“Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated.” Paul Rand
In the middle of the Summer of 2009, I found myself searching our servers—looking for all the presentation work (PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi, etc.,) our studio has done since 2005 to date. The studio director during that time had already scheduled a meeting to scrutinize all these assets to determine what we had delivered so far, and what we should do moving forward.
It was pretty obvious to everyone the need to raise the bar in our presentation delivery.
By looking at the big picture, we realized most of the presentations were using a corporate-look and dated template. No disrespect to corporate style templates, but we are in the business of selling creativity. We definitely could have done much better than that. We also found out that some of the best work was done in Indesign and presented as interactive PDFs, which can probably make you think the solution to achieve better-looking presentation slides is creating them in Adobe CS since this is the preferred designer's tool and everyone in the studio is proficient using Adobe. It sounded like a good option, but the reality is that almost all the time the requesters of these projects ask for either PowerPoint or Keynote because they can do last minute edits to their presentation.
I left that meeting with one goal in mind, to leverage my social media and resource management skills to find the Über presentation specialist. And you bet I found not one, but a handful of über presentation specialists that became part of the pool of freelancers we call on a regular basis.
Stay in touch for the continuation of this story in my next article: “Top 10 Qualities of An Über Presentation Specialist.” A list similar to The Über Production Artist.
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Ernie Arias is an Advertising Studio Manager at Hogarth WW. Social Media enthusiast. Dad, husband. Opinions are my own.
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