Get Your Picture ON! – Finding and Using Great Pics and Graphics

I wanted to cover a couple of best practices we will be using extensively BEFORE we go through the next step of the Modern Presentation Method, Step 3: Build & Refine.  The first of these best practices is how to use Pictures in all types of presentations and even more importantly, how to find great ones at little or no cost.

Using Pictures

Vision is our dominant sense.  Not hearing, touch, taste, or smell.  In fact, we are far better at remembering visual information than we are at remembering what we hear.  This is important for a host of reasons, but the simple thing to remember here is that if you want your audience to remember key points of your presentation you should present it in a visual way. 

This is why I almost always put a graphic or picture on every slide.  Sometimes it is the single dominant feature, sometimes it’s a small graphic next to a single sub point, sometimes it’s the background.  But it’s there and it contextually supports whatever point I’m trying to drive home.

Now, I’m going to stand on the shoulder of a giant in communications, Garr Reynolds.  Garr is in my opinion the best single authority on how to use pictures in a presentation and I encourage you to pick up Presentation Zen and also his latest book, The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides.  Garr will do a much better job of giving you a detailed account of how to user pictures than I can.  I do however have three key points that I think all presenters should keep in mind when using pictures or graphics. 

1.  Match the picture to the subject:  Each picture must correspond precisely with the exact point you are trying to make.  One of the most renowned authorities on how a brain works is Dr. John Medina from the University of Washington.  He teamed with Garr a while back and came up with this short presentation on how to do this.  Check it out here:  Brain Rules For PowerPoint Presenters.  Slides 8, 9, and 10 are brilliant!

2.  Remove the Background:  Most of the pictures you will find will have a background.  You will often find that the background doesn’t match the color of your deck.  Here is a picture I downloaded from Microsoft Clip Art. 

It has a white background which clashes with my black background.  And it quite frankly looks pretty poor as a result. 

If I remove the background, the picture now POPS out at us and looks really good.  Plus, now I can put text into the space formerly used by the white background. 

I use the Background Removal tool in PowerPoint to remove the background.  Here is how I do this:

1.  Select the picture in the slide.

2.  Go   to Picture Tools on the Ribbon Bar and select Format

   

3.  Select the Remove Background option (all the way to the left) and remove the background.

4.  The end result looks like this.

3.  Rule of Thirds:  An almost universal rule used by photographers and cinematographers is the Rule of Thirds.  In any graphic they divide what is seen by two horizontal and two vertical lines equally spaced.  The four points where these lines intersect (shown with the red dots) are where the focus of the eye will go and are where you should put the most important information on your slide.  Here is my slide before I apply the rule of thirds.

You can see that it doesn’t quite conform.  Now, let’s take a look at it when I apply the rule of thirds.  In this case, the upper left hand point frames the picture and the lower right hand point frames the title.  And it looks much better!

Finding Pictures

The #1 question that I get is where a presenter can go to get great graphics or pictures cheaply.  There are four places I recommend for 100 and 200 level presenters.

1. Clip art – thousands of free pictures – http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/
   Microsoft has recently purchased thousands of stock photographs for free use by Office 2007 and 2010 owners.  Here are 5 pictures I downloaded when I searched for the keyword people.
              
2. Does your organization have some kind of media bank?  Usually PR, Public Affairs, or somewhere in the Marketing org of your company you will find logos and stock photography that have been licensed.  In many cases, you can use those images and graphics free of charge. 
3. Source from your company or organization’s web site.  Take the US Army for example.    You can get most of the logo graphics you would need (unit logos, rank logos, etc…) at the Army’s Heraldry site here:  http://www.tioh.hqda.pentagon.mil/
   Also, if I wanted to get great pictures of soldiers in action, I would just go to the Army Public Affairs website and guess what, it has thousands of great photos that I could use.  http://www.army.mil/media/
   Best Practice:  An institutional (company, organization, etc…) best practice in today’s world is to have a single repository of all copyrighted images, logos, graphics, and videos company-wide.  Creating a one-stop SharePoint site with thousands of these images will save cross-company perhaps hundreds, even thousands of hours of time that presenters are wasting today in searches for graphics they can legally use in their presentations.
4. Last, there are some fantastic stock photo sites out there where you can get pics and graphic for a low cost.  Even better, there are Microsoft Office plugins that you can use to download and manage what you buy from these sites.  Examples of stock photo sites includes iStockPhoto, iClipArt, and Veer).  Find out more here:  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/

 

So that’s pictures 101 for the 100 & 200 level presenters out there.  In a few weeks, I’ll fire up a post for the 300 & 500 level presenters.  Ping me back on email and let me know how well this works for you.

DK

mailto:dkarle@microsoft.com