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