David Salaguinto (pictured to the left) is a writer on the Office User Assistance team at Microsoft who uses comics he creates to have fun, and to connect with readers -- see his Office Online Web Comic blog. In this conversation, David discusses how he got started, and where he gets inspiration from.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your work at Office Online. And how did you get started with the web comics blog? David: Mostly, I write about Visio for the people who use it, although I do occasionally write about other Microsoft Office programs if a team needs my help. Every month, we look at the feedback we receive from customers, and we try to address it. Sometimes it means we write new articles or update existing ones. Sometimes it means we produce a video demo or online training. Sometimes it means we try new things. They don’t always work, but we like to think we learn from our failures.
One of the things we wanted to try was a comic. A colleague of mine found a fascinating article about comics being used in unusual places. What if we did a comic for Office Online? I thought it sounded like a fun idea, so I jumped at the chance to create a comic using Visio. For my first comic, I did a rather simple one about printing:
I personally thought it was kind of corny, but my coworkers seemed to like it, so I made more. Pretty soon, I was posting them online. You can read more about how I got started in this column I wrote for Office Online.
Geetesh: I love all the content you put up on the Office Online Web Comic blog -- what inspires you for all the ideas based on Microsoft Office applications.
David: I get a lot of my ideas from my coworkers. Sometimes, someone will send me an idea for a comic, but more often than not, I’ll read something in an e-mail or overhear something in a meeting that strikes me as a possible source of humor. It turns out that jokes aren’t that hard to write. Finding irony and surprise in everyday things—like Microsoft Office—now, that’s hard. For example, I was reading something written by a coworker about how a PowerPoint deck can have multiple slide masters. I immediately thought of the saying, “No man can serve two masters,” which lead me to this comic about PowerPoint and Marketing:
That’s where the ideas come from. As for the punch lines, well…I don’t actually know. They seem to come out of nowhere, but only after throwing out dozens of bad ones. You’d cringe in horror if you saw some of the bad punch lines I came up with for the preceding comic.
Geetesh: Tell us about some favorite posts you have put up, and why they are your favorites?
David: I think my favorite comics are the ones with the little pink girl in them. I have two young daughters myself, and I love the way they talk and how they look at the world. For example, I‘ve noticed that a lot of kids have started using PowerPoint in their school projects, which lead me to this comic:
For this comic, I spent a lot of time crafting the words so they would ring true and sound believable. I also wanted to capture the excitement in the child and the caring in the father. In so far as the comic succeeds, I think it succeeds because of that (and not just because of the jibe at marketing—although that certainly helps). As you can probably tell, I have a lot of fun creating these comics—probably even more than you have reading them.
Glen Millar (pictured to the right) is a MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for Microsoft PowerPoint. Based near Brisbane, Australia, Glen is a regular on the Microsoft support newsgroups, and a featured speaker at PowerPoint Live. Visit Glen's site, PowerPoint Workbench for tutorials on cool animation effects in PowerPoint.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your work, and your involvement with PowerPoint..
Glen: I first began to use PowerPoint a number of years ago to present scientific information. It was critical that we could communicate effectively, as well as efficiently. I discovered that PowerPoint is a very powerful way to help people communicate. It allowed us to span information across time and locations. That is, we could take our audience to locations and across time in ways that simply cannot be done in real life.
Today, I work in a bunch of areas, including environmental education projects. I particularly build presentations for clients and conduct computer training into the features of PowerPoint that allow clients to build presentations faster and more effectively. I still think it is an awful shame that people spend lots of money on their projects and go to a conference and give a very poor presentation.
Geetesh: Tell us about your false background trick, and how you evolved it. Also what are typical usage scenarios for this trick?
Glen: False backgrounds take advantage of a property of AutoShapes that allows the shape to grab pixels from the slide background and lock them into place. The first time I created a false background was almost by accident. I was preparing for PowerPoint Live in 2004 and wanted to use an AutoShape to pan across the background image of a slide. However, every time I animated the AutoShape to move, it would take the background image with it. I learnt that if I covered the slide background, I could produce some amazing effects such as cropping, highlights and very cool animations. I mainly used the effect to crop multiple parts of an image and apply animations to them.
With the advent of PowerPoint 2007, the effects are even more amazing. When I have shown them to people, they don’t believe I didn’t use an external image editor. For example, a common comment at PowerPoint Live in New Orleans was that people had spent hours in external programs to create image effects that could be done easier and more accurately right within PowerPoint 2007.
I currently use this technique in a number of situations. I mentioned cropping of images. That is, I place an AutoShape over a strategic part of an image on the slide background and the shape drills through the false background in between. This allows a very powerful image crop to occur, but that is only the beginning!
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.
Mind mapping is a great way to brainstorm, store ideas, and create visual relations between concepts. I found a great application to do mind mapping -- and it lets me save those mind maps as PowerPoint presentation outlines -- a great way to create great outlines.
With ConceptDraw MINDMAP 5, you can present processes, ideas, complicated relationships, and other concepts graphically. The program helps you present your learning material in a logical and structured way -- it also includes a comprehensive library of graphics, colors, figures and connections which helps in creating and sustaining the outline structure.
