Monday, October 22, 2007
3 Photoshop Tips for Preparing Images for PowerPoint
Here are a couple of quick Photoshop tips for preparing images for a PowerPoint Presentation:1. Setting Backgrounds to White
Do you ever import an image into PowerPoint only to find out that what you thought was a white background, is actually not? There is a easy Photoshop trick to change any almost-white background to white.
- Choose Image > Adjustments > Levels
- Click on the Set White Point Eyedropper
- Click on the area of the image that needs to be changed to white, and voila!
2. Scale Images Appropriately
This is a strangely little known fact, but the size of a default PowerPoint slide is 10" x 7.5" at 100dpi. To avoid resizing images in PowerPoint, it's best to adjust images to an appropriate size in Photoshop before exporting. To resize an image use Image > Image Size.
3. Lower the Quality Setting on jpgs to Reduce File Size
Images add a lot of file size to a PowerPoint presentation. Using lower quality jpgs will help reduce the overall presentation file size. Lowering the jpgs file size and quality doesn't mean you have to make the image look bad. The best way to maintain control when reducing jpg quality is to monitor the image preview as you reduce the quality settings.
- Zoom the image to 100% (this is important to get an accurate preview)
- Choose File > Save As
- Select jpg as the file type from the Format drop down
- Type the name of the file in the Save As text box
- Click the Save button
- A dialog box with the jpg options will appear. Make sure that the Preview box is checked. Start adjusting the quality of the jpg down while watching the preview. Adjust the jpg quality to as low as possible without loosing a detectable level of quality on the image preview. Depending on the image, a quality setting of around 7 will drastically reduce the file size without changing the look of the image.
Labels: Tips and Tricks
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Being Inspired by Nature - Part One: Color
Some of us designers took a little diversion to the LongHouse gardens last week. It was nice to have a couple hours away from the office to enjoy some art and nature. It reminded me how much inspiration can be gathered from nature. One thing that really caught my eye was the gorgeous warmth that sunlight gives to colors. As a designer, I often default to using very cool color pallets. Adding some yellow or red to colors can help make products or graphics seem more comfortable and inviting.Below are two color pallets that I created based on photos from our LongHouse trip. Please feel free to download the swatches and bring them into Illustrator or Photoshop (CS3 required) for your own use.
Labels: Color, Inspiration
Saturday, October 06, 2007
The Cathedral & The Bazaar
For some reason, I've been thinking a lot about Eric Raymond's classic essay, "The Cathedral & The Bazaar". From his abstract:I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of the surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the "cathedral'' model of most of the commercial world versus the "bazaar'' model of the Linux world. I show that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow'', suggest productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and conclude with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software.This paper is one of the seminal works of the open-source software movement. I'm not sure exactly how old it is, but I first came across is some time in the late 90s. If you haven't already read it, you should take a look now.
I believe that it encapsulates not only the core beliefs and values of the open-source movement (who brought you Wikipedia, Linux, Firefox, PHP, Apache, MySQL, and a very large portion of the other core technologies that power the internet), but also defines the value system of the leading creative minds of our culture in general. Although they're not open-source or Free (with a Big F), the various user-generated content sites that have largely redefined the media landscape are more or less an extension of the bazaar model (MySpace, Facebook, Youtube, blogs, etc).
It's a short read, but highly thought provoking, whether you work with software or not. Think about how the points it raises could apply to your line of business- because I guarantee they do.
Read it here.
Labels: links
