Slide:ology Book Review
I have just had the pleasure of reading slide:ology, The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte, President and CEO of Duarte Design, the firm that created the presentation for Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth.
The book is beautifully designed and illustrated and leads the reader through the process and concepts of creating a visually compelling presentation. Easy to read sections with insightful case studies from some of the world’s leading brands (Adobe, Hewlett-Packard, Mozilla) help convey the message that you need to create a meaningful relationship between you, your slides and your audience rather than a barrage of slides full of nested bullet lists.
Key areas of the book include:
- Why is a good presentation important and where do you begin
- Planning, research and brainstorming
- Displaying data – diagrams and infographics
- Thinking like a designer – color, grid systems, typeography, layout, templates
- Movement and animation
- Interacting with slides
- Manifesto – The five theses of the Power of a Presentation
The book isn’t about Powerpoint, Keynote or Google Docs, its about concept, storytelling and engaging your audience. It should be read and re-read by anyone responsible for brainstorming, creating, designing and presenting in any organisation who truely cares about their brand.
IE6 and 7 whitespace bug
IE 6 and IE7 often display whitespace underneath images and <li> tags (when all other browsers do not) . The best way to solve this is to add either or both of the css rules:
display:inline-block;
display:block;
The alternative method is to remove all space between tags within your html document, however this makes the mark-up hard to read and edit!
Removing scrollbars from IE7 textarea
Often the default textarea in Internet Explorer 7 has ‘greyed-out’ scrollbars even when no content has been entered. To remove simply add the following style declaration to the style-sheet.
overflow:auto;
Positioning a background image at the foot of the page
If you need to position a background image at the foot of a page you will realise its pretty tricky to align it right at the bottom.
Add the following to your stylesheet and hey presto!
html {
min-height: 100%;
height: auto;
}
Missing image problem
I have often come across the problem of a missing image when developing a site.
The solution is simple.
<img src=”image.gif” width=”100″ height=”100″ onerror=”this.src=’error.gif’;”>
If the correct image doesn’t exist the image named error.gif will be used instead.
Credit goes to Rob Gonda for this tip.