Outdoor Photography

From CreativePro.com:

Whether you're traveling, enjoying a backyard barbecue, or recording a graduate's moment of glory, summer means outdoor portraits. A few simple picture-taking tips can soften and flatter those harshly lit, squinty-eyed
faces.

New Web Column

Creative Pro has a new a monthly column on Web design called View Source.

There's an article about the virtues of the PNG file format:
Compared to GIF and JPEG, the PNG file format has a lot to offer: smaller file sizes, higher quality, and superb transparency. All you need are a few guidelines and techniques to expand your design toolbox.

Creative Workflow

From CreativePro.com:

Workflow is not a traditional photography concept. The idea came into the photography world alongside Photoshop's rubber stamp tools, the Raw format, and the practice of shooting more pictures in an afternoon than film photographers used to shoot in a month.

Film photographers do have workflows, of course; they just don't describe them as such. But making contact sheets, circling selects with a grease pencil, choosing to process some images by hand and send others to a lab, developing elaborate notations for describing processing instructions -- they all constitute a workflow.

In the digital realm, workflow is a bit more complicated because of the higher volume of images and our higher expectations when shooting digital. When it's possible to keep, search, and sort everything, we think that we should keep everything, and have it all accessible. Since we can create a perfect, lossless image backups, we demand the ability to do so. (In the film world, backup was costly, time-intensive, and impossible to do without a quality hit.) All of these expectations, along with all of the vagaries of digital image editing, mean that photography workflows are now often more complicated than they were in the film world.

Who says we need our logo on every slide?

From PresentationZen.com:

“Brand” is one of the most overused and misunderstood terms in use today. “Branding” is perhaps even more misunderstood. Many people confuse the myriad elements of brand identity with brand or branding. PowerPoint critic Edward Tufte, for example, has referred to the simple (and admittedly annoying) act of placing logos on every PowerPoint slide as “branding,” implying that branding doesn’t go much deeper than catchphrases and identity symbols. A logo, though, is but one visual symbol of a brand. The logo is an important part of the outward expression of a brand (part of brand identity), but the meaning of brand and branding goes far, far deeper than simply making one’s logo as recognizable as possible. Though logo placement itself is not branding, I do share Tufte’s distain for logos/trademarks appearing on every slide of a presentation. If you are presenting for an organization try removing logos (and other clutter) from all except the first and last slide. If you want people to learn something and remember you, then make a good, honest presentation.

Is it finally time to ditch PowerPoint?

From PresentationZen.com:

Last week an article appearing in The Sydney Morning Herald entitled Researcher points finger at PowerPoint generated quite a stir. The article highlighted findings by researchers from the University of New South Wales, including John Sweller who developed the Cognitive Load Theory back in the '80s. One of the findings mentioned in the article: it is more difficult to process information if it is coming at you both verbally and in written form at the same time. Since people can not read and listen well at the same time, the reporter suggested, then this may mean "the death of the PowerPoint presentation." The assumption being (apparently) that a presentation made with the aid of slideware such as PowerPoint or Keynote necessarily includes lines of text projected on a screen that mirror the spoken word of the presenter.

I am assuming that what Professor Sweller means is that the way PowerPoint is used should be ditched, not the tool itself. Suggesting we abandon PowerPoint because it's often (usually?) misused and abused to produce awful presentation visuals is like saying we should dump the idea of 24-hour cable news because so much of it is vacuous rubbish. But whether we’re talking about bad TV or boring presentations, shouldn't we blame the content producers not the content medium?

So, is it finally time to ditch PowerPoint? Hardly, but it is long past time to ditch the use of the ubiquitous bulleted-list templates found in both PowerPoint and Keynote. And it’s long past time that we realized that putting the same information on a slide that is coming out of our mouths usually does not help — in fact usually hurts our message. Next time you plan a presentation, then, start by using a pencil and pad, a whiteboard, or a stick in the sand — anything except jumping headfirst into slideware on your computer with its templates, outlines, and content wizards that may point you down a path you wish not to go. And as you examine your work from previous talks remember this rule of thumb: if your presentation visuals taken in the aggregate (e.g., your “PowerPoint deck”) can be perfectly and completely understood without your narration, then it begs the question: why are you there?