PowerPoint Blog
Labels: cartoons, clip_media, interviews, powerpoint
Joel Mishon is the co-founder and co-director of CartoonStock Ltd. Prior to starting the business more than 10 years ago he was a freelance cartoonist in the UK producing work for national titles such as Private Eye, The Times, Readers Digest and The Spectator. He lives and works in Bath, UK. In this conversation, Joel discusses the CartoonStock web site.
Geetesh: Tell us more about CartoonStock, and how the media provided by your site can be used in PowerPoint presentations.
Joel: CartoonStock is the world's largest cartoon library that allows instant licensing and downloading of cartoons. We represent more than 500 professional cartoonists and animators from around the world, and license their work to everyone from major international publishers and advertisers to private individuals and organizations for education and presentation use. We work with artists whose work appears in well known titles such as Reader's Digest, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and The Times so presentation clients wishing to utilize our collection have access to some of the best cartoons and cartoonists in the world at fees that reflect the more modest usage. To license use of a top quality cartoon for a presentations for up to a year costs just USD20. There are more than 150,000 cartoons to chose from and they are all searchable and downloadable instantly at CartoonStock Ltd.
Cartoon used with permission from: CartoonStock.com
CartoonStock started as a company specialising in print cartoons for publishing and presentation use. However as the demand for more multimedia content has increased, CartoonStock now offers professional animations as well. This means that clients can enliven their presentations not just with still images but with full professional animations. Before the service existed there was no easy, reasonably priced, legal way for clients giving presentations to gain access to this sort of material so we are creating a new market, and hopefully providing a very useful service.
All our images are high resolution JPEG files and animation files can be downloaded at the resolution and in the format you choose, so both can be slotted into a PowerPoint presentation in seconds.
Geetesh: About your foray into cartoon animations – how is it a win-win situation for users and creators of these animations?
Joel: Users gain from access to very good quality animations for presentations. This is the sort of high quality content they wouldn't have had access to previously. Creating animations is a very expensive a time consuming process that requires a great deal of talent. It would be very rare that someone could afford to commission new work from an animator, but for a small fee they can now legally used appropriate work.
Cartoon used with permission from: CartoonStock.com
New technology has allowed animators to create more content more quickly than they did before but it remains a time consuming and expensive process and the new work that is being creating previously had no obvious outlet and had been hard to monetize. Animators might display it for free on sites dedicated to animation, or might wait for the work to be picked up by one major media client, but with a service like CartoonStock's they can now make lots of smaller sales rather than a) only allowing viewing or b) waiting for one broadcast client.
Categories: cartoons, clip_media, interviews, powerpoint
Labels: clip_media, photos, powerpoint 
Pictures make presentations work. But the most interesting and compelling images aren’t generally found in free clipart galleries. So you comb the Internet, looking for just the right image to convey your message. Click-cut-paste. You’ve got it!
While you may have “it”, that “it” is more than likely the copyright-protected work of a photographer or designer. Even for department presentations, sales presentations, training materials, and other internal business purposes, using images without the proper permission and rights is a serious issue, and may constitute a breach of the creator’s copyright.
Guest author John Billington has lots of info to share with you on this interesting topic -- read the article here...
Categories: clip_media, photos, powerpoint
Labels: clip_media, interviews, maps, powerpoint 
Carles Enric Lopez is CEO of Netmaps, SA -- a Barcelona, Spain based company. He has a degree in Geography from the Universidad de Barcelona (UB) and the University College of London (UCL). In addition, he holds a Master in Demography (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ) and is a Postgraduate in Urbanism (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya).
In this conversation, Carles Enric Lopez talks about the use of maps in PowerPoint.
Geetesh: How can presenters and presentation designers benefit from using maps in their PowerPoint slides?
Carles: PowerPoint maps are not only perfect for making your presentations easier to create, but also give them a far more professional look. Such maps are ideal if you are looking to add clear, visual references into your presentation. One of the benefits of our maps for presentations is that we have covered all the country maps in the world with the same kind of information so it would be perfect for any company to unify their information.
You can modify any of the maps, and make your own look and feel, so our maps can be combined with your corporate images in an easy way. It is a well known fact that visual aids greatly help people to retain for longer the information which you present to them, and the speaker finds it much easier to engage with their audience and pull off a successful presentation, if they don't have to worry about technical problems or trying to describe geographical locations. PowerPoint maps will save you a lot of time and hassle, since the maps have been purposely created for PowerPoint software, so you won't have to worry about glitches, bad graphics or difficult modifications.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your company, and the PowerPoint specific maps that you provide.
Carles: We, at Netmaps, have over 11 years experience under our belts, and specialize in the creation of digital maps in a variety of formats, for example PowerPoint, Illustrator, and Freehand. Our diverse team comprises of experienced geographers and cartographers. Our head office is located in a four story building in the quiet suburbs of Barcelona (Spain), but we have reputable customers in 69 countries throughout the world, such as DK, Time Out, National Geographic, African Development Bank, HP, BBC, Apple, and so on. We offer maps of continents, countries and cities, both topographical, political and road maps. Our maps for PowerPoint were created in 2003 because some of our largest clients needed specific and customized maps for their presentations. We used our beta website version from 2003-2005, with Maps 1.0 available. In 2006 we launched the new version of our website 2.0, and finally in 2009 we have decided to start our PowerPointMaps version 3.0 which combines the free version 1.0 and the payable version. We have also reduced prices by 50% of the version 2.0. Version 1.0 maps are completely free to download, and you can start using them straight away. Upgrading to version 2.0 maps (at a cost of just 49 euros each) allows you to easily modify the PowerPoint map.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your support infrastructure.
Carles: Our maps are fully vectorized, which means that our production team is working day in day out to update any new information. When we update any of the maps, we also transform them to PowerPoint format to make them available for users of PowerPoint presentations.
We can be reached by either phone or email. You will be put straight through to a member of staff (no pushing lots of buttons!). If you choose to send us an email, we promise to get back to you within 6 hours. Our team comprises of native speaking English, French, Spanish, and German nationals. Our production team is on hand if you have any problems with downloading, but if all else fails we can send the map to you via email. Our central server is in the UK and we have backups in India and France. It means our presentation maps are guaranteed 24 hours X 7 days.
Categories: clip_media, interviews, maps, powerpoint
Labels: animation, clip_media, powerpoint, templates
AnimationFactory.com is a huge resource of visual content that I have known for a very long time now. Founded in 1996, the site now comprises over 500,000 animations, video backgrounds, PowerPoint templates, backdrops, web graphics, sound clips, Flash source files, etc. They have a dedicated team of on-house artists who create this content. Their media elements can be use in any kind of presentation.
Read the review here...
Categories: animation, clip_media, powerpoint, templates
Labels: clip_media, powerpoint, sounds
A good source of high quality music is something anyone who works with multimedia can use -- for sound scores in PowerPoint presentations, as animation sounds, or for use in Flash and video-editing. RoyaltyFreeMusic.com is a site that provides plenty of high quality music that can be bought using either a subscription model, CDs or individual tracks.
Read the review here...
Categories: clip_media, powerpoint, sounds
Labels: clip_media, interviews, medicine, powerpoint 
Olivier Gryson is the Internet Project Director at Servier International, an independent pharmaceutical company based in France. Their medical art is an offshoot of their existing business which they offer as free downloads for non-commercial use. In this exclusive conversation, Olivier discusses Servier's medical art and its evolution and usage.
Geetesh: Tell us more about the purpose and evolution of Servier Medical Art.
Olivier: The aim of Servier Medical Art is to provide healthcare professionals with a valuable tool to help them create their PowerPoint presentations. Indeed, when you want to illustrate a specific medical mode of action or an experiment in a lab, it is very difficult to find the image that exactly suits your needs.
Our idea was to propose a construction set made of basic elements that can be combined each other to create more complex scenes. For example, to illustrate a pharmacological mode of action, you can combine an empty cell, with a nucleus, receptors, channels, and any other intracellular component by a simple “copy” and “paste”.
We launched Servier Medical Art at the occasion of the congress of the European Society of Cardiology in September 2005 in Stockholm. More than 30,000 cardiologists were attending the congress.
At this time, we were looking for an innovative service to animate our booth. It met a great success.
We then used Servier Medical Art during other international and national congresses or events in many countries worldwide. (Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Turkey, …)
Geetesh: What's unique and different about the Servier Medical Art collection. Can you share some trivia about their usage.
Olivier: First of all, our images are available as PowerPoint files. Using them only requires “copy” and “paste”. It was very important for us to propose a service that is easy to use. Indeed, most of our visitors do not have specific skill in computers.
They are true vector images. We work with specialized scientific illustrators who produce Adobe Illustator files. Images are rescalable without loss of quality.
More than 2500 images are available for download. Furthermore, doctors can submit their suggestions online. We enrich our image bank almost every week.
Servier Medical Art is free of charge. Our objective is to be a source of reference for any healthcare professional who would like to illustrate a PowerPoint presentation. Basically, we precise on the site that images are available for educational purpose only, but we are often contacted by companies, universities or public organization who want to use our images in books or training programs. We often grant them the permission providing that they add Servier in the credits.
Recently we were amused to discover that our files were also spreading via peer-to-peer networks. We don’t think that it is the best way to get our image bank. Indeed, Servier Medical Art is in permanent evolution. Our site is the only up-to-date source to get the files. Furthermore, we do not ask for a specific registration to get the images. “You enjoy the images, you download them free of charge and that’s all!”.
Categories: clip_media, interviews, medicine, powerpoint
Labels: clip_media, graphics, powerpoint 
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.
PointClips are available here...
Categories: clip_media, graphics, powerpoint
Labels: clip_media, powerpoint, tutorials
This time, in a continuing series for PowerPoint beginners, I have put up a tutorial on insering clip art in PowerPoint using the Clip Art task pane, found in PowerPoint 2002 and 2003.
Check it out here...
Categories: powerpoint, clip_media, tutorials
Archives:
April 2003 | May 2003 | December 2003 | January 2004 | February 2004 | March 2004 | April 2004 | May 2004 | June 2004 | July 2004 | August 2004 | September 2004 | October 2004 | November 2004 | December 2004 | January 2005 | February 2005 | March 2005 | April 2005 | May 2005 | June 2005 | July 2005 | August 2005 | September 2005 | October 2005 | November 2005 | December 2005 | January 2006 | February 2006 | March 2006 | April 2006 | May 2006 | June 2006 | July 2006 | August 2006 | September 2006 | October 2006 | November 2006 | December 2006 | January 2007 | February 2007 | March 2007 | April 2007 | May 2007 | June 2007 | July 2007 | August 2007 | September 2007 | October 2007 | November 2007 | December 2007 | January 2008 | February 2008 | March 2008 | April 2008 | May 2008 | June 2008 | July 2008 | August 2008 | September 2008 | October 2008 | November 2008 | December 2008 | January 2009 | February 2009 | March 2009 | April 2009 | May 2009 | June 2009 | July 2009 | August 2009 | September 2009 | October 2009 | November 2009 |
