None of that would have been possible without our amazing creative community, and we wanted to do something as a little thank you. Since “more fonts” is a very frequently requested feature, we’ve added 14 new fonts and image filters to the web by adding premium themes that were previously only available on the iPad.
Plus, we made all 20 themes free for both iPad and the web!
Selecting a Theme
To check out the new free themes in the app, simply tap or click on the “FONTS/THEMES” tab in the top center of edit mode:
If you’d like to learn more about each theme, we’ve included a short summary, screenshots, and links to our Pinterest boards dedicated to showcasing examples of each of our themes, here.
Share Your Story
Now, you can make the most stylish holiday greeting or wish list ever. Tweet us the results with #hdholiday or drop us a line at gallery@haikudeck.com – we’d love to see how you use the new themes!
As more and more Haiku Deck users work with the app for selling products or representing their company’s vision, the need for slides to showcase a company’s brand identity with logos and custom background colors has become a top request.
Beginning today, iPad users can update Haiku Deck to version 3.3, and web app users can sign in to haikudeck.com, to give these awesome new features a try. Here’s how they work:
Creating a Logo Slide
Select the orange Text button on the left, then the Logo Slide type that now appears at the bottom of the “SELECT FORMAT” options.
Once you’ve selected the Logo Slide type, tap on the camera icon in the white circle on the slide to upload your image or logo. After importing your logo, enter your text and tap on the blue Image icon to search for a Creative Commons image, import your own photo, or use a solid color for your slide’s background.
Tip: For the best results, the optimal size for logo images in Haiku Deck is 600 x 600 pixels. If you find that the automatic zoom is cropping your image, we recommend resizing your image with free apps such as Canva to place your logo on a larger canvas, or PicMonkey’s collage feature to increase the amount of white space around your logo.
Selecting Custom Colors and Theme Colors
To select your background color, choose the blue background tab and then the solid color icon as shown below. Toggle “SOLID BACKGROUND” to ON. This gives you the ability to choose a preset background color or create a custom color to fit your brand exactly.
Custom Colors
When you tap on the eyedropper icon, you can customize the color of your slide background. Simply tap, or press, hold and move the small circle located on the color wheel to select a color. Pressing and holding the circle located on the square within the color wheel will adjust the color’s saturation and hue.
Tip: If you have the hex code for a color you’d like to use on your slide, tap on the hex code above the color wheel and type in the code.
Theme Colors and Haiku Deck Favorites
You’ll notice a few new options when you turn on solid background colors for a slide. Tapping on the color palette icon will provide you with a pre-selected group of colors specifically tailored to the current theme you have selected, as well as our Haiku Deck Favorites you’re already familiar with. Simply tap to select your desired color.
Share Your Story
What’s the story behind your brand? Share your decks with us by dropping us a line at gallery@haikudeck.com — we’d love to see what you create! And if you ever have any questions, our support team is always here to help!
Make your first slide the title slide — think of it like a headline. This is the first thing your audience will see, and you want to grab their attention.
Click here to view the full deck on SlideShare
2. Sprinkle in keywords.
Haiku Decks on SlideShare can draw some serious traffic! Be sure to include your important keywords in your deck title and throughout your slide content.
Click here to view the full deck on SlideShare
3. Break out the multiline slides.
SlideShare is a great place to make use of multiline slides, which give you a bit more room to flesh out an idea, showcase an inspiring quote, or capture a mission statement. (Keep in mind that currently Public Notes are not uploaded to SlideShare, so you want to make sure you’re capturing a complete thought on each slide.)
Click here to view the full deck on SlideShare
4. Optimize your layouts.
Haiku Deck’s different text layouts allow you to customize the placement of your text. For Haiku Decks shared on SlideShare, we favor layouts that place your text toward the middle and top of your slides (this keeps the Creative Commons licensing information from overlapping with your slide text).
Click to view the full deck on SlideShare
5. Include your contact information on the last slide.
When creating and publishing your Haiku Deck on SlideShare, the normal final slide with your contact information will not be displayed. So be sure to add a wrap-up slide with any contact information you’d like to share with your audience. (We actually like to do this for all of our Haiku Decks!)
Click to view the full deck on SlideShare
Your Turn!
Now that you can easily create and share Haiku Decks from either site, there’s no reason not to set your story free! If you’ve shared a Haiku Deck on SlideShare, we’d love to see it — just leave us a comment below.
Headquartered in State College, PA, AccuWeather provides worldwide weather forecasting services with superior accuracy, and they’re using Haiku Deck to help aid their efforts of spreading the news. Most recently, we had the opportunity to speak to their team about how they’re using Haiku Deck, and their predictions for using in the future.
Guest Q&A
Haiku Deck: Tell us a little bit about how your team is using Haiku Deck at AccuWeather.
AccuWeather: We first heard about Haiku Deck in a Poynter NewsU Webinar. Our team started experimenting with it afterward and we now build Haiku Decks on a regular basis for very visual stories. We believe that pictures help to tell the whole story of an event, so we like to provide our readers with compelling visual evidence in addition to our written news content.
“We believe that pictures help to tell the whole story of an event.”
We usually build Haiku Decks around major weather events, such as dangerous flooding, tornado outbreaks, heavy snowfalls, tropical storms and hurricanes. They’re also great for summary stories. Once per week, we use them for our weekly wrap-ups and frequently for end-of-season recaps.
Haiku Deck: What are your team’s favorite things about it?
AccuWeather: Haiku Deck is one of the best tools we’ve found to date that allows us to recreate weather events on a timeline. Our most recent deck was a weather recap of the summer of 2014. It’s now received nearly 160,000 views!
Summer of 2014 – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
We love that it allows us to create photo galleries to complement our editorial content. If we’re talking about a specific typhoon, we may build a deck encompassing the overall typhoon season. It becomes a second destination for people who are interested in knowing more after reading.
“It becomes a second destination for people who are interested in knowing more after reading.”
It also allows us to house all of our photos related to a story in one location, instead of embedding numerous images throughout and pushing our editorial content too far down the page.
Haiku Deck: Your decks have been very popular! Have you gotten good feedback from your audience? Do you have more planned?
AccuWeather: We think the feedback is in the page views! We’ve also seen a lot of engagement in stories that contain decks. We definitely believe that this tool adds something to our editorial content and plan to continue brainstorming new ways to use it!
We’ve seen a lot of engagement in stories that contain decks.
Haiku Deck: Do you use Haiku Deck for purposes other than for the AccuWeather blog?
AccuWeather: We’re experimenting with using it as an invite tool for our AccuWeather LIVE weekday noon shows and our Thursday extended editions.
Share Your Ideas
How do you use Haiku Deck? Share your experience and ideas with us in the comments below, or drop us a line at gallery@haikudeck.com — we’d love to hear about them!
We’ve long been a fan of incorporating visuals into blogging and marketing efforts. Images not only improve the appearance of your blog post, adding color and grabbing attention — they have been shown to drive engagement and social sharing among your readers.
But recently we’ve noticed some creative thinkers in our community using Haiku Deck in some cool ways to promote their blog content. Here are a few of our favorites.
Method 1: Create Custom Visuals to Drive Traffic
Links alone are boring, but links with beautiful images get noticed. The content managers at Bruce Clay, Inc. use Haiku Deck to create one-slide custom visuals to promote blog content on their social media channels. Here’s an example from Google+, where gorgeous visuals really shine.
The Haiku Deck slide crisply captures the blog content in a way that’s easy to read and understand, and definitely stands out in the stream. To this, we say +1!
Tips: Showcasing a beautiful image with minimal text is your goal here. You can import your own image, or use our Creative Commons image search to pick out an image that perfectly captures the topic of your post to use as the background. You’ll then want to include the title of your post with a minimal amount of text — think of it like a headline.
Method 2: Create a Slideshow Summary to Share with a Larger Audience
The team at PGi uses Haiku Deck to create awesome slideshow summaries that they embed right in their blog post and upload to SlideShare to gain more traction. Uploading to SlideShare makes it easy to share widely — they’ll tweet it and post it on Google+, LinkedIn, and other social media channels to really cast a wide net.
Tips: Here, you’re basically creating a preview of your post that summarizes your ideas and piques interest. You can include intriguing pull quotes and interesting data points. Blog content focused on a list of tips or how-to steps lends itself beautifully to this format. Be sure to include a link back to your blog — you can either highlight it on a slide (using a link shortener here helps) or include it in the Notes field.
Method 3: Create a Video to Cross-Promote on Your Social Media Platforms
Videos allow you to expand your cross-promotion efforts of your content onto YouTube, and provides you with another content piece to promote on your other social media platforms. Here’s another great example from Bruce Clay Inc. — check out how they’ve turned their Haiku Deck recap summarizing a blog post on 6 ways to repurpose blog content into a video.
Tips: One of the great things about YouTube videos is that they can sync with your Google+ page, making it super easy for your followers to share and comment. Also try adding music for an extra element of fun or add narration to include more supporting details, and make sure to include a link back to the blog post in the info box. Converting a Haiku Deck into a video is quite simple, and we’ve written a helpful article on how to do that here.
PowerPoint. Everyone’s used it, everyone’s heard of it, and a lot of people are pretty tired of it. Have you found yourself seeking an exciting new angle to approach your presentations from? If so, try these five fresh PowerPoint alternatives on for size.
Before you decide which method to present with, though, ask yourself what purposes your presentation materials have. Critically thinking about how your materials are going to support you will help your presentation be more interesting and memorable. For each PowerPoint alternative we’ve listed below, we’ve included a few of its best scenarios and benefits, so that you can pick the best presentation method for your purposes.
PowerPoint Alternative #1: Printed Handouts
An often-overlooked option for presenters is to provide a simple handout, instead of putting together a full-blown presentation.
Great for:
Kicking off new projects
Meetings with a light tone
Content that your team might want to reference later
Meetings outside of the office
Being prepared ahead of time so you won’t have to fuss with technology
Benefits:
Handouts allow your audience members to interact with the materials, and take your presentation home with them. Your attendees:
Can read while you speak, benefitting from both auditory and visual learning aids
Won’t have to divert attention to taking notes
Will be able to focus more energy into thinking about what you’re presenting on
Can share your work with others
Handouts in action:
One person who strongly advocates the use of handouts is Edward Tufte, a pioneer in the presenting world. In his words:
Overhead projectors and PowerPoint tend to leave no traces; instead give people paper, which they can read, take away, show others, make copies, and come back to you in a month and say “Didn’t you say this last month? It’s right here in your handout.”
A paper record tells your audience that you are serious, responsible, exact, credible.
How to pull it off:
Once you’ve decided to make a handout, how are you going to make sure it’s memorable and fun? We recommend Canva as a free, easy, impressive way to put together handouts. Canva allows you to generate all kinds of different content, and it makes you look like a design god with very little effort on your part. Here’s an example made by our Chief Inspiration Officer, Catherine:
PowerPoint Alternative #2: Flip-Boards / Whiteboards
If you have a dynamic presentation style, and like to sketch or scribble, you might try a using a flip board or whiteboard to present with, in lieu of slides.
Great for:
Topics you can draw diagrams to represent
If you like drawing or sketching
Involving your audience in brainstorming exercises
Benefits:
The audience will be captivated by your physical interaction with the board
You can shift gears easily and use different colors, lines, and shapes to make sure everyone understands
You can invite team members to be involved at the board
Doodling can facilitate funny situations easily, which keeps audiences entertained and engaged
You have the opportunity to really shine as a presenter, because all eyes are on you
Flip boards in action:
Simon Sinek, author and well-known TED talker, often uses flip boards to sketch and demonstrate concepts during his talks, like his highly-popular Start with Why:
How to pull it off:
There are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind when presenting with a flip chart, whiteboard, paper tablet, etc:
Use bold colors. Yellow, orange, light blue, etc. markers can be very hard to see, especially from the back of the room. Test your markers beforehand and make sure you are well-stocked with easily-seen colors (that aren’t dried out!).
Practice beforehand. Find the balance between large enough to be read from the back, and small enough to fit on your board, beforehand. Practice writing at a whiteboard angle, which is very different from writing on paper. If you’re nervous about drawing on the fly, you can even lightly draw diagrams you know you’ll be making in pencil if you’re using a flip board, and trace over them with markers when you’re presenting.
Check for glare. If you’re using a whiteboard, scope out the room with the lighting you’re intending on using, and make sure there’s not too much of a glare for anyone in the audience.
Speak toward the audience. It’s easy to get caught up drawing or writing on a whiteboard, and to keep speaking when your back is to your team. Just remember, if your mouth is pointed at the audience, they’re going to have an easier time hearing you!
Write legibly. Don’t get caught up trying to write so quickly that no one can read what you’ve written.
Include visuals. If you’re using a whiteboard or a flipboard, don’t just use it to write words – even lines and shapes can make an otherwise boring whiteboard much more fun and interesting.
PowerPoint Alternative #3: No Slides
If you are really comfortable with your material, try delivering a talk without any slides at all. Think about some of the greatest storytellers you’ve known — how many of them used slides?
Great if:
You don’t need to show data to prove a point
Your meeting topic can involve a lot of discussion
You’re confident about presenting and keeping people entertained
The content for your meeting can be covered without visual aids, screenshots, examples, etc.
Benefits:
There’s nothing to distract your audience or teammates from giving you their full attention
Attendees will learn more about your personality through watching you present
The situation lends itself nicely to personal interaction
You’re more capable of moving around the presentation space
You can pack a very powerful punch by moving your audience with your delivery alone
See it in action:
Some of history’s greatest speakers didn’t use any visuals — just think about some of the most famous speeches you know of. For example, would President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address have been so famous if it’d been made in PowerPoint?
Sir Ken Robinson does an excellent job of addressing creativity in the standard educational system in this TED talk, without using a single presentation aid:
How to pull it off:
Bring physical objects or other props, especially interactive ones
Incorporate other senses — play music or audio, for example
Rehearse enough that you can deliver without a script — you can do this in the car, while working out, etc.
Watch the audience for visual cues you can interact with or respond to, so it feels fresh and unscripted
PowerPoint Alternative #4: Mind Maps
Mind-mapping apps are great tools for capturing and connecting ideas. They help you understand how you got to where you are, the motivations behind ideas, cause and effect, etc. Creating a mind map during a meeting can be a stimulating experience for your whole team and will definitely keep your audience engaged.
Great for:
Brainstorming
Planning
Strategizing
Collaborating
Benefits:
Demonstrates connected concepts better than many other methods of presenting
Helps keep non-linear ideas organized in an easier-to-understand manner
Provides an interesting visual for gathering input, rather than presenting findings
Mind-Mapping apps to try:
iMindMap – Featuring one of the most elegant presentation modes available for mind-mapping apps, iMindMap is available for Windows and Mac OS. There’s a free trial, as well as Home & Student / Ultimate editions of the software available.
NovaMind – Available for Windows Desktop and Mac OS X, NovaMind is in beta for a number of other platforms as well. The app breaks your maps up into slides you can present, and makes moving through your branches and nodes intuitive and effortless. Both the Windows and OS X versions have free trials.
MindManager 8 – If you want to have a lot of control over how much information is shown or hidden within your mind maps, and especially during presentation, MindManager 8 is for you. It’s available for Mac and PC, and you can get a free trial to see if you like it before buying.
iThoughts – Creating Mind Maps on the go, or while passing a device around the meeting, can be easy with iThoughts. You can get it for your iPhone, your iPad, and your Mac in the App Store.
PowerPoint Alternative #5: Haiku Deck
Of course we have to mention Haiku Deck! It’s very near and dear to our hearts, as you may imagine — but not just because it’s our job. Haiku Deck embraces our favorite aspects of presentations and storytelling: simplicity, beauty, and fun.
Great for:
Being inspiring and evocative
Presentations that benefit from strong visuals and bold text
Large groups that wouldn’t be able to see smaller text from the back of the room
Storytelling
Benefits:
Makes it quick and easy to create gorgeous presentations
Supports you as a storyteller with stunning visuals to pull your audience in
iPhone remote allows you to present without having to bring your iPad or computer to the meeting
It’s available on multiple platforms (iPhone, iPad, PC / Mac / Chromebook via the web)
Your slides will look clean, attractive, and professional — without the ‘template’ feel of a PowerPoint or Keynote slideshow
You can print handouts from your deck
Your materials will be available online (as long as you save them as public or restricted) so you can share with your team
Someone who uses Haiku Deck:
Lots of people use Haiku Deck, for a wide range of purposes! Here are a few good examples to check out:
But in the interest of the topic at hand, the example I’ll leave you with is from Stefanos Karagos, Haiku Deck guru and founder of XPlain, a performance marketing agency:
The MindMapping Road – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
So, what PowerPoint alternatives do you use?
Have another PowerPoint alternative not listed here? Any other apps you’d like to recommend? Let us know in the comments below!
Bar graph or pie chart? Text block or headline? If you’re looking for the perfect way to communicate your message — simply, beautifully, and effectively — be sure to take a spin through our field guide to the seven Haiku Deck slide types. You’ll see examples and get expert tips for making the most of each type.
Click to view the full Haiku Deck with Notes
I love the flexibility of these simple, yet versatile, slide types. You can also get creative — stat charts can be a fun way to showcase words as well as numbers, for example. The multiline text layout is super useful for quotes, short paragraphs, or even haikus.
Formatting is also a snap — I no longer get frustrated with having to manually resize each text box I create, and I no longer resort to the “trial and error” method for finding the perfect font size, since Haiku Deck takes care of that automatically.
Do you have a favorite slide type or have a slide type that you’d like to see in Haiku Deck? Let us know in the comments! And as usual, if you have any questions, feel free to drop us a line anytime.
Quiet chaos — that’s the phrase we tend to use to capture the distinct energy of a Twitter chat. {Also, fun!} For making new connections and getting a fresh flow of inspiration, we love a good Twitter chat as much as you do. We also wanted to share our tips for using Haiku Deck to simplify the task of organizing and promoting your chat, so you can keep your focus on the connecting and getting inspired part.
Promote Your Chat
Use Haiku Deck to spread the word about your chat in a visual format that will stand out and get people engaged in your topic. It’s a great way to call out the the Twitter handles of the hosts/moderators and any guests, the date and time (don’t forget to mention the time zone!), and of course, the hashtag. Here’s a simple Haiku Deck template we’ve created to make this super easy.
Want to really wow your chat participants? Introduce your questions with visuals, not just text. We recommend creating a slide for each question, exporting your deck to PowerPoint/Keynote, and then saving your slides as images.
You can then simply upload the image along with your tweet when you schedule your questions. (Bonus: You can do all this ahead of time, and it only takes a few minutes!)
Click to view the full deck of questions we created for #1to1ipadchat
Recap the Highlights
Haiku Deck is also a quick and easy way to share the killer sound bites and takeaways from your chat. The example below from Lisa Buyer‘s #SEOChat recap deck has a combination of imported images that she’s created on her own to introduce each question, with screenshots taken right from Twitter highlighting answers from a few of her chat participants.
You can then tweet this recap out to share with chat participants and those who missed it, along with sharing and posting it on your other social media channels.
#SEOchat – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
We hope this gives you some fresh new ideas for your next Twitter chat — and if you use any of these techniques, be sure to let us know so we can share with our creative community. And as usual, if you have any questions, we’re always here to help!
Need a little marketing inspiration? Here are a few creative marketing ideas from the brilliant minds of our own Haiku Deck community. (We’ll be trying a few of these ourselves!)
1. Create a list of your favorite resources.
What are your favorite sites for curating content? Where do you go to keep yourself up to date on the latest marketing news and trends? Here’s a fantastic example deck from Catherine Pham of The Seen, showcasing her top 30 content marketing blogs and what they’re about.
By transforming your blog posts into Haiku Decks, you’re not only providing your audience with a fresh new perspective on the blog post, but you’re also creating a piece of content with visual impact that can be shared across your social media channels in multiple ways. “Content Repurposing” by Niki Payne of Bruce Clay, Inc. is a great example of how she took information in her original blog post and transformed it into a Haiku Deck.
Content Repurposing – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
3. Share your expert tips.
What are you an expert at, or want to be known as an expert for? Showcase your skill set, offer your expert tips, or create a helpful guide. Here’s a great example from social media enthusiast John Walker, featuring ten useful tips for social media marketing.
Kelly Mitchell and Debra Trappen host weekly podcasts and use Haiku Deck to create an attractive image that is then shared across their social media networks along with information about where, when and how people can tune in. Learn more about how you can use Haiku Deck to promote your next podcast here.
Compared to sharing a transcript of the Twitter chat, a Haiku Deck recap is a quick and easy way for sharing the main highlights from the chat. We love Lisa Buyer‘s combination of imported images she’s created on her own for each Twitter chat question, with screenshots taken right from Twitter highlighting answers from chat participants.
#SEOchat – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
Leave us a comment below on the different ways you use Haiku Deck for social media and marketing. And as usual, if you have any questions, we’re here to help!
Share your next big idea, present social media stats, or promote an upcoming event with one of these simple and flexible Haiku Deck templates. Each template helps you easily create a piece of content that can be easily shared with event attendees, embedded in your blog or website, and posted to your social media channels.
These are must-have marketing presentation templates that you’ll definitely want to keep in your marketing tool box.
Idea Sharing Template
Whether you’d like to start building thought leadership around social media, capture insights from top marketing experts, or share your best social media practices, this beautiful idea sharing template will help get your big idea and supporting key points organized.
To take it to the next level, we recommend uploading your deck to SlideShare to help further share your idea and reach a larger audience.
Click to view the full deck with notes.
Weekly Content Calendar Template
This simple content calendar template will help organize your content and boost your productivity by eliminating the guesswork that stems from the question, “what do I share with my audience today?”
Click to view the full deck with notes.
Event Marketing Template
Marketing your event with a Haiku Deck is a new and fun way to promote your next event or conference. Use it to highlight intriguing keynotes, interesting sessions, and provide people with the opportunity to learn more about the event.
Click to view the full deck with notes.
Customer Quotes & Testimonials Template
Whether you have a collection of quotes from an event, user testimonials, or awesome iTunes reviews of your app, use this elegant Haiku Deck template to capture them in one place.
From explaining “how to craft the perfect Google+ post” to showing someone “how to make your own pizza crust,” our How To Template can help you get the job done with beauty.
Click to view the full deck with notes.
Press Release Template
Add visual interest to your press releases with this presentation template that has high flexibility, allowing you to adjust it for your specific needs.
Click to view the full deck with notes.
Twitter Chat Promotion Template
Keeping things short and sweet (just like a tweet), this presentation template helps you promote the most pertinent details of your Twitter chats with simplicity.
Move away from wordy case studies to case studies that inspire. This case study template, created by Haiku Deck user Irene Yam, is great for those wanting a new visual way of highlighting customer stories.
Click to view the full deck with notes.
Event Recap Template
Did you recently attend an event or conference and have inspiring quotes or major highlights from the event that you’d like to share on your social media channels or share with other event attendees? Try out this template that combines the perfect amount of quotes and event details to include in your recap.
Click to view the full deck with notes.
Social Media Report Template
Showcase and present stats from your social media report in a new and visually appealing way with this simple and flexible Haiku Deck template.
What Haiku Deck templates would you like to see? Leave us a comment below and let us know! And, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to drop us a line any time.
