Thoughts When a Car Alarm Goes Off

Here’s a Monday morning funny, courtesy of GraphJam:

Laptop Battery Life

GraphJam is a humorous web site where people upload funny visual aids. For example, how long does the battery in your laptop last?

Add Some Polish to That Presentation

Check out a great before and after shot of a set of PowerPoint slides. The number of slides barely changed, but right from the beginning, you can see how awesome and eye-catching the second presentation is going to be.

Before:

After:

Hat tip to Olivia Mitchell.

Authors@Google: Garr Reynolds

If you have an hour or so over your lunch today, you should watch this presentation from Garr Reynolds. This is what a great integration of public speaking and visual slides looks like.

Why Simpler Slides Win

A simpler interface is easier to use, so it stands to reason that a simpler PowerPoint slide is easier to understand as well:

Hat tip to Tony Ramos.

An Interesting Visual Aid

Jex Condom sales in Japan:

I’m not sure whether to be appalled by the creativity or applaud the creativity.

Tip (so to speak) to Garr Reynolds.

Breakfast of Champions

Here’s a chart that offers a funny take on the usage of the Wheaties slogan “breakfast of champions”.

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

We discussed this rule last week in class, but here is an explanation from Guy Kawasaki himself.

Don’t be a bozo.

Four Things You Cannot Recover

Randy Alcorn posted this great set of pictures on his blog that are a great devotional and an example of great design. Look how simple the pictures are, yet communicate so much, and notice how the black-and-white half-and-half look separate each half of each quote.

The Difference Between Art and Design

A great article from the Web Designer’s Depot on how design works in a way that seems less like you’re being artistic (because some people may feel that they are not artistic at all and may settle on creating bland slides) and more like you’re communicating visually with your audience (which anyone can really do with a little thought and effort).

The magic of this is really not magic at all. You can come up with slides that look just like these if you think ahead of time what you want to say, how long your audience is going to look at it, and what the real message you’re trying to communicate is.