Presentation Tools 1: Fontsquirrel

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I love a good presentation. I think they're often the best way to communicate information, and I create them as stand-alone online objects as well as for actual talks to an audience. So it's Presentation Tools Week on the blog - seven different useful tools from the list below, explored over the next five days.

These fall into two broad categories: tools for creating presentations from scratch, and tools for making PowerPoint presentations better in some way

When I began giving presentations 5 years ago, I remember looking at Bobbi Newman's, Buffy Hamilton's and Helene Blowers' Slideshare accounts and being amazed that slides could look so beautiful. My horizons were truly expanded; previously every PPT I'd seen had been functional, boring, and (as I later learned) ineffective as a communication method. I learned by trying to expose my brain to as many great ways of putting together a PowerPoint presentation as possible, and trying things out to see what worked for me.

These days things are a lot easier, as there are several helpful tools which assist you in creating effective and pretty slides. Some of them do a lot of the work for you, and some of you provide a helping hand for specific elements of a presentation. I've summarised the 7 tools I think Past Me would have found most useful. Hopefully if you're reading this you can take something from one or more of these platforms too.

Tomorrow we'll look at an alternative to PowerPoint, but for now we'll look at working with it, using non-standard fonts. It took me a long time to realise just how important fonts were to a good presentation.

FONTSQUIRREL (fontsquirrel.com)

FontSquirrel is a website full of downloadable fonts, and I use it ALL the time - it's the first port of call for non-standard fonts. I think using new fonts which we're not all over-saturated with from the Office suite can make a HUGE difference to how good a presentation or poster looks, and everything on FontSquirrel is free even for commercial use.

Examples from FontSquirrel

I use Megalopolis Extra in loads of presentations, along with Aller, Caviar Dreams, ChunkFive Roman, Quicksand Book, and Pacifico. You need admin permissions to install fonts on your PC, so if you can't have that permanently at work, try and get it for a couple of hours, go onto FontSquirrel, and go mad downloading interesting fonts. Once you install them they install across the Office Suite, so you can use them in Word as well. Try it!

(NB: An alternative to FontSquirrel is DaFont, which I've heard people recommend, but I can't vouch for it as I've never used it myself.)

Remember to save your PPT as a PDF when using non-standard fonts! Otherwise when you come to present on a different PC without the fonts installed, it will almost certainly go horribly wrong.

Some guidance around fonts - generally it is thought that you should use a maximum of 3 fonts per presentation (although as with all 'rules' around presenting, feel free to break this one if you have a good reason), and my personal minimum font size is 36 for slides.

Font-pairing is an art I feel like I've not mastered at all, but would like to - I found the following (albeit very brief) presentation helpful:

The Ultimate Guide to Font Pairing from Guy Kawasaki

Import your floorplans into Prezi to create an interactive map

A couple of years ago I wrote about some interactive maps we'd made of the Library, which we used for induction and teaching - they went down very well. The students are much more engaged by a slick Prezi than a tired PowerPoint, and it's also very practical to have information about the library geographically located in a map, rather than in linear slides. So the maps worked really well as stand-alone web objects to be viewed independently by students and staff, as well as actual materials for live presentations and workshops. You can read the post - Student Induction, Libraries, Prezi, and Interactive Maps - here; it also contains an embedded Prezi map, with which to compare the new version I've created below.

In 2012 we tried to improve the maps a little, including embedded a lot of videos in them - things like the virtual tour, but also information at the point of need, for example '1 minute on... how to photocopy and scan' next to where the printer/scanners are on the map.

This year, we did something I've wanted to do from the start, which is import floor plans to Prezi and create the maps based on those. Previously we simply didn't have good enough floor-plans in a format I could use - hence having an outline of the Library buildings (drawn by someone in the Digital Library team), somewhat awkwardly divided up by me using lines and boxes. Now though, we have a MUCH better interactive map, the basis of which is an imported PDF of our floor plans.

Here is the generic map we display on our Info for New Students page (as always I'd recommend going into Full-Screen mode to view this - press the Start Prezi button then once it loads, click the box icon in the bottom-right corner):

We experimented with various ways of representing the different floors: separate maps for each floor, or one map but with box-outs containing the other floors, for example. In the end we opted for making the ground floor plan of the overall building take up most of each ground floor, but with the other floors contained within the same space. (That doesn't make much sense; you'll see what I mean if you look at the map.)

Unexpected benefits

Once again the response from the students was really good. Quite a lot of our induction talks happen as part of wider introductions to the course, from academics, the Student Union, Careers office etc - just the fact that we aren't using PPT and they all are makes the students sit up and take notice. They've often not seen Prezi before so are impressed by the ability to zoom in on different parts of the Library and talk about them. It really does have more impact, and make people more aware of what you're saying about the Library, than a PowerPoint presentation. (And I say that as someone who still likes and uses PPT a lot, including for a lot of teaching.)

That is the expected benefit of using Prezi, but each year another benefit that occurs is the map instigates conversations with the academics. People from the Departments we're presenting in come up to us and want to talk about the Prezi - they're often impressed by it, and they appreciate the fact that the students took notice of it. I really do think I've found it easier to work with departments after they've seen me using Prezi; it serves as a jumping off point / builds bridges. (Bit of a mix of metaphors there but you get what I mean!)

If you want to try making your own interactive map, here's how

The process we followed at York was this:

1. Open a new Prezi and edit the template so it reflected our branding
2. Import the floorplans as a PDF. When you import as a PDF each page of becomes a seperate object on the canvas, to be manipulated: picked up, shrunk, stretched, etc
3. Stretched the overall top-down view of the Library so it was absolutely massive - after all, everything else has to fit inside it
4. Placed the individual building plans within the stretched top-down view
5. Annotated the maps with further information by simply double clicking anywhere on the canvas to type
6. Put in photographs to give the audience a better idea of where they were in the building
7. Embedded YouTube vids at all appropriate places (this is very easy with Prezi - you just need the video's URL)
8. Saved a copy - individual Academic Liaison Librarians then took the generic map and made bespoke versions for each department
9. Made different versions, by copying the maps, to suit specific needs - so edited the 'path' (the order in which the Prezi moves through all the text and pictures on the canvas) to make e.g. 5 or 6 key points only for a 10 minute presentation, or every single thing on the map for the stand-alone web version ..

An example of a different version of the map (as in point 9) is this iteration I made for my History of Art PG students, with subject-specific information added and non-essential path-points taken out:

We also use Prezi for some teaching but not all. So for my History of Art 1st years, with whom I have an hour on Texts and an hour on images, I use PowerPoint for the Finding Texts session, and Prezi for the Finding Images. The latter was created using a Prezi template - these are really good if you need something nice looking in a hurry. It took me around 2 hours to turn my predecessors PPT into the Prezi you see there.

Non-York examples

Here are other takes on the interactive map:

• Pendlebury
• All Saints
• Bodleian Social Sciences
• City
• North Saffordshire
• Royal Holloway .Rop

If you have examples I can add me list, or any comments or questions, let me know below!

Just Do It (yourself)... free tools to empower

The Internet has bought much darkness and much light to the world, but one of things I really like about it is how it can increasingly empower you to make things happen for yourself. Whereas previously you had to wait for other people to create stuff, either because they were more qualified or had purchased expensive software and hardware, nowadays you can get access to a whole host of free programmes which require very little expertise, and allow you to take the initiative. Here's some of them that I've used.

I want to create a network

There are various ways to share space online. Creating a wiki or a network is so quick now, you can do one for any occasion, even if it is merely disposable (just be sure to delete it if you've taken a decent name, so someone else can have it!). As most people know, NING used to the king of free networks and has now started to charge. There are a lot of comparisons available online (just search for 'NING alternatives' - or this is a good roundup) and I've sifted through most of them - in the end, the site I've found which most closely recreates NING's best features and which appears to have a sustainable free model is SPRUZ.

Networks are so easy to create, you can make one for a one-off event and use it as a way of keeping (and disseminating) all the information about the day together, of communicating with attendees, and of following up and interacting afterwards.

I want to make a video

Have you ever tried using Windows Movie Maker, the thing that comes free with your PC? It's ridiculously easy to use, and you can get surprisingly good results with it and just your camera (assuming it has video built in) or even your phone. [Sorry Mac users, I've never tried your equivalent so can't vouch for its simplicity...] Or why not use the also-ridiculously-easy-to-use text to movie animation tool, Xtranormal?

Youtube Search Stories is really good as an educational or presentation tool, too - this one took me literally 3 minutes from start to upload:

I want to make a poster

If you want to create graphic design stuff from scratch, then download GIMP - it's a free art programme which is crammed full of features and doesn't have a learning curve of two years like Photoshop does. Or you can use a free online programme to make the job easier for you, such as Glogster. All their featured examples seem to be expressions of teen angst (or romance, in the loosest possible sense of the word) but it's very easy to use to create much more professional looking online, interactive displays. Also don't forget Photofunia, which I use a lot - it takes your pictures and crops/fits them into all sorts of real-world settings - fun for putting your head on others' bodies, but there's all sorts of potential for re-contextualising your logo or avatar in an arresting way:

I want to create a presentation

Having been massively off PowerPoint I'm now coming round to it again because of the joys of zen-style slide decks; however, many free online options allow you to do something completely different and arguably more interesting. Check out Prezi, or Vuvox. I reckon Ahead has perhaps the most potential out of all of them.

I want to create a magazine or journal

Issuu is a great place to start with this - it takes your documents and turns them into 3D page-turning online magazines. Check out this Seattle Library related example. Imagine the difference in time, effort and resources between creating a regular magazine using old media, and creating one using issuu!

I want to create a podcast

Recording audio really doesn't have to be complicated - it is within the grasp of all Information Professionals. Audacity is a free programme which has all sorts of features you can add if you want to but, equally, will just record you speaking into your laptop's inbuilt mic if that's all you want to do. (I know of at least one successful podcast that began using an in-built mic...) You don't need expensive microphones, or expensive software, or sound-technician expertise to make your own podcasts, and registering them with iTunes is pretty simple too.

I've only written here about tools I've got some experience with - for a more comprehensive list of, effectively, everything you could ever need, see The Open Thinking Wiki (cheers for the link Bobbi!) or Phil Bradley's absolutely awesome list of web 2.0 tools, arranged by category.

That's it for now. I've got less and less time in the evenings to write these but will try and keep a trickle going until I get a little bit more control over my time management and can start producing them more regularly again!

- thewikiman

p.s I feel very patronising trying to offer people advice about stuff. What tools to use is one thing, but how to approach your profession is quite another... that said, I've had a lot of really great things by just doing them myself. What is remarkable is how much making things happen facilitates more things happening to you! If you see what I mean. So the other point of this post, apart from listing the free tools, is to say this: if you find yourself in two minds as to whether the useful thing you've just thought of is something you could attempt to do yourself, or leave for someone else to do - choose doing it yourself! It's more fun, and more rewarding, and often fairly simple to achieve.