Making slides
Steve Lawson, in a comment about my STM Innovations slides: “*thinks ‘jeez, these are beautiful slides’”.
It’s not me. It’s the tools. And the Creative Commons.
I build presentations with Apple Keynote these days. It’s such an awesome tool it even makes me look good, and I am a completely worthless designer. Want to know something weird? I regularly export my Keynote presentations to PowerPoint, just in case something goes kaboom at the presentation site such that I can’t use Nova the PowerBook. The resulting presentations invariably look worse in PowerPoint than in Keynote. Mostly, it’s not translation glitches (although PowerPoint can mangle line spacing); it’s subtle details of font appearance. Keynote gets them right. PowerPoint gets them wrong.
(That said, I wish Keynote would adjust line spacing and font size automagically to fit stuff on slides the way PowerPoint will. But one can’t have everything.)
I get most of the images I use in my presentations from Flickr, via their Creative Commons tools. I restrict myself to the “By” license, because my presentations are a derivative work (especially given that I often alter images), and I don’t want to fall afoul of a use that might be judged commercial (if I get an honorarium for a talk, for example). Believe me, that still leaves plenty to play with!
(I get other images from NASA: the glory of free-to-reuse government data! I also reuse images created by my work colleagues, because I’m lazy that way. If you see an uncredited picture that isn’t from NASA, that’s probably where it came from.)
Most of the image alteration and text rotation I do from within Keynote itself. This isn’t as intuitive as fondly supposed by some Mac devotees, so here are some of my favorite tricks:
- To rotate an image, bring up its Inspector, go to the little ruler tab, and spin the “Rotate” spin-wheel.
- To make an image partly transparent, bring up its Inspector, go to the tab with the green circle on the gray square (you see why I say this isn’t intuitive?), and move the “Opacity” slider.
- To darken an image (or sepia-tone it, or any number of other tricks), click on the little black “Adjust” box and have at it. For my background images, I usually go to 40-60% opacity first, and then darken or alter tone as need be. Takes a little fiddling, but it works. (Why isn’t there an opacity slider on the Adjust screen? Got me. Because that would make too much sense?)
- To rotate text, it must be in a Keynote text box first; you can’t rotate normal bullet-point boxes in Keynote. (I’ve tried!) To create a text box, select Text from the Insert menu. To rotate it, bring up its Inspector, go to the little ruler tab, and spin the “Rotate” spin-wheel. (It is possible to add bullets to text in text boxes to make counterfeit bullet-point boxes, and also to remove bullet points from text in bullet-point boxes; go to the T tab in the Inspector, and select the “Bullet” page.)
- Write your text before you adjust its color. Trust me on this one.
Bare-bones Keynote presentations default to Gill Sans for a reason; it’s an inordinately pretty display font. I’m starting to itch to move away from it, though, because too many Keynoters are using it. Your mileage may vary.