Animation

“We need to animate that!”

The audience does not see the difference between 4 consecutive slides with different images, or 1 slides with 4 consecutive image build up, so there is no point in trying to cut slides by consolidating 4 images into one. Four slides are easier to edit, and four separate slides are easier to email as PDF.

European borders time lapse

This video shows how the political map of Europe has changed in 1,000 years. There is a lot of information packed in here, but the only one that gets across is: “lots of things have changed”. To bring more information to the surface, you need to slow down the pace, and add…

The wow intro

Bombastic animated introductions are often used to promote movies, and some people might think they make spectacular product presentations. However, I think that a 3D animated product name with loud music does not make a good connection with the audience.

Uncovering

When you need a complex animation, it is often easier to uncover objects by removing a white box than build up a shape step by step, especially if the shape includes a data graph (columns, lines, bars).

Uncover versus popup

I am not a big fan of animation, spectacular effects do not support a serious business message and documents with animations do not convert well to PDF for emailing.



Sometimes there is no escaping though, especially when you need to explain components of a complex system. The best way to…

A cinematic presentation opening

Motion graphics: Stuxnet virus explained

Demo slide sequence versus demo video

I get this question a lot when designing presentations for technology startups: “Hey, can you embed our demo video into the presentation?” I almost always try to avoid this:

• Embedding videos always triggers Murphy’s law: on-stage…