For the last few weeks we've been commuting back and forth to Austin working with a new and very exciting Client, GradLaunch USA. GradLaunch prides themselves in preparing and polishing soon to be or recent college grads for rewarding careers they actually enjoy. We've been working with them on all production pieces of their three hour Springboard Experience Seminar. Taking our advice GradLaunch bought a new MacBook and Keynote 08' and we've been busy producing an amazing presentation that uses every ounce of Keynote 08's new power. The presentation is not quite finished but for a peek at the animated intro we created click HERE.

We were happy to see a great review of the presentationjunkie.com web site over at Website Design Reviews. They do a great and very thorough job of dissecting site design and construction. To check out the presentationjunkie.com review as well as many others click HERE.

We bought the new Apple keyboards for the office today and the first thing you'll notice is that they are paper thin and much easier to type with than a PC keyboard or even the old Apple keyboard not to mention they look cool. But upon further inspection we noticed Apple decided to remove the 'apple' or 'open apple' from the keyboard and replace it with the very foreign word 'command.' Not sure why the change but we sure will miss our little apple key.

Tags: Apple

Today we finished up a small presentation for Harland Clarke, formerly Clarke American. The assignment was to sync a series of very encouraging and uplifting slides to some great music for a large corporate meeting. It was a quick assignment for us but of great importance to them.

Today we finished up and a very cool presentation for HOLT CAT, the worlds largest Caterpillar dealer. They have a series of presentations for which we conceptualized and produced a 3D animated character named 'Benjamin' in honor of Benjamin Holt the founder of Caterpillar and inventor of the first track-type tractor. Benjamin will be used as a virtual spokes 'person' in future presentations. He started as a sketch and grew into a fully animated 3D character, to check out his progress, the animations and the awesome presentation template we created, click HERE.

Given that Keynote is a staple of our business and our favorite tool we were at our local Apple Store this morning to buy iWork 08'. There were several changes and updates we were very interested to see and most of our expectations were met. Apple boasts new text effect and transitions, Instant Alpha, Smart Builds and A to B animations. All amazing we have to admit, but the most useful to us and our favorite additions are Smart Builds and A to B animations. We have been generating these types of effects the hard way with iWork 07'. These two new automated features will really improve our workflow and help wow customers even more. Two things missing we'd like to see in the future; ability to customize the background color during transitions to match our designs and utilize existing page images or groups with Smart Builds. All in all the new Keynote 08' is an A+ and remains our favorite tool.

Today we finished up an awesome presentation for Pfizer's New York office. The assignment called for a custom design which we mentioned in our blog posting from yesterday but it also included two custom 3D animations. In the animations we show an obese human and dog on a rapid slim down - it was a fun project and we hope it serves them well. Click HERE to watch QuickTimes of the presentation animations.

Unless a Client has very strict brand guidelines narrowing down a color scheme for their presentation can be difficult. There are a few color pickers out there but we really like Color Schemer Gallery. The website allows you to scan hundreds of existing color schemes for free. They also sell Color Schemer Studio for Mac and PC that allow you build your own color schemes using their color wheel, color harmonies and even a new feature called PhotoSchemer that allows you to build unique color schemes based on any picture or image.

We used their free Widget for Mac OSX to find a color scheme for our latest presentation. We sent several schemes for the Client to choose from and ultimately they selected tea towel. The great thing about the widget is that it provides dexahecimal values which is handy if you find your self doing work in Illustrator or Photoshop.

A snapshot of the widget in action - you can see how the the color scheme turned into a nicely designed presentation for Pfizer.

Tags: presentation tips

'Can't you just get the logo from their website?' A question many of us hear daily as we prepare presentations, particularly sales presentations being presented to companies rather than individuals. Its always a nice touch to ad a company logo to your cover slide or any slide where they're mentioned but re-creating logos in Photoshop or Illustrator can be time consuming. What can you do aside from using the pixelated version you lifted from their home page?

Brandsoftheworld.com is a great resource for obtaining logos of most major brands. The primary use of the site is to enable designers to access vector-forms of the well-known brand-logos that they can use in their presentations.

Tags: presentation tips

One of our favorite products for daily use is Desktopple from Foggynoggin. It's great for people who make a lot of presentations or who take a lot of screen shots, like us.

There is nothing worse than a presenter who hooks up to a projector only to show the audience his cluttered desktop. With Desktopple you can quickly and easily hide all of your desktop clutter with the touch of a key. What's better, you don't loose your desktop files, they are simply hidden from public view.

There are two versions of Desktopple; a very functional free download and Desktopple Pro that provides many extra features.

Here you can see a huge difference in one of our monitors with the touch of a key.
Before & After:

NOTE: Desktopple runs on Mac only. If you are on a PC and have found a similar software let us know!

Tags: presentation tips

PowerPoint turned 20 years old yesterday! Although a standard of the Microsoft Office Suite, PowerPoint was originally authored for the Mac by Bob Gaskins and Dennis Ausin of Forethought in 1987. Later that year PowerPoint was sold to Microsoft for $14M, creating what we all now know as Microsoft Office PowerPoint.

The Wall Street Journal covered the story including an interview with both Gaskins and Austin.
Wikipedia.com also has a nice history.

Tags: powerpoint, Bob Gaskins, Dennis Austin

We receive a few calls a week asking for our advice on what to do when Clients or Potential Clients do not have Microsoft PowerPoint. Short of buying them a copy of PowerPoint, how do you get that presentation to open up on their machine? In most cases the answer and fix is quite simple; Microsoft has made available PowerPoint Viewer as a free download. The free software allows you to view full-featured presentations created in PowerPoint, it also allows you to password protect and print them, you however, cannot edit them.

There are several versions currently available, please check the System Requirements to see which one is right for you and your client:
PowerPoint Viewer 2003 (PC)
PowerPoint Viewer 2007 (PC)

Mac Users:
Mactopia does have PowerPoint Viewer 98 (Mac) available but it requires you are running Classic which makes it absolutely useless. If your Client is running Mac OSX and has Keynote, they can easily open your PowerPoint presentations with this software.

Other handy Microsoft Viewers:
MS Word Viewer 2003 (PC)
MS Excel Viewer 2003 (PC)

Tags: powerpoint tips, powerpoint viewer

After a few months of intense work our site is finally up! It has been fun developing an entirely new brand; logo, icons, content and now the website. It is nice to have a place to call home where we can showcase our many great projects and our expertise with all things PowerPoint, Keynote & Flash. Many thanks to the great people involved; Cesar Proa, Adriana Garcia, xhtmlslicer.com, Josh Lockhart & redGizmo.

Tags: junkie news

We received a very nice letter in the mail today, LionForce had some very kind words and we just wanted to share! Click HERE to read...

Our latest project was was to prepare LionForce Building Systems for the National AIA Convention in San Antonio, Texas. With only a week and a half we certainly had our work cut out for us. The assignment was to write a short but comprehensive script and animate their building process in 3D. LionForce uses EPS or Expanded Polystyrene (it's Styrofoam but they can't say it because it's trademarked) to build affordable and green homes. We completed several different presentations; a presentation to be played via DVD on a plasma screen (16:9 HD) hung in their booth, a new product presentation designed to drive traffic to their main booth and an auto-run Flash CD that was handed out to visitors at their booth. We also produced an animated logo treatment and provided them with an iPod compatible copy of the presentation for a meeting the next week in NYC.
It was a fun project but to fulfill all of the Clients needs we used several different applications:
● 3D Studio Max 9
● Adobe After Effects
● Flash
● Keynote
Click HERE to check out their presentation!

Tags: new project, 3D max

The junkie blog is up and running! Here we'll be talking about our latest projects, tips & tricks with MS PowerPoint, Apple's Keynote and Adobe's Flash and our favorite - new technology. And just maybe the random thought will creep in from time to time.

Tags: junkie news