I make slide decks using Instagram. What’s your superpower?
Who else loves making slides? All the nice details, perfecting the theme and making sure all the colors and the fonts match nicely. I am a UX Designer after all and if it was for me I would create every single slide with Sketch, making sure they are PIXEL PERFECT.
But I also hate making slides. I mean seriously, when I realise that I wasted 45+ minutes and still failed at choosing a suitable theme for a slide deck, I do tend to get a tiny bit frustrated. Just as it happened recently, when I was going to the annual alumni meet-up of EIT Digital, and I was going to hold a small presentation.
With a dying computer, about to board a flight and only a few hours left to send in my presentation, I was starting to accept that I might just present without slides.
Oh but how much I love constraints! And how much my creativity loves it! My computer might have given up on me but I still had my beloved phone, and the sudden realisation that it might just be the perfect tool to prepare the slide deck.
Yes! You can make your slides on you phone! And yes, I decided to make them using Instagram. Not sure about what the scale of Instagram stories proficiency is but I would say I am no expert. I can use filters, text, maybe I use some emojis or hashtags at times. But I had the feeling that this might still give me just enough possibilities for creating the slides I needed!
So there you go, first I just attempted to create an opening slide and see how things are. As the presentation was about my experience in the Start-Up Chile incubator program where I spent my past few months, my phone was filled with a pictures relevant to the presentation.
I put a photo of Santiago into Instagram stories, put a caption over it and then instead of posting, I simply downloaded the image. Voila, opening slide is done!
[Just to be fully transparent, I had to apply a little trick to actually rotate the image 90 degrees in Photos and then put it into Instagram stories as I wanted to have regular, landscape slides.]
Going forward I had the first obstacle. I really wanted to include some more details about the whole Start-Up Chile program but I wasn’t sure how to convey their message and brand identity when the inspiration came to visit their website! And what other way of keeping their identity then using the website itself! Quick screenshot and I’m back on Instagram, using the screenshot as the slide background and writing my talking points over it. At this point I also wanted to make it a little more fun and so I included some small gifs. And really, I never tried this before but I imagine integrating GIFs into PowerPoint or Google Slides would be a real pain compared to Instagram’s “GIF” option.
Then I reached a point in the presentation where I wanted to have one of those nice and empty slides with a single word/expression, something to catch people’s attention. I was feeling the blue color scheme emerging from the previous slides and so I decided to have a nice simple blue background. Here, I used Instagram’s own blue background that you can have when you type things, but really any screenshot, google’d image or picture from the phone would suffice. Don’t let your creativity be restricted by mine! One important thing though, it comes handy to save this single background we created without any text on it for creating additional text based slides.
Okay wow, 4 slides down and I was pretty pumped about this insta-presentation process getting maybe a bit too creative. I really wanted to tell my audience a bit more about Chile and its geography for some good old storytelling and so I googled “South America Map Sketch” to find a nice outline I could use. It was quick and easy to find a map sketch I liked and after downloading the pic I was once again back in the stories function to edit my “slide”. Here, I finally took advantage of my favourite highlighter function combining it with emojis, text, and funky hand drawn arrows! If there was one point where I might have gone overboard is this small circular picture of the Atacama desert. At this point also, I needed a second device — in my case another phone, and used this odd feature of Instagram that I think was originally created so that you could take funny selfies of your face and put them all over your stories. Turning one phone’s selfie camera toward the other phone’s screen I managed to have this nice image included in the stories! (Instead of a second device of course any printed image or our own face works just as fine).
The following slides were pretty much just using the same quick tricks as before with more emojis, highlights and text. I figured however, I still had all those really cool South America pictures on my phone and I also wanted to make the slides a bit more personal so I started making slides that have my own pictures as their background. And one of the coolest Instagram stories features that helps making things very visually appealing is being able to pick colors from the image and apply them to your text, like on this slide.
I could keep explaining how I used the various insta story features to get creative with the presentation, but I think you get the point. Once I was done I just dragged the pictures into a google slide deck on my phone, but you could also really just keep them as pictures.
I am not saying that the process is prefect and of course it has many limitations. But with a bit of creativity we can actually create visually appealing and consistent slides very quickly on our phone! The reduced options in terms of fonts and no pre-set slide outlines made me focus much more on the visual storytelling. After all what are slides for? In my case they were needed to assist my storytelling with visuals and help me in having a nice flow (hence the numbers on the slides, I’m not expecting myself to actually remember those).
Like it? Not? One thing for sure, the slides were perfect for the purpose of my presentation. So next time you notice yourself spending 30 minutes on an opening slide maybe consider limiting your options and speeding up the process. And the best part? You could do it on the go.
Isn’t it impressive how much we can do with our phones?
