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Showing posts from February, 2012

Visual examples: Three alternatives to using squares

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Last night while standing at the cashier's line a magazine cover caught my eye by their use of a circle. Allow me to explain,  sometimes magazine covers (and slides) use circles to add text to a photograph, like in the image below. Source: Flick Now, what I saw yesterday was a pointy circle, something like this: I think is this ingenious not only because it gets more attention, but also because it has more white space. An additional advantage is that straight lines make alignment easier. Trick number two. This one comes from the Periodic Table of Typeface , where the elements are not enclose in normal squares, but in "pointy round squares", something like this:   where all but the top right corner are rounded. If the stroke is bigger, the effect will be stronger.  Cool effect, not nothing more than eye candy. But we can modified it get a visual communication booster. Trick number three. What if we inverse the last effect and sharpen the round corners and roun

Presentation Guru: Geoffery West

Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist, a former president of the Santafe Institute , and a good speaker. "The surprisingly math and science of cities and corporations" is data driven talk, heavily data drive. Although the visuals are generally rocky and the structure is at times not clear, I love this talk. It leaved me in awe to learn and know more about it. Enjoy!

The use of clipart in presentations

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The use of clipart in presentations is usually not advised. However not all clipart is bad. In this post I talk about how Silhouettes and Outlines can be good for slides. This topic seems to be a complicated one, but it isn't. Presentations Pros are likely to advise us not to use clipart in our slides. I think we are wrong, or at least they haven't told us the whole truth. A better statement is " Bad clipart shouldn't be forbidden from presentations visuals, and good one should be used carefully" . Pros use top quality clipart like in Obama's State of the Union address 2011—SOTU 2011— ( click here to see it ) or in The clock is ticking on Long Island design by Duarte, so saying no to all clipart can't possibly be right. It is not to say that the camera on the left is bad clipart. There are different types of clipart, but not all are appropriate for slides. So what is good and bad presentation clipart? Source: clker.com The camera on the left is no