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!

A Business Impact Case Study featuring Danielle Oteri

Creative Director, Feast on History
New York City

Inspiration for Small Business Owners

• Create visual content to increase engagement on blogs and social media
• Repurpose existing content like lists and blog posts
• Share expertise to help promote your business or service

Content Marketing with Haiku Deck

Food writer and art historian Danielle Oteri has been busy creating mouthwatering Haiku Decks like these to promote her business through content marketing…..

10 Best Foods in Little Italy – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

…as well as for book proposals, article pitches, and teaching content marketing and social media skills.

Here’s her visual lesson in how to extend the value of your content, centered around a single (killer) photo of a cream puff!

How to Make Micro-content – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Lovely Lists

Danielle discovered Haiku Deck through a Google search —  as she put it, “I loathe PowerPoint, so I was just looking for something different.”

“I loathe PowerPoint, so I was just looking for something different.”

When I spoke with her, she commented that she thinks of Haiku Deck as a classy way to generate Buzzfeed-type content — eye-catching lists with lots of images and minimal text. {Haiku Deck pairs perfectly with lists — we’ve collected some of our favorites on our Lists Pinterest board.}

Danielle loves that the content she creates with Haiku Deck is so easy to share on Twitter and Facebook, as well as SlideShare and LinkedIn, where she feels it works particularly well —  “I love to get my decks out there and see the view counts add up. It’s just another way of sharing my story and my content.”

“I love to get my decks out there and see the view counts add up.”

Pro Tips

Danielle has cooked up her own spin on collaboration — to work with a group on a Haiku Deck, she made a draft, sent the link around to her collaborators, and made real-time edits while talking through the content on a conference call. “It was easy for us to collaborate,” recounts Danielle. “I was able to do it all from my iPad.”

“I was able to do it all from my iPad.”

She also uses Adobe Illustrator to create her own custom images, such as this three-photo layout, which she then imports to Haiku Deck.

Danielle recommends Haiku Deck for trainers, entrepreneurs, coaches, and businesses who need content but don’t have a lot of money to pay for it.

“Haiku Deck is perfect for trainers, entrepreneurs, coaches, and businesses who need content but don’t have a lot of money to pay for it.”

Extra Helping

Here’s a delectable Haiku Deck Danielle’s husband, Christian Galliani of wineforthe99.com, created to share his picks for inexpensive wine. Cheers!

Top Ten Santa Margherita Alternatives – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

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!

Smile…it’s National Photography Month!

Photography makes us smile all year round — but for the occasion, we’ve collected 10 fun photography project ideas for exploring, teaching, and celebrating photography with Haiku Deck.

1. Do a Photography Scavenger Hunt

Hunt for, and photograph, a list of geometric shapes, colors, numbers, or textures. Snap photographs of things that start with a certain letter or rhyme with a word. Use Haiku Deck to share your photos and compare your discoveries!

Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app

2. Illustrate a Process

Take photographs to capture and share how to make something, do something, or carry out an experiment, step by step. Here’s a Haiku Deck that demonstrates how to make ice cream in a plastic bag! Continue reading