RemarkablyCreative.com

Virtually Boring

How do you make a bad Powerpoint presentation worse? Give it in Second Life.

Yesterday, I attended a seminar held in Second Life. Our host greeted us, walked us across the virtual boardroom to a virtual screen, and then cranked up her virtual PowerPoint slideshow.

Dozens of bullets per slide. Tiny, tiny fonts. Unreadable charts. Worse, all of these design mistakes were actually amplified by the Second Life environment. Slides that are unreadable when projected at full screen are even MORE unreadable when projected on a virtual screen within that screen.

About half-way through the program -- a presentation extolling the virtues of virtual meetings in Second Life -- the audio stutter became so bad, the presenter gave up, turned off the microphone, and dialed her audio in via speakerphone. Worse, when one of the presenters tried to "teleport" into the room to greet us, she arrived about six seconds before her clothes did.

Six seconds is a long time to stand naked in front of thirty executives, even if you're just an avatar.

It makes me a little sad, frankly, that, given all the theoretical potential of a virtual environment, the first impulse of business people is to recreate the kinds of spaces -- and the kinds of presentations -- that all of us would prefer to avoid in the real world.

Fresh - Simple "For the Moment" File Organization

I download programs often. And just about as often, I find myself scrambling to open Safari's download window ... or struggling to find recently-saved email attachments ... or just flinging everything onto my desktop, which, after an hour or two, starts to look like a drawer full of postage stamps.

Fresh looks like an interesting solution to my inclination toward digital clutter. Newly downloaded, created, or modified files appear in a pop-up "Fresh list." In addition, there's a Cooler -- a sort of shelf -- where I can drag files I'd like to keep handy.

Fast, colorful, visual, simple. Fresh. I like it.

From Ironic Software: [Link]

Images, Inspiration from Compfight.com

Compfight makes keyword searches of Flickr photos faster, easier, and more efficient. Enter a search phrase, click the Search button ... and bam!! You'll get dozens of thumbnails, many leading to Creative Commons-licensed images you can use freely (as long as you give the creator some credit). 

Research and Creativity

From Steven Johnson's boingboing.net post, "How to Write a Book":

The first stage, which is crucial, is a completely disorganized capture of every little snippet of text that seems vaguely interesting. I grab paragraphs from web pages, from digital books, and transcribe pages from printed text ... with no organization other than a citation of where it came from...

And so in the last stage before I actually start writing ... I sit down and read through every single little snippet that I've uncovered ... and as I'm reading them on the screen, I just drag them into the chapter folder where I think they will be most useful ... 

I have a completely new contextual experience of them, because I'm at the end of the research cycle, not at the beginning. They feel like pieces of a puzzle that's coming together, instead of hints or hunches.

Yes, yes, yes. My own creative process -- whether writing books or piecing together multimedia presentations -- involves three steps:

1) snag everything even remotely interesting

2) go through the big pile, sorting stuff that feels related into smaller piles

3) wait for a pattern to emerge.

Logo of the Day

Logomania has set in at The Company, where almost every individual, team, committee, and department is clamoring for logos, logos, logos!

I'm working on a post about my own logo design process ... but until that's finished, you might make a visit to Logo of The Day for some inspiration. Scrolling through past winners is sure to give you some ideas .. and, perhaps, prompt that critical "Ah Ha!" moment that will help you produce a stunning logo or two of your own.

Remember your goal, though. If the point of all this is to actually make a logo, set a time limit for browsing -- no more than fifteen minutes or so -- and then get right back to the drawing board. 

Dazzling Zero-Effort Slideshows with Animoto

In a nutshell: Animoto.com generates slick, eye-catching slideshows edited to match the pace and tone of music you select. The result isn't always perfect -- but any service that delivers this much dazzle for this little effort deserves a place in the creative worker's bag of tricks! Sign up using discount code huvtxyne, and you'll get five bucks off.

The End of Slideshows?
There are dozens of software titles out there capable of converting your photos into a slideshow. With a click of a mouse, you can add music. Another click, and the "Ken Burns effect" will set your photos into motion. Dressed up with some lively music and eye-catching animation, even your Uncle Ed's fuzzy vacation photos can seem to tell a story.

Automatically generated slideshows are convenient, but they have their limitations. Because the software doesn't know what's in the picture, it may pan away from the focal point of the photo or -- worse -- zoom in for a close-up of the wart on Aunt Edna's nose. A poorly chosen soundtrack can transform bland slides into a truly disturbing multimedia experience.

And -- until now -- the number one problem with automatically generated slideshows has been this: due to their limited set of transitions and their dreamy pace, they all tend to look alike.

That's where Animoto.com comes in.

Together 2.2 Update Released

Reinvented Software released Together 2.2 today, adding great new functionality to one of my favorite tools.

Together is my personal digital "cabinet of wonders" -- a secure storage space for everything from random scraps of information to archived copies of completed projects. There's no end to what I can stick in there: photos of books I want to read, titles of movies I want to rent, PDFs of web pages I want to read later, links to intriguing blog posts, logos I've completed in Vector Designer, slideshows I've created in Keynote, video clips, banners -- you name it.

Larry Lessig's Dazzling Visual Presentations

I've seen great presentations ruined by bad presenters ... and bad presentations saved by good presenters ... but here's one of those rare moments when a great presentation gets paired with a great presenter:

The fireworks start about forty-five seconds into the clip. I love the speed of the presentation -- the rapid-fire flow of ideas and images -- but also the way Larry Lessig uses bold, screen-dominating images to identify and reinforce key information.

This approach simply isn't possible when a presenter:

a) wants someone else to advance her slides for her

b) doesn't know the material well

c) is imprisoned by a bullet-point mentality

d) thinks people actually want a hundred-page print out of the presentation to take home.

Insight: an effective presentation -- one that makes great use of the medium's ability to capture attention by catching the eye -- simply can't be replicated on a printed page.

Creating Documentation the Easy Way with ScreenSteps

When I started my career, I did a lot of high-speed documentation creation. It wasn't uncommon, in fact, for my unscrupulous boss to advertise software classes, wait to see how many people would sign up, buy the software on a Wednesday, give it to me Wednesday night, and expect me to deliver a customized, fully-illustrated manual (and teach from it!) on Thursday morning.

Yesterday, I sat down to create yet another user manual -- this time, for a multi-million dollar videoconferencing system that, remarkably, seems to have been sold to The Company without so much as an instruction book.

I admit I've been procrastinating a bit, mostly because I dreaded doing all the cutting, pasting, and writing associated with this particular project. But thanks to a remarkable new tool -- ScreenSteps -- I was able to create an attractive, comprehensive fifty-two page instruction manual ... with full-color screenshots and step-by-step procedures ... in less than five hours.*

My Creative Software Toolkit

Here’s a quick peek into my creative software toolkit: the programs I depend on all day, every day, to turn around jaw-dropping multimedia … in record time … and on a budget, no less!

Presentation Software

Keynote. Everything PowerPoint can do, Keynote does better … but Keynote is far, far more than Apple’s answer to PowerPoint. The included templates are more elegant than any I’ve ever seen for the Microsoft product. Slide to slide transitions are brilliant, eye-catching, and smooth as glass. Almost every day, I use Keynote animation and effects features to produce jaw-dropping mini-movies that would once have required a film crew and a dedicated computer workstation to produce. Oh -- and it never, ever crashes. Nirvana! (Apple, part of the iWork suite, $67.99 at Amazon.com)