Digital storytelling has transformed the way we experience and share ideas. We’re surrounded by digital tales that we can even access right from our cell phones! But with so many stories echoing across the web, making yours stand out can be challenging.

Here at Haiku Deck, we like to think we know a thing or two about telling stories… and we’d like to let you in on a little secret.

Picture-Perfect Digital Storytelling

Presenting your story in a way that ensures it will be exciting and worth interacting with is easier than you might think. Whether you’re rallying support around a cause, or just telling folks about your cat, audiences go nuts for visuals. Want to see a great example? Just check out our deck explaining Ten Reasons Why Visual Communication Can’t Be Ignored:

Ten Reasons Visual Communication Can’t Be Ignored – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Once you’ve gotten a chance to let that soak in, here are a few more resources that might help give your story even more reach:

• Optimizing the Appearance of Haiku Decks on Social Media
• Optimizing Your Haiku Decks for SEO
• Haiku Deck User Guide: Using Your Own Images
• Haiku Deck User Guide: Share & Export
• Embedding Your Haiku Decks in Your Blog or Website
• Haiku Deck Support: Free Images, Licensing, and Commercial Use

And of course, if you have any questions, you’re always welcome to drop us a line!

One of our main goals at Haiku Deck is to make things simple and easy, especially when it comes to sharing your beautiful Haiku Decks. But, the different image sizes and dimensions on various social media channels can be a bit less easy to handle. We’ve experienced just about everything from having words and images cut off in odd places, sizing of slides that don’t necessarily align with sizing on that specific social media channel, and the inability to reposition the image for a post all together. So, we’ve come up with some ways to handle situations just like this.

First, you’ll need to know how to save your Haiku Deck slides as images. Here are 2 ways:

1. Take a screenshot.
2. Export your Haiku Deck to PowerPoint/Keynote, then save your slides as images.

Now that you know how to save your Haiku Deck slides as images, let’s get started!

Facebook

When sharing a link to your Haiku Deck on Facebook, Facebook will automatically pull the image in the first slide to use for the link’s preview. Sometimes, the link preview looks perfect:

And other times, when your text isn’t centered on the slide, it looks like this (the majority of the text in the top/bottom of your slide gets cut off):

There isn’t a way to reposition the image on Facebook, so here are a couple things you could do to workaround this:

Showcase a different slide from your deck by using the arrows at the top left corner of the image to view the different slides in your deck and select one that looks the best.

Or, if you’d like to use the title slide, here’s a workaround:

1. Take a screenshot of your first slide, or export your deck to PowerPoint and save your slides as images.
2. The recommended image upload size for shared links on Facebook is 1200 x 627. You can use photo editing software such as Photoshop, or free web based tools like PicMonkey or Canva, to upload and resize/crop the image to the correct size and save it as a .jpg or .png image file.
3. Once you’ve saved that image, you can use the “+Upload Image” button to replace the original image with the new image you just created. It should look something like this:

Tip: If you’re sharing the link and using Facebook’s default link preview, you can delete the link in the status box. Your posts will look more clean and less cluttered with text. You can also edit the text that appears in the link preview to include more details about your deck.

Google+

Google+ will also provide you with a link preview similar to Facebook, but the preview perfectly adjusts to the size of the slide so you won’t need to manually resize the image. You should see something similar to this:

However, if you’re not a fan of the link preview, you can upload an image instead and include a link to your deck within the status. The recommended size for a shared image on G+ is 497 x 373, the same proportion of our Haiku Deck slides, so resizing/cropping is not needed. The result should look something like this:

Not only does sharing an image give you a beautiful G+ post, images that are shared on G+ also have a higher chance of being highlighted (taking over both columns of posts) in your followers’ G+ stream.

Tip: If you’re sharing a quote or blog post that doesn’t have an accompanying image, you can create your own with Haiku Deck. We love doing this for our curated content; here’s one example. And if you’d like to take it a step further, G+ also supports gifs. If you’ve already exported and saved your Haiku Deck slides as images, you can use GIFMaker to create a gif out of your slides, giving the illusion of a slideshow on auto play. Here’s an example from one of our posts.

Instagram

Because of the square format on Instagram (recommended image size is 640 x 640), you’ll need to resize the image of your deck’s slide into a square. To do this, you’ll first want to save your Haiku Deck slide(s) as an image in a place where you can access them on your iPhone or Android phone (we like to use Dropbox and GoogleDrive for this).

Once you’ve saved your slide(s) as an image, you can use apps such as #SquareDroid (Android), Squaready (iPhone), or Canva (web), to upload and save your image as a square without needing to crop it when you upload it onto Instagram. You’ll have an image that looks something like this:

Tip: The only place on Instagram that allows you to have a clickable link is in your bio. If you’re promoting a new deck or blog post, share an attention-grabbing image, update your bio with the link to your new deck or blog post, and mention it in the description of your post that they can click the link in your bio to see it.

Twitter

When sharing a link to your deck on Twitter, your tweet appears in your follower’s home timeline and lists like this:

Tweets like this can be easily missed by your followers, but tweeting a photo helps your tweets to stand out like this:

This is also a great way for Twitter chat hosts to highlight their questions. If you’ve ever participated or hosted a Twitter chat, you know how busy those streams can get. Using this method, your questions will stand out and participants are less likely to miss them; they’re also easier to spot if anyone needs to scroll back through the chat’s stream. Also check out our post, How To Host a Twitter Chat with Style.

Tip: If you’re using Haiku Deck to display a quote, soundbite, or question on Twitter, you’ll want to insert the text more or less in the center of the slide to avoid any odd cropping. The minimum size for in-stream photos on Twitter is 440 x 220.

It’s Friday morning. Class is in 20 minutes, and your students are supposed to present the Haiku Decks they’ve been working on all week. But as you’re finishing up your coffee, you’re skimming through an inbox full of emails from students who couldn’t find their projects at the last minute. Sound familiar?

With so many students, email addresses, decks, classes, and shared devices, it’s no wonder teachers sometimes run into trouble finding their students’ projects or accounts. Thankfully, we’re here to help make one part of this equation a lot easier by explaining the best ways to use Haiku Deck for education.

Haiku Deck Classroom

With Haiku Deck Classroom accounts, the teacher and all students associated with a Classroom account will enjoy the benefits of our paid product which includes privacy features, the ability to download decks for offline viewing and editing, the ability to embed YouTube videos in presentations, and more.

Classroom also includes a handful of new features designed specifically for the teacher:

• Classroom management dashboard for adding/removing students
• Course galleries where teachers can review the presentations that students submit in one convenient location.
• Optional Integration with Google Classroom and Google sign-in

Haiku Deck Classroom is affordably priced for educators on tight budgets and department, school, district, and institutional pricing discounts are available. Learn more about Haiku Deck Classroom here.

Creating a Single Account for Your Class

This is probably the easiest method (and our favorite), but it’s not ideal for all classrooms. You can create one Haiku Deck account for your classroom, and your students can all sign in using the same email address and password. This will save their work to the same account, so we recommend having students include their names in the titles of each deck to make them easy to find.

Pros:

• Easy to keep track of login credentials
• Work can’t really ‘go missing’ from account mix-ups
• No time spent signing in and out of separate accounts
• No risk of students accidentally saving to the wrong account
• You can sign in at any time to review, share, and delete student work
• Students can save their work as ‘private’ and you’ll still be able to view it

Cons:

• Students could inadvertently delete or edit other students’ decks
• Scrolling through everyone’s decks to find the one you’re looking for could be inconvenient

Maybe your students will be making too many decks for one account to sound appealing, but having separate accounts for each of your students sounds like a headache waiting to happen. In this case, we recommend taking advantage of a nifty little Gmail trick that not a lot of folks know about: the ability to create variants of your Gmail email address that all go to the same inbox.

With any email address at gmail.com, you can add a plus sign and more text after your username to create a variation that will still go to your inbox. Gmail ignores everything from the + forward, so the possibilities are endless.

You can set up one Gmail account (for example, ‘msbeifong@gmail.com’) and then use variants of it to set up separate Haiku Deck accounts for specific groupings of students, such as:

• msbeifong+history@gmail.com
• msbeifong+morningclass@gmail.com
• msbeifong+thirdgrade@gmail.com
• msbeifong+fourthgrade@gmail.com

This way, you only have one email address through Gmail – but you can have as many Haiku Deck accounts based on that email address as you’d like.

Pros:

• Easy to keep track of logins
• Easy to keep track of student work
• Low risk of work being saved to the wrong account
• You can sign in at any time to review, share, and delete student work
• Students can save their work as ‘private’ and you’ll still be able to view it
• Not as much time needed signing in and out of accounts on shared devices

Cons:

• Students signed into the same group could accidentally edit, or delete other students’ decks
• Even if they save decks as ‘private,’ any work students are doing can be viewed at any time by other users signed into the same account

If you’d prefer to keep all of your students’ decks separate, then you could have students set up accounts under their own school email addresses. From a support standpoint, we get the most troubleshooting emails from teachers with classrooms set up this way, due to the increased chances of work being saved improperly. If you decide to take this route, here are a few things to consider:

Pros:

• Students’ decks are saved separately
• Lower likelihood of students editing or deleting other students’ decks

Cons:

• The inconvenience of having to sign out/in on shared devices
• No access to decks until students share them with you
• Students cannot save decks as ‘private’ and share them with you
• High likelihood of decks being saved to the wrong accounts due to sign out/sign in confusion
• Higher likelihood of accounts being created improperly (misspelled email addresses, passwords, etc. or accidentally using a personal email address instead of an .edu one)
• Account mix-ups, improperly saved decks, etc. can be somewhat tricky and time-consuming to resolve for all parties involved in this case (less than ideal when you need a fast resolution)

For an easy alternative that still provides each of your students with a unique account, you could take advantage of using the Gmail trick mentioned above (under Method #2). For example, you could create the email address mrbarnesclass@gmail.com. For your students, you could create Haiku Deck accounts for them as follows:

• mrbarnesclass+jonny@gmail.com
• mrbarnesclass+sarah@gmail.com
• mrbarnesclass+alexi@gmail.com, etc.

All emails pertaining to any of the accounts created using this method will go to the original email address, mrbarnesclass@gmail.com. Here are the benefits of using Gmail instead of student email addresses:

• You can easily reset the password for any student account
• Students won’t receive emailed updates, news, etc. from us
• It’s super easy for us to look those kinds of accounts up to provide support
• We can get all of the accounts created for you – just email us at support@haikudeck.com
• If your students have educational email addresses that don’t accept incoming messages outside of the school district, this is a better method to use so that their passwords can be reset

In Summary

We recommend Haiku Deck Classroom for teachers using the app with their students. This provides the greatest convenience for the teacher and also provides important access to student presentation privacy features and download. We’re here to give you a hand and help out if you ever have any questions. Just drop us a line!

Just imagine how cool it would be if you could notate and mark up some content and use that in your Haiku Decks. It’d be pretty awesome, right? You could build recipes, create how-to guides with screen shots, point out things in photographs you’ve taken, and a billion other things. Good news is, you can do it for free with Skitch, and we’ll show you how!

The app: Skitch

Skitch is a free app by the folks who brought you Evernote. It’s straightforward, easy to use, and allows you to add shapes and text to images, then easily save your creations for use elsewhere.

The possibilities:

• Notate your slide backgrounds
• Blur portions of slide backgrounds
• Mark up photographs, screenshots, and anything else you want to use as a slide background

App mashup example:

Here’s an example deck that one of our talented education users put together to demonstrate how well Skitch and Haiku Deck can be used together in the classroom:

Skitch – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

How to use it with Haiku Deck:

1. Download Skitch on your Mac or PC.
2. Use the drop-down menu in the top center of Skitch to take a screenshot, snap a photograph, open a file, create a new blank document, and more.
3. Go nuts! Use the tools on the left to add text, shapes, tags, drawings, etc.
4. Drag the file icon on the bottom, center tab in the app to save your creation to whatever folder you drop it on (I like using my dekstop, personally).
5. Use your Skitched-up image as a slide background uploaded into either the Web App or the iPad app.

Tips:

• Try to be consistent in your color scheme if possible – it keeps your image from looking too busy and distracting
• Sign into Evernote in the top left corner of the app to save your Skitch work there
• Adjust how zoomed-in you are in the bottom left corner of the app
• Save your Skitch creations to a place like Google Drive or Dropbox so you can access them easily from your iPad
• If you need help with Skitch, check out their support site here.

Have you ever wanted to put multiple photos on one slide, or use really creative, design-heavy slides in your Haiku Decks? Maybe you’d like to build some flowcharts, use icons to illustrate your ideas, or apply interesting and colorful filters to your background photos. If any of the above sounds intriguing to you, read on — we’re about to show you how.

The app: Canva

Canva is a free web app made by a super talented team of designers in Sydney, Australia. You can build all kinds of content – from Twitter headers to real estate flyers – with a very simple and intuitive interface (it’s kind of similar to ours, actually!). You can use your own photographs in the app, or take advantage of Canva’s crazy-huge library of images and icons. Some of Canva’s images are free, while others are only $1.00 each. You don’t pay until the end, though, so you can get everything laid out exactly as you’d like it before you have to spend a dime (and you can always go back and make changes if you’d like).

The possibilities:

• Multiple images per slide
• Icons and vector images for slide illustration
• Additional layouts for text
• Additional color filters and options for images (uploaded or purchased)

App mashup example:

Here’s a little deck I threw together by building my backgrounds in Canva:

App Mashup: Canva – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

How to use it with Haiku Deck:

1. Set up an account at Canva.com.
2. Walk through their quick and easy tutorial to get a feel for the app.
3. Once you’re ready to go, choose Presentation under “Start a new design.”
4. Build your slides.
5. When you’re ready to send them to Haiku Deck, click Link & Publish in the top right.
6. Choose Image on the right in the window that pops up.
7. Save your images to your computer.
8. In Haiku Deck, import your downloaded Canva slides as slide backgrounds.

Tips:

• You can leave the text fields blank in Haiku Deck if you’d like just the Canva slide to show, like I did in the example above.
• When you download your image files from Canva, put them in Dropbox or Google Drive to use them from the iPad app easily.
• Check out the Easy Guide to Creating a Presentation in Canva for some great tips on making the most of your Canva slides.
• If you select any image in your Canva project, you can click the Filter button to apply some nifty effects. However, clicking the advanced options in the bottom left corner of the Filters popup will allow you to really play around with the colors, blur, contrast, etc. in your image – try it out!
  
• If you’re searching through images in Canva, any that say “free” are free; if they don’t say anything over the thumbnail preview, they’re premium selections and will be tallied up at the end when you publish.
• Need help with Canva, or want to learn the basics? Check out their support site here.

Let’s say you have a Haiku Deck you’d like to narrate, or add audio to, or automate entirely. Maybe you’d like to share it — audio and timing included — in a way where people can enjoy it on a mobile device, a computer, a PS4 or an AppleTV.

Making a video out of your Haiku Deck would arguably be the best course of action: you could add audio, video, timing, narration, etc. and share easily with websites like YouTube and Vimeo by uploading your final product. Sound complicated? Don’t worry! It’s actually pretty easy, and we’re going to show you how to do it with iMovie.

The app: iMovie by Apple

iMovie is the video editing component of Apple’s iLife suite, which is chock full of powerful but easy-to-use creative software. iLife actually comes with Macs – so you probably won’t have to buy iMovie; it should be on your computer already if you have a Mac.

Using iMovie, you can do a number of things, from making your own music videos to creating ‘movie trailers’ out of home videos you shot with your iPhone. It’s pretty simple to pick up, fun to use, and great at helping you making things that wow people!

The possibilities:

• Add audio
• Add timing
• Add transitions
• Add video
• Narrate
• Share on YouTube, Vimeo, etc.

The requirements:

• Haiku Deck
• A Mac
• PowerPoint or Keynote (don’t have either? We’ll go over a workaround. Read on!)
• iMovie (all versions are compatible, but these steps are for the newest version)

App mashup example:

In order to demonstrate some of the ways you can work with your Haiku Decks in iMovie, I threw this video together pretty quickly this afternoon using my laptop, iMovie, Haiku Deck (Web App), Keynote (to convert my slides to images), and Quicktime (to capture video screenshots demonstrating within iMovie):

See the original deck and photo credits here, and check out Koop on YouTube if you like the song in the video above!

For another example of a Haiku Deck and iMovie mashup, you could check out this video we made for Haiku Deck Guru Susan Spellman-Cann: Living Aware, Living Empowered, Living Informed: Messages of Inspiration, Hope, and Wellness

Using it with Haiku Deck

1. Export your Haiku Deck to PowerPoint / Keynote file.
2. Open the file in PowerPoint or Keynote. (If you have trouble, check out this article. If you don’t have Keynote or PowerPoint, email support@haikudeck.com – we’re happy to convert a few Haiku Decks you’d like to do this with.)
3. Save your slides as images. (PowerPoint: File – Save As…, choose JPEG in the drop-down list.  Keynote: File – Export – Images.)
4. Open iMovie (it should be in the Applications folder in Finder).
5. Choose File – Import Media from the menu bar. Find and select your exported slides, choose (or create) an event to keep your slides in, then import.
6. Start a New Movie from the File menu. At the prompt, choose no theme, and make sure to save it to the same event you imported your slides to (for ease).
7. Choose your event on the left. You’re ready to go: let’s turn this Haiku Deck into a video!

Edit your video

Drag and drop your slides from the top of the screen to the timeline at the bottom. Refer to the screenshot above to learn where to adjust the timing, cropping, and content within your video (click the image to view it larger).

Tips:

• When adjusting cropping, leave the bottom strip of Creative Commons license information. Using any photographs found in our image search without including those credits would violate the terms of use for the photos, and would be unfair to the photographers whose work is being used.
• You can add music from your iTunes library very easily, but be forewarned that if you upload it to YouTube, your video may have ads added by YouTube under contract with the record company that owns your video’s soundtrack. Alternatively, YouTube may give you a message indicating you are not allowed to upload that content.
• Want to make your own music? Check out Garageband, which comes with your Mac, and allows you to use pre-built loops to make your own copyright-free music. Online resources from Apple will help you get started – you don’t have to be a musician, just willing to try something fun and new!
• You can add additional images or videos by repeating step 5 above to import the media into your project.

Share your creation proudly

This part is super easy: just click the share button (square with an arrow pointing out of it on the top toolbar) and choose your destination (YouTube, Vimeo, iTunes, etc.). iMovie will walk you into signing in when appropriate, and will export and upload your video right to your account!

Then, you should Tweet us at @haikudeck – we’d love to see what you come up with!

Have you ever considered how useful it would be if you could draw a diagram, illustrate an idea by hand, or paint a picture to share a vision in one (or several) of your presentations? If so, then you should check out Paper by FiftyThree, which you can partner with Haiku Deck to create unique, custom background illustrations for your slides.

The app: Paper by FiftyThree

Paper is a free app for iPad that allows you to draw to your heart’s content. It’s fun, slick, and simple to use, and you can buy additional drawing tools within the app if you want more stylistic versatility. You can keep your drawings grouped in ‘journals,’ save your creations to your Camera Roll, share your work on social networking sites, and even order printed books from your collections.

The possibilities:

• Incorporating original drawings
• A cohesive, unique look for your deck
• Customized sketches
• Customized charts
• Illustrations for ideas that are hard to find photos for
• Fun!

App mashup example:

Haiku Deck Guru Alexander Charner made this awesome deck about working with his dad for Father’s Day this year, and illustrated many of the slides using Paper:

How To Work With Your Dad – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Alexander also uses a very cohesive, simple color palette across his drawings and slides in this deck about the role of vocal energy in engaging an audience: Are Audiences Getting Worse?

How to use it with Haiku Deck:

1. Download Paper for free from the App Store or this link.
2. Open a journal in the main menu, or start a new one.
3. Tap a blank page to get started.
4. Draw!
5. Pinch on the screen to zoom back out so you’re viewing the page in your journal that you drew on.
6. Tap the export button at the bottom (square with arrow pointing up)
7. Choose Camera Roll (if the toggle is orange, you’re ready to go)
8. Tap SHARE at the bottom
9. If you’re prompted to allow Paper to access your photos, accept the request
10. Use the image(s) you save to your Camera Roll as backgrounds for slides in Haiku Deck!

Tips:

• Make sure to leave a border around your image, since the edges of graphics get cropped in Haiku Deck to make room for the parallax transition between slides when you’re presenting.
• Putting two fingers on the screen in Paper, and moving them in a counter-clockwise position, rewinds through your steps like a fancy ‘undo’ button.
• You can email yourself the images from your Camera Roll if you want to use them from your computer with the Haiku Deck Web App.
• Think outside the box: you can use Paper for more than just fun drawings. In the example above, Alexander used it to make a Venn diagram, for example:
• For inspiration, check out Made With Paper. If you’re in the app, just close whichever journal you’re in with a pinch, and swipe to see the leftmost item in the menu.
• Need help with Paper, or want to learn the basics? Check out their support site here.

When it comes to your experience with Haiku Deck support, the team here has a few specific goals:

• Personalized support: even if we write you back before our morningly coffee, our responses won’t leave you wondering if you’re dealing with a robot.
• Speedy solutions: like Clark Kent rushing off to save the day, we often drop everything to save you from presentation peril. (Yes, I just compared answering emails to being a superhero from another planet. Shush.)
• Proactive empowerment: a fancy, shorter way of saying “we like putting the answers out there so you can find them without needing to wait for us.”
• Simple, beautiful, fun: we try to take the same approach to support as we have for Haiku Deck, by keeping our support as user-friendly as we can.

Having started reading this post because of its enthusiastic, promising subject line, you’re probably thinking: “that’s great and all, but what’s new?” Well, in the spirit of the goals above, I just finished making some huge changes to our support site — and I’m really excited to share them with you! Here are the updates I love the most:

Updates To Haiku Deck Support – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

There are all sorts of nifty little updates here and there, so you should go find the rest of the changes for yourself (remember that whole ‘proactive empowerment’ thing?). If you’re looking for new tips and tricks, or running into trouble, take our new support portal for a spin – just click the HELP button in the top right corner of our website anytime!

Creative Career Building

How do you stand out from other candidates when you’re interviewing for a job? One creative way is to use Haiku Deck as a visual resume or to showcase your work, and that’s exactly what our friend Steve Nestor of Staffordshire did.

Steve began his career as a support worker in Bromford Support in 2009 and worked his way up to Marketing Coordinator, with Haiku Deck playing a key role in his promotion. Steve also happens to be one of three winners in our “About Me” contest last year (a fact he mentions on his LinkedIn profile):

My Life In A flash – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires;

Guest Q&A

Haiku Deck: Tell us the scoop! How did Haiku Deck play a role in your new job?

Steve: During a team talk we heard about the power of social media. We were encouraged to begin to tell our own stories and also the stories of the vulnerable people that we help in order to raise awareness of what we do and the real difference that we make to their lives every single day.

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