How to make frosted glass in PowerPoint

Follow these simple steps:

1. Apply the “blur” photo filter to your background image
2. Create a very light grey box
3. Add 45% transparency

How to clean up PowerPoint slides

I sometimes help out clients to clean up a very large presentation. Incorrect PowerPoint use…

Columns versus rows and other table design issues

When making a table, what to put in columns, what to put in rows? There is no absolute rule here, but this is what I consider when deciding (some of these can contradict each other).

• It easier to fit lots of rows then…

SlideMagic versus PowerPoint

Some interesting feedback from SlideMagic beta testers:

• I promised some SlideMagic beta testers to convert the presentation to PowerPoint in the end (there is not yet an automated feature that does that), and it is encouraging to see that these users…

Calibri light

It has been years since I have worked on Windows machines, and given that they do not have Helvetica installed, I would still prefer design most of my presentations in Arial over Calibri, the current default Microsoft Office font on my Mac.

Image captions

What do people read in text? Big headlines (if there are not too many of them), and tiny captions under a photo. So watch out what you put right under the image, people might read before the other beautiful things you have written down.

Images from museum collections

Step by step, museums are putting their entire collection of paintings online. These archives make for a great source of images: consistent in style, without copyright issues (if you go back sufficiently far in time). You won’t find stock images of smartphones though, but…

How to write a good cover email pitch

Cover emails that introduce a presentation are very important. It is the first thing the recipients sees. And given that more and more emails are read on smartphones that are not very good at handling attachments (still), they have become more important.

Learning from Swiss graphic designers

Most presentation design software today is the result of someone in the 1980s thinking: “hey, this mouse is cool, you can use it to draw things!”. We can move, drag, stretch, place things freely across our drawing canvas.