everyone tells me that makes it look like you're shouting. It seems that using PowerPoint is her recipe for a joyous old age.

Decades passed as Mrs del Castillo de Rumié baked wedding cakes and taught art history from home, blissfully unaware that PowerPoint was taking over the corporate world and was being used by the military as a means of not divulging information, the thinking being that it was a useful tool in bamboozling the media at press conferences because no-one could understand the presentation.

Lourdes (informal, but it's quicker to type) was until quite recently technophobic, in common with many of her generation. Then her equally impressively-named friend, Myriam Vélez de Lemaitre, herself almost 90, enthused to Lourdes about the Internet and recommended a computer teacher, one Luis Felipe Venegas, and so was opened a new window on the world. She now travelled extensively, courtesy of Google Earth, and found the wealth of information at her fingertips inspirational. For those who've never experienced the pre-internet era, when Mammoths bestrode the planet and using an Olivetti typewriter was the closest thing there was to the age of information, the use of the net now seems as commonplace as blinking, but for Lourdes it was life-changing. Then, after mastering many new online tricks, her knowledge of art met PowerPoint.

With hubby tucked up in bed, she could now spend half the night weaving a narrative about Michaelangelo, replete with Renaissance music and men in fig leaves. Art has come to life for her students, thanks to so far over 175 presentations. Life itself has new meaning too, and there's now a future for her beyond the usual travails of ageing. She had thought that going to her Catholic heaven would be paradise indeed, for there she'd meet Michaelangelo and all those other greats, now reborn through her PowerPoint slides. But she's too busy to think about dying. Anyway, she now has access to information which is far greater than that possessed by mere immortals.

Dennis Austin, Robert Gaskins and Thomas Rudkin have a torrid time ahead, as Lourdes has expressed a wish to kiss the inventor of PowerPoint, 'from his head to his toes', not realising that it was three of them who conceptualised the idea back in '87. No doubt they might like to return the compliment, given the noble use Lourdes has made of their idea.

Whether the Moray Eel featured in the attached photo is a particular threat to the pearl divers of Ama is unknown. Perhaps Lourdes could look it up? That picture has been used because it's scary. Scary is cool. But as cool as PowerPoint in the hands of Lourdes del Castillo de Rumié? Next one up there in Heaven please tell Michaelangelo, Leonardo (Da Vinci, not DeCaprio), El Greco and the rest, that they have some great presentations coming their way, but hopefully not too soon.

31/05/2014

Slide by Slide offers life after 'Death by PowerPoint'

We've all been there, those endless meetings where even the evening commute looks as inviting as a trip to the Maldives. All those worms twisting and twirling and graphs of graphs, until you find yourself concentrating on what the images represent rather than on the message they're meant to convey, all the while remembering that yawns are contagious.

Slide by Slide prides itself on cutting through all that. No, we are not saying that our presentations will have the entertainment value of your favourite box set, but nor will we leave you scratching your head and guiltily wondering whether you're the only one in the room who ended the meeting more confused than when it began.

Simplicity and clarity are the key, with visuals that inform yet aren't there just to look pretty, or in the next example, otherwise. US Army General Stanley A McChrystal made a valid point when he was reported in The New York Times as wryly commenting at a briefing that 'When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war', referring to what looked to him like a bowl of spaghetti, although it was meant to represent NATO military strategy in Afghanistan.

If it seems odd that a company specialising in PowerPoint and Keynote presentations should openly acknowledge the negative rather than accentuating the positive of these most useful of visual aides, it's because we are aware that information is best conveyed and most accurately remembered when interest is aroused. Think of your favourite hobby. Unless you had a particularly unfortunate childhood, it's unlikely to be the collecting of flow-charts, but if someone asked you to talk about your football team or music tastes you'd become a walking, talking encyclopedia ... because you're interested.

PowerPoint is a concept that's been around nearly as long as our life-changing friend, www, and for good reason. Used wisely it's still the ultimate visual tool, but it's only as good as it's allowed to be. Having a great presentation may seem an end in itself, but it's only a great presentation if it delivers the message. Think of all those TV ads that made you smile or got you talking, but scratching your head afterwards trying to remember what they were trying to sell.

If all this sounds more like death to PowerPoint, far from it. So, what does Slide by Slide bring to the table? Our designers' client list for a start, including such multi-national stellar names as L’Oreal, Unilever, Acer, Coca-Cola and Ogilvy & Mather, the latter the legendary ad agency whose founder was reputed to be one of the inspirations behind Mad Men. Clearly, these are the kind of companies that do not, and cannot, afford to work with anyone other than the best. What we do instead is understand that a PowerPoint designer is ultimately only as good as the brief. These clients know what they want, and that is what they get – clear, informative, individual and entertaining slides backed by crisp, concise copy, all delivered with an eye to strong corporate branding.

Slide by Slide is a UK team based in Manila and we work primarily with Asian clients who share the same time-zone, so a Skype video conference with, for example, Hong Kong, Singapore or Shanghai, is possible within normal office hours. All presentations are assessed by an in-house team before presentation to a client, working on the principle that if a novice in your particular field can understand it, so too will your target audience.

We bring professional, affordable presentation-design to all industries, with an emphasis on being memorable and persuasive, using beautifully-designed slides at low cost by utilising talented multimedia designers, backed by copywriters, animators and illustrators of the highest order. And we understand that spaghetti is for eating. Over to you, General.