Presentations have never had it so good. Once a stagnant medium for communicating with captive audiences, they are now freely shared and broadly consumed on blogs, twitter, email, and even sites similar to YouTube that host millions of presentations. Why the surge in sharing? The reason is simple: Presentation programs have been rewired, reinvented, and set free.

Presentation Programs ‘Before’

In years past, even as the number of PowerPoint users has swelled to the hundreds of millions, presentations have been tightly bound by the inherent limits of PowerPoint. (more…)

Perhaps you’ve been lulled to sleep by PowerPoint. Perhaps you’re feeling PowerPoint 2010 wasn’t fundamentally different from PowerPoint 2007 (or PowerPoint 2003 for that matter). Perhaps you have a right to demand a fresh approach to presentations!

Truth is, hundreds of thousands of people have shunned PowerPoint and opted for greener pastures. And as it turns out, people have found the online presentation pasture to be the most lush! (more…)

There’s no doubt Fotolia is a great source of stock images for business presentations. But even with such beautiful stock photos to choose from, or perhaps because there are so many, it can be overwhelming to find the best business image for your slide presentation design.

Here are, in our estimation, the top new images posted to Fotolia in the last month under the theme of “motion”. (more…)

Emailing a PowerPoint presentation seems like it should be a simple thing. But all the slide design stock images, video and audio that can make a PowerPoint compelling are the very things that make emailing PowerPoint slideshows so clumsy. Those assets quickly balloon a PowerPoint’s file size, which is where the trouble begins.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have the presentation online? This way when you email the presentation you’re just sending a link. How easy is that? Try SlideRocket for free and find out.

Emailing a PowerPoint – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Emailing anything but a basic PowerPoint requires a fair amount of preparation, communication and wizardry. But everything should go as planned so long as the following criteria are met:

1. Your recipient has PowerPoint or PowerPoint Viewer
2. You properly embedded any audio files in the correct folder
3. You properly embedded any video files in the correct folder (more…)

Because it takes time to find great stock artwork for your presentations, it’s a shame not to invest 10 more minutes to lend some edginess to your images. By playing around with contrast, saturation, hue and brightness you can add more emotion to your stock images to elevate your presentation design.

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Fonts are a subtle and surprisingly easy way to set your slide design apart from the crowd. It’s easy because you only have to choose a font once and you reap the rewards on every slide.

Font Squirrel is an excellent place to start looking for the best presentation font for you. For one thing it’s free. But there is a lot of talent on the site, and we’ve picked out 4 fonts that really caught our eye. Read about them below and see them in action in the SlideRocket presentation. We picked a Museo 300, ChunkFive, Aller and a District Thin font. These are all excellent and we definitely recommend them for your next presentation.

We also spent an equal amount of time on the sites of the font designers to make sure they had the design chops and character to back-up their fonts. They all do.

Quick Presentation Font Primer

Remarkable fonts make a good slide design element in their own right, and focus attention on your message. But make sure you stick to solid design principles when choosing. (more…)

Microsoft has with each new version of PowerPoint made it progressively less painful to embed a YouTube video. But loading a PowerPoint to a website, blog, or other online site (much less emailing it to someone) is exhausting. YouTube and desktop software do not make a happy marriage.

So, put down the PowerPoint widget, converter, compressor, or whatever it is you’re using to try and salvage your project to insert a YouTube into PowerPoint. Sign-up for a free trial of SlideRocket and take your YouTube video to a much happier place. (more…)

No matter how hard you try, the content of your presentation will sometimes be dry and boring.  And, it can be quite a challenge to keep your audience interested and engaged while you’re flipping through one slide, chart, or graph after another.  Sometimes, even pictures and videos aren’t enough to spice things up.

Everyone loves to laugh.

That’s why more and more presenters are seeking ways to add humor to their presentations.  Everyone loves to laugh, and nothing will grab the undivided attention of your audience more than something that makes them smile or chuckle.

What can you to do make your slide deck or speech more amusing?

1.  Set the Tone
Start your presentation off on a light-hearted note.  Give your audience a big smile, and let them know that you want them to not only learn, but to enjoy themselves as well.  They’ll immediately relax and take notice.  But be careful, experts warn that it may not be wise to open with a joke.  If it bombs, the rest of your session will suffer.

2. 101funjokes (www.101funjokes.com)
If you need a good joke, this is the place to go.  Dozens of categories – from jokes about celebrities, the Internet, kids, and the medical profession, to funny bumper stickers, limericks, quotes, and witticisms – make it easy to find whatever you need to incorporate some fun into your slide deck and give your audience a good giggle.

3.  Humor Writers
Let’s face it, some people lack a “funny bone”.  If you are one of those unfortunate souls, you may want to hire a professional writer to help incorporate humor into your slide deck.  They’ll be able to take your existing content, and make it more chuckle-worthy.  Check out the Comedy Writers Guild (http://www.comedywritersguild.com), or conduct a search on Google, Yahoo, or other popular search engine to find one in your area.

4.  Comedy Coaches
Comedy is about more than just “scripting” jokes and quips.  Delivery is also very important when you want to get the laughs.  Check out your local comedy clubs or theater groups.  Most of them will offer classes to help improve your comedic timing and execution.   Or, you can check your Yellow Pages for private comedy coaches who will work with you one-on-one.

5. Learn from Professional Comedians
Many professional comedians measure their success by evaluating one important metric – laughs per minute (LPM).  As you gain more experience adding humor to your sessions, you may want to use this indicator to gauge how effective you are.  How many LPMs should you strive for?  That depends on your content.  Some presentations may warrant several LPMs, while others that are more serious in nature may require just a handful of giggles throughout the entire slide deck to lighten the mood.

This is the continuation in a series of Incredible resources for presentations. If you have an idea for incredible resources or want to add one of your own just add a comment below this post. See the whole incredible presentations series here.

Find more great tips and resources at the Presentation Skills Launch Pad.

We all want to tell an engaging story and captivate our audience with stunning slides. But it’s not always an easy thing to do, which is why we’re providing a free guide to creative presentation resources. Use these to get inspired, liven-up your presentation technique, and create fantastic visuals. Tell us about your favorite source for presentation help and we’ll include them in future editions!

Creative Stories and Anecdotes

Nothing will help your audience relate to you and your message more than stories and anecdotes. But sometimes it’s a challenge to find ones that relate to your topic and draw your audience in. Here are some creative presentation resources for developing anecdotes:

Awesome Stories – countless fictional and non-fictional stories in a variety of categories such as famous trials, biographies, movies, history, religion, and sports.

Anecdotage.Com – home to the largest collection of celebrity anecdotes and quotes on the Internet.

Story Arts – an educational Web site with stories to enhance speaking and facilitate improved listening.

Choosing Your Method

Many presenters, particularly novices, struggle to find a presentation style that works best for them. Use the methodology of these leaders as a presentation resource – Incredible Presentations – Presentation Methods. If you’re short on time, here is a summary of the 5 creative presentation methods:

The Takahashi Method calls for simplicity resulting in clarity and attention to the speaker—the use of very large type and few words, or a single image or photo with no accompanying words.

The Lessig Method calls for multiple slides (even hundreds)—each with only a brief quote, a short sentence—delivered in rapid-fire pace to prevent the audience from growing bored.

The Godin Method focuses on selecting striking accompanying visuals to enhance messages appropriately.

The Monta Method emulates the game show style of posing questions and hiding answers to build audience participation and engagement.

Visually Awesome Fonts

Tired of Arial, Times New Roman, and other boring, over-used type styles? Here’s a variety of Web sites and other helpful presentation resources devoted to the creation, sharing, distribution, and use of unique, visually appealing fonts.

Free Internet fonts at Dafont with over 10,000 free fonts matching themes and celebrating holidays; and 1001 Free Fonts is a primary source of free new fonts with more than 30,000 commercial fonts.

Fee-based Font Sites

1. Adobe Type Library
2. Bitstream
3. MyFonts
4. Ascender Corporation
5. FontMarketplace
6. FontSelector

Get the full scoop on fonts from this blog post: Incredible Presentations – Awesome Font Resources

Amazing Video

Many presenters look to audio to enhance their visuals and stimulate the senses. Music and a variety of sounds can help make a presentation memorable. Here are some great presentation resources for adding audio.

• Musicshake – allows users to easily create their own music clips using more than 80,000 copyright-free samples.
• Royalty-Free – other royalty-free audio presentation resources offering a wide variety of music and other audio include Royalty-Free Music, Presentation Magazine, Audio Micro, and Sound Ideas.
• Make Your Own Audio – create your own unique sound using any of several software apps, including Sony, Adobe Soundbooth, Dexster Audio Editor, FX Audio Editor, or Acoustica, which all run about $40 to $60 each. For studio quality sound, try Adobe Audition or Sony Vegas Pro which will cost you several hundred dollars. For free audio programs, try Aviary’s Myna, Audacity or Wavosaur.

Find more audio presentation resources at Incredible Presentations – 5 Amazing Audio Resources.

Getting Inspired

Visual communications, especially presentations, are an opportunity to distill complex information into digestible pieces. Here’s a collection of visual communication blogs to inspire your next great presentation.

Vision Jar – Johanna Rehnvall has a heck of a design eye and a knack for spotting innovative trends.

Duarte Blog – The best collection of storytelling and business communication tips out there.

Note and Point – If you are a presentation designer, you’ve got to check this site every day. The cream of the crop from the presentation world.

Presentation Zen – Garr Reynolds dishes out practical advice so that you can realize your presentation idea in its most beautiful form.

This is Indexed – When standard graphs, venn diagrams, and metaphors just won’t do, this delightful and witty collection of infographics is sure to inspire.

Presentation Tips

And finally, here are helpful presentation resources to leverage when it’s time to give a presentation. Use these to tailor your presentation to specific audiences:

Learn how to produce effective presentations for top management

Find out how to present to venture capitalists and other investors

How to give an amazing product demonstration

Find more great tips and resources at the Slide Design Launch Pad.

In August, Google CEO Eric Schmidt famously said that every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. Visual communications, especially presentations, are an opportunity to distill complex information into digestible pieces. Here’s a collection of visual communication blogs to inspire your next great presentation.

Visual communicators use metaphor, symbols, and graphics to simplify complex information.

1. Vision Jar
Johanna Rehnvall shares new directions in presentation design in this excellent blog – rich with resources and thoughtful posts. She’s got a heck of a design eye and a knack for spotting innovative trends.

2. Duarte Blog
The best collection of storytelling and business communication tips out there. Nancy Duarte’s team covers everything from Great Moments in Presentation History to How to Spread Your Talk.

3. Note and Point
If you are a presentation designer, you’ve got to check this site every day. Note and Point posts the cream of the crop from the presentation world. Their mission? “Filling the gaping void of inspiration for those of us who use projectors.”

4. Presentation Zen
Garr Reynolds is the presentation sensei, the patriarch of Presentation Zen. Garr dishes out practical advice so that you can realize your presentation idea in its most beautiful form. Also check out his posterous. Ah, my work is done.

5. This is Indexed
When your standard graphs, venn diagrams, and metaphors just won’t do, this delightful and witty collection of infographics is sure to inspire.

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