Death by PowerPoint, Deconstructed

A Comprehensive Guide to Diagnosing and Fixing the 15 Worst Slide Problems

Last time we checked, there were 13.3 million Google search results for “Death by PowerPoint.”

13.3 MILLION.

And more likely than not you’ve experienced it — that sinking feeling when someone says “Let me just fire up my slides,” you see a hodgepodge of bullets and clip art framed in an overbranded corporate template, and you know instantly you’re not going to get the next hour of your life back.

Death by Powerpoint Exhibit A, via Boing Boing

It’s worth noting that we have nothing against PowerPoint itself — in fact, PowerPoint can be used to create some incredibly awesome presentations, if you have strong design skills or you know someone who does.

But let’s face it — as a culture, we’ve developed some pretty bad, and pervasive, habits in the PowerPoint department, and the truly excellent ones feel like the exception rather than the rule.

Missing Vizify? How To Create an Attention-Grabbing Visual Resume

March 20, 2014 / Catherine Carr / 0 Comments

Our friends at Vizify announced recently that they have been acquired by Yahoo and will be shutting down the site. They were awesome enough to recommend Haiku Deck as an alternate service for creating standout visual resumes. (Hai-5, Team Vizify!)

Like Vizify, we believe there are many compelling reasons to present your story visually.

Images engage your audience’s emotions and make your story more memorable.
Presenting content visually helps you stand out from the crowd.
Visual content is easier to consume on mobile devices.

In an age of information overload, visual content is an increasingly powerful way to communicate, and we’re here to make that part simple and fun. To make your transition from Vizify — or your leap to visual storytelling — as easy as possible, we’ve created two flexible Haiku Deck presentation templates you can use to whip out a visual resume in no time flat.

Create a Professional Profile

Here’s a template you can use to create a stunning visual resume or professional profile. Continue reading

PowerPoint for iPad? Try the Haiku Deck Way

March 19, 2014 / Catherine Carr / 1 Comment

PowerPoint for iPad

There’s been a lot of talk in the news lately about the long-awaited arrival of PowerPoint for iPad, and as you might expect, we have a thought or two on the subject.

Should I Use PowerPoint for iPad?

It depends. We have long believed in the flexibility and power of the iPad as tool for content creation and productivity, not just content consumption. We love being able to work on a presentation whenever and wherever inspiration strikes, whether it’s at a coffee shop, on a plane, or curled up on the couch while half-watching House Hunters International. That’s why we started with Haiku Deck for iPad.

So we are all for creating and sharing presentations on an iPad, but we’ve also worked hard to make that experience uniquely tailored to the tablet — simple, fluid, and even fun. One key difference between Haiku Deck and PowerPoint is that we build the experience around images, not words.

We build the experience around images, not words.

We do this because we believe that people are tired of seeing presentation slides crammed with text (and, even worse, presenters who read that text word for word). Dave Paradi’s Annoying PowerPoint Survey provides more detail on this subject. Here’s our Haiku Deck version of the findings:

PowerPoint for iPad: Annoying PowerPoint Survey Results

Click to view the full Haiku Deck with Notes

Like many presentation design experts, we believe that images speak to our emotions and make what we have to say more engaging and memorable, and we’ve purposefully designed our Creative Commons image search to trigger creative flow.

Images speak to our emotions and make what we have to say more engaging and memorable.

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