Jeff Koke (pictured to the right) is a graphic designer and creative marketing expert who has been designing professionally since 1992. He is the co-founder of two businesses: Koke Creative, a creative marketing firm that helps innovative companies build strong brands and executes on those brands through Web, print and presentation design; and PointClips, a site that sells high-quality professional graphics for PowerPoint. Jeff lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and two children. He enjoys Tae Kwon Do, soccer, writing and music.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself and PointClips.
Jeff: I've been involved in graphic design professionally since 1992, and have been working in PowerPoint since 1997 when I was creative director for an enterprise software company, helping them craft effective sales and marketing presentations. More recently, my design firm Koke Creative has built a practice around creating beautiful and powerful PowerPoint presentations for all kinds of companies.
The idea for PointClips came from the fact that one of our clients required that all the artwork in their presentations be built within PowerPoint, not imported from JPEGs or other external graphics. This was for file size reasons as well as to increase the quality of the presentation when given over NetMeeting. We developed a method for creating beautiful icons and objects using PowerPoint's built-in drawing tools. Our illustrator, Russell Moore, used this method to build the hundreds of objects that we offer on PointClips.
Geetesh: How are PointClips different than other graphics for PowerPoint.
Jeff: When people think of graphics for PowerPoint, they usually think of backgrounds and templates, or stock photography -- or they think of the cartoony clip art that comes with the program. We wanted to break that paradigm with PointClips. PointClips are unique illustrations that convey the benefits of native PowerPoint objects (scalability, transparency, editability) while having the detail and beauty of graphics that are usually created in other design programs, like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. If you've spent any time working with PowerPoint's drawing tools, you'll know that this isn't easy.
Being vector illustrations, their main advantage is flexibility: they can be scaled to any size, from a tiny icon or bullet, to a graphic that fills the slide -- all without any loss of detail or quality (no jagged, pixellated edges); they have transparent backgrounds, so they can be placed on top of other elements without white boxes around them; and they are easily editable by ungrouping their components and editing the colors or individual points. If needed in other applications, they can be copied and pasted into Word or Excel, or exported as JPEG or PNG for any other application, including web sites.
