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The New Corporate Template

Corporate Templates: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

To me, a corporate template is kind of like a pinstripe suit — professional and conservative, but (usually) not particularly exciting.

Most corporate templates are like a pinstripe suit: professional, but not exciting

Templates are like pinstripes: professional, but not particularly exciting

And let’s face it — the corporate template is as pervasive as bad PowerPoint in today’s business culture.

Nearly every company and brand has one, and in my role as Haiku Deck’s Chief Inspiration Officer, I’ve seen plenty of them — beautiful, bland, and downright hideous.

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This would fall into the latter category….

Now as a bona fide brand geek, I appreciate that there are plenty of great intentions behind most corporate templates — they keep brand expression consistent, they give presentations a cohesive, polished look, and (in most cases) they give presentation creators a leg up in terms of design, structure, and layout.

But I believe corporate templates also have a few drawbacks that are worth noting:

1. They take valuable space (and attention) away from the content being presented.

2. In the rush of presentation prep, slides from different templates are often combined into a single presentation, resulting in a mishmash instead of a polished whole.

3. Just like a presentation using endless header-and-bullet slides, corporate templates can set a tone of uniformity and, well, corporateness that subtly signals “This is going to be boring.” Especially in longer presentations, it gets monotonous.

Zooming out a bit, corporate templates do not exactly encourage creativity or inspiration on the part of the presenter, and I can’t help but feel that at some level they disrespect the intelligence of the audience. Putting a logo or a company name on every single slide seems to suggest that the audience is going to forget where they are, or who they’re talking to. It’s just overkill.

Putting a logo on every single slide seems to suggest that the audience is going to forget who they’re talking to.

Bottom line: It’s really only your company who cares about your company template.

A New Take on the Template

I love working with companies, large and small, to help them create beautifully branded Haiku Decks that loosen the tie, so to speak, on the typically stuffy corporate template.

Here’s one we created for our friends at OfficeNinjas:


The OfficeNinjas Story – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Here’s another example of a Haiku Deck that’s branded with a lighter touch:


Ideas that Stick – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

7 Strategies for a More Creative Corporate Template

You might not be able to abandon your corporate template wholesale, but perhaps you can experiment a bit. Here are my top tips to help you try out this new approach.

1. Try putting your logo on the first and last slides, not on every slide. (Tip: The new Haiku Deck logo layout is ideal for this.)


Haiku Deck: Startup Story – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
The new Haiku Deck logo slide layout makes this a snap[/caption]

2. Include boilerplate or legalese on one slide, not every slide.

3. Include your hashtag or Twitter handle at the beginning of your presentation (or sprinkle throughout), not on every slide.


Visual Storytelling with Haiku Deck – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
Include your hashtag at the beginning of your presentation, not on every slide[/caption]

4. Include your contact info at the end of your presentation, not (you guessed it) on every slide.

New corporate template: Sample contact info slide

Sample contact info slide to close a presentation

5. Instead of repeating slide headings, try using solid-color, standalone slides to introduce new topics or sections. (Tip: In Haiku Deck, you can now create solid-color backgrounds to match your brand colors using the new color picker.)

New corporate template: Sample section break slide

Try a solid-color section break slide instead of repeating slide headers

6. Use creative imagery to evoke or illustrate your brand — you don’t have to resort to logos alone. You can include images of actual products, people, places, or symbolic objects that relate to your brand or company.

For example, when I give talks about Haiku Deck, I prefer to represent our brand with beautiful images of colorful origami instead of showing our logo over and over again.


10 Tips to Transform Your Presentations – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
Try using evocative imagery to express your brand in place of logos[/caption]

7. Experiment with choosing photographs and colorful backgrounds that showcase your brand colors in a more stimulating way.  If your company colors are, say, blue and green, try doing an image search for “blue green,” “blue green abstract,” or “blue green pattern.” (Tip: You can now match your brand’s colors exactly using custom color slide backgrounds.)

New Corporate Template: Using abstract colors

Try using abstract patterns in your brand colors for a creative twist

New corporate template: Using abstract patterns in brand colors

Your Turn

What ideas do you have for loosening the tie on the corporate template? We’d love to hear your thoughts and see your examples — feel free to share your creations at gallery@haikudeck.com.

More Helpful Resources

If you found this article helpful, you might enjoy these as well:

Power Tips: Optimize Your Haiku Decks for SlideShare

Haiku Deck for SlideShare

Uploading your Haiku Decks to SlideShare is a breeze — and now you can create them right from SlideShare! Here are a few things to keep in mind to make your Haiku Decks look their best for SlideShare’s 70 million monthly visitors (wow!).

5 Power Tips

1. Include an attention-grabbing title slide.

Make your first slide the title slide — think of it like a headline. This is the first thing your audience will see, and you want to grab their attention.

Screen Shot 2014-06-13 at 3.53.25 PM

Click here to view the full deck on SlideShare

2. Sprinkle in keywords.

Haiku Decks on SlideShare can draw some serious traffic! Be sure to include your important keywords in your deck title and throughout your slide content.

Screen Shot 2014-06-13 at 3.43.06 PM

Click here to view the full deck on SlideShare

3. Break out the multiline slides.

SlideShare is a great place to make use of multiline slides, which give you a bit more room to flesh out an idea, showcase an inspiring quote, or capture a mission statement. (Keep in mind that currently Public Notes are not uploaded to SlideShare, so you want to make sure you’re capturing a complete thought on each slide.)

Screen Shot 2014-06-13 at 4.02.31 PM

Click here to view the full deck on SlideShare

4. Optimize your layouts.

Haiku Deck’s different text layouts allow you to customize the placement of your text. For Haiku Decks shared on SlideShare, we favor layouts that place your text toward the middle and top of your slides (this keeps the Creative Commons licensing information from overlapping with your slide text).

Screen Shot 2014-06-13 at 3.35.15 PM
Click to view the full deck on SlideShare

5. Include your contact information on the last slide.

When creating and publishing your Haiku Deck on SlideShare, the normal final slide with your contact information will not be displayed. So be sure to add a wrap-up slide with any contact information you’d like to share with your audience. (We actually like to do this for all of our Haiku Decks!)

Screen Shot 2014-06-11 at 4.06.33 PM

Click to view the full deck on SlideShare

Your Turn!

Now that you can easily create and share Haiku Decks from either site, there’s no reason not to set your story free! If you’ve shared a Haiku Deck on SlideShare, we’d love to see it — just leave us a comment below.

An Awesome Five-Minute Method to Promote Your Blog

We’ve long been a fan of incorporating visuals into blogging and marketing efforts. Images not only improve the appearance of your blog post, adding color and grabbing attention — they have been shown to drive engagement and social sharing among your readers.

But recently we’ve noticed some creative thinkers in our community using Haiku Deck in some cool ways to promote their blog content. Here are a few of our favorites.

Method 1: Create Custom Visuals to Drive Traffic

Links alone are boring, but links with beautiful images get noticed. The content managers at Bruce Clay, Inc. use Haiku Deck to create one-slide custom visuals to promote blog content on their social media channels. Here’s an example from Google+, where gorgeous visuals really shine.

The Haiku Deck slide crisply captures the blog content in a way that’s easy to read and understand, and definitely stands out in the stream. To this, we say +1!

Tips: Showcasing a beautiful image with minimal text is your goal here. You can import your own image, or use our Creative Commons image search to pick out an image that perfectly captures the topic of your post to use as the background. You’ll then want to include the title of your post  with a minimal amount of text — think of it like a headline.

Method 2: Create a Slideshow Summary to Share with a Larger Audience

The team at PGi uses Haiku Deck to create awesome slideshow summaries that they embed right in their blog post and upload to SlideShare to gain more traction. Uploading to SlideShare makes it easy to share widely — they’ll tweet it and post it on Google+, LinkedIn, and other social media channels to really cast a wide net.

Below is their slideshow summary based on their original blog post here.

Tips: Here, you’re basically creating a preview of your post that summarizes your ideas and piques interest. You can include intriguing pull quotes and interesting data points. Blog content focused on a list of tips or how-to steps lends itself beautifully to this format. Be sure to include a link back to your blog — you can either highlight it on a slide (using a link shortener here helps) or include it in the Notes field.

Method 3: Create a Video to Cross-Promote on Your Social Media Platforms

Videos allow you to expand your cross-promotion efforts of your content onto YouTube, and provides you with another content piece to promote on your other social media platforms. Here’s another great example from Bruce Clay Inc. — check out how they’ve turned their Haiku Deck recap summarizing a blog post on 6 ways to repurpose blog content into a video.

how to promote your blog

Tips: One of the great things about YouTube videos is that they can sync with your Google+ page, making it super easy for your followers to share and comment. Also try adding music for an extra element of fun or add narration to include more supporting details, and make sure to include a link back to the blog post in the info box. Converting a Haiku Deck into a video is quite simple, and we’ve written a helpful article on how to do that here.

How to Promote Your Blog – Additional Resources

And of course, if there’s ever anything we can help you out with, drop us a line!

A Field Guide to Haiku Deck Slide Types

Bar graph or pie chart? Text block or headline? If you’re looking for the perfect way to communicate your message — simply, beautifully, and effectively — be sure to take a spin through our field guide to the seven Haiku Deck slide types. You’ll see examples and get expert tips for making the most of each type.

Haiku Deck slide types

Click to view the full Haiku Deck with Notes

I love the flexibility of these simple, yet versatile, slide types. You can also get creative — stat charts can be a fun way to showcase words as well as numbers, for example. The multiline text layout is super useful for quotes, short paragraphs, or even haikus.

Formatting is also a snap —  I no longer get frustrated with having to manually resize each text box I create, and I no longer resort to the “trial and error” method for finding the perfect font size, since Haiku Deck takes care of that automatically.

Additional resources

Let us know your thoughts!

Do you have a favorite slide type or have a slide type that you’d like to see in Haiku Deck? Let us know in the comments! And as usual, if you have any questions, feel free to drop us a line anytime.

How To Host a Twitter Chat with Style

Quiet chaos — that’s the phrase we tend to use to capture the distinct energy of a Twitter chat. {Also, fun!} For making new connections and getting a fresh flow of inspiration, we love a good Twitter chat as much as you do. We also wanted to share our tips for using Haiku Deck to simplify the task of organizing and promoting your chat, so you can keep your focus on the connecting and getting inspired part.

Promote Your Chat

Use Haiku Deck to spread the word about your chat in a visual format that will stand out and get people engaged in your topic. It’s a great way to call out the the Twitter handles of the hosts/moderators and any guests, the date and time (don’t forget to mention the time zone!), and of course, the hashtag. Here’s a simple Haiku Deck template we’ve created to make this super easy.


Twitter Chat Publicity Template – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Introduce Your Questions

Want to really wow your chat participants? Introduce your questions with visuals, not just text. We recommend creating a slide for each question, exporting your deck to PowerPoint/Keynote, and then saving your slides as images.

You can then simply upload the image along with your tweet when you schedule your questions. (Bonus: You can do all this ahead of time, and it only takes a few minutes!)

how to host a twitter chat

Click to view the full deck of questions we created for #1to1ipadchat

Recap the Highlights

Haiku Deck is also a quick and easy way to share the killer sound bites and takeaways from your chat. The example below from Lisa Buyer‘s #SEOChat recap deck has a combination of imported images that she’s created on her own to introduce each question, with screenshots taken right from Twitter highlighting answers from a few of her chat participants.

You can then tweet this recap out to share with chat participants and those who missed it, along with sharing and posting it on your other social media channels.


#SEOchat – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

We hope this gives you some fresh new ideas for your next Twitter chat — and if you use any of these techniques, be sure to let us know so we can share with our creative community. And as usual, if you have any questions, we’re always here to help!

Additional Resources

More Inspiration

 

How to Promote Your Podcast with Haiku Deck

As the age of digital storytelling opens up new possibilities for sharing content with the world, you may find yourself wondering how to promote your podcast. Research shows that people love images: they grab your attention, tug at your heart strings, and encourage interaction more quickly and easily than text can.

So, what’s a great way to promote your podcast by using beautiful images viewers will love?

Use Haiku Deck to Generate Buzz

Using Haiku Deck is an awesome way to make a delicious-looking appetizer for your podcast quickly and with little effort. Creating a full deck or a single slide intended to drive traffic to your podcast is a snap, and whatever you create can easily be shared to Facebook, Tweeted, pinned on Pinterest boards, etc.

Example: BreveTV

Debra Trappen and Kelly Mitchell use Haiku Deck weekly to create single slides representing each new episode of their video conversations for BreveTV. The image is shared on Facebook and other social networks with information about the series, links to the videos and related resources, and discussion topics users can join in on.

How to Promote Your Podcast example: BreveTV

The photos grab their followers’ attention, leading them to read the relevant text and learn how to check out each episode. The excitement generated by the eye-catching images and discussion topics encourages users to share with their social groups, effectively providing free advertising for the series.

Example: Tim Blankenship, Divorce661

Tim Blankenship of Divorce661 has an extensive series addressing all kinds of questions anyone might have while considering or going through a divorce. He uses Haiku Deck to generate title cards, text, and supporting information for his podcasts:

Divorce661 example - How to Promote Your Podcast with Haiku Deck

By using Haiku Deck, Tim has a fast and easy way to create clean, attractive content to balance out the video footage in his episodes. Like the BreveTV example above, the slides are an easy way to soak up attention on social media sites. They can also be used as highly-readable thumbnails for each video, as opposed to blurrier and less-informative video screenshots.

How to Promote Your Podcast with Haiku Deck

There are a few ways to approach using Haiku Deck to promote your podcast. Feel free to look over the following steps and mix and match them in whatever ways work for you!

Create a single-slide call to action

  • Use the free Creative Commons image search tool to find a gorgeous background to represent this episode’s focus
  • Use the header/subheader layout to pack a punch, sum it up, and keep your text to a minimum
  • Include your podcast’s title, and any pertinent hashtags, in case viewers only read the slide (and skip any accompanying text)

Take advantage of SEO

Make an episode summary

A lot of people appreciate a summary of each episode. You can create Haiku Decks that summarize the contents of each episode so that viewers know what to expect — sort of like the description for videos on Netflix. Use public notes to provide links to any resources that seem helpful: the websites of people you’re interviewing, the live stream for your upcoming episode, the product you’re reviewing, etc.

Choose how to link to your content

There are two ways to share what you create in Haiku Deck, and use it to generate traffic to your podcast: via its URL, or as a screenshot.

Link right to your deck: 

Share a screenshot of your slide:

  • Save your slide as an image to share
  • Great way to simply grab attention
  • Add any supplemental information and links within the description accompanying your image
  • Make sure to include a link to your deck if you used any free images, so as to follow the Creative Commons image license terms

Share, share, share!

Once you’ve got a great deck or slide representing your podcast, spread the word! Share to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. Find fun ways to encourage viewers to comment and share, such as including a discussion question for them to answer.

Additional Resources

Once you’re ready to promote your podcast, blog, etc. using Haiku Deck, here are a few more articles that may prove useful:

And of course, if there’s ever anything we can help you out with, drop us a line!

Six Simple Suggestions for Poetic Presentations

Poetic Presentations

Presentations are pervasive, perhaps unavoidable, in modern business culture. We depend upon them to document details and dictate discussion. We use them to inform and to teach.

But shouldn’t presentations also inspire? Can they be evocative as well as informational?

I believe they can, and I think a lot about the qualities that make presentations feel poetic rather than pedestrian.

Poetic Building Blocks

I’ll spare you the cliche of starting with the dictionary definition (see #2 below), but most descriptions touch on these essential components of poetry: the expression of feelings and ideas, distinctive style, rhythm, beauty, intensity of emotion, and brevity.

1. Expression

To me, the most important element of a poetic presentation is a single, powerful idea to build around, to expand upon, to infuse every aspect of your creation. Think of this as your creative hook or your angle. Without a strong underlying inspiration or theme, presentations can end up feeling rambling, jumbled, or disjointed — just a sequence of slides.

The Dragonfly Effect, an inspiring book and blog about how social media can drive social change, is a great example of how powerful a cohesive creative hook can be. I incorporated beautiful dragonfly imagery into this presentation I made to share the team’s unique approach.


Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app

Poetry in Practice: When you’re crafting a presentation, give yourself some time up front to identify a theme you can carry through. This could be a metaphorical idea, a powerful phrase, or some other unifying creative thread. I often get my ideas from exploring in the Haiku Deck image search.

2. Distinctive Style

There are a wide variety of unique poetic forms, each with its own mood, character, and general format. The same is true for presentations. Whether you are sharing a lighthearted list or making an impassioned case for a cause you care about, select a style that fits and carry it through cohesively. Each presentation you create should feel distinct, in a way that suits its unique purpose.

The other important point here is to be distinctive — which means taking special care to avoid cliche in subject matter, wording, and image choice.

I love how Mel Carson uses black & white portraits in this presentation promoting his book, Pioneers of Digital. The overall effect feels unified and perfectly tailored to its subject.


Pioneers Of Digital – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Poetry in Practice: Instead of templatizing your presentations, select fonts and images to reinforce your mood and theme. As you develop each presentation, keep formatting and even image palettes as cohesive as possible to sustain the mood.

3. Rhythm

Poetry is strongly associated with rhythm, with cadence, with well-chosen words. You can play with alliteration (the repetition of consonants), assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds), or even rhyme as you title your talk and script your slides.

Zooming out, try to give your presentation as a whole a sense of rhythm, structure, and flow. You can do this by repeating visual or text elements at regular intervals — for example, solid-color slides to introduce new sections, or a short, simple string of text repeated throughout for poetic emphasis.

“Sculpting an Elephant,” by Barry Casey, is a wonderful example of poetic language and rhythmic flow in practice:


Sculpting An Elephant – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Poetry in Practice: Allow yourself time, and a few edit passes, to explore possibilities for word choice — you might even use an online dictionary, thesaurus, or rhyming dictionary for ideas. If you land on a poetic, powerful phrase, try repeating it at intervals throughout your presentation to underscore its rhythmic resonance.

4. Beauty

Beauty alone can’t carry an unsubstantial idea, but a beautifully presented idea can blossom into something bigger, more powerful. In a presentation, beauty may take the form of evocative, well-chosen images that deepen your meaning, or it could be an elegant metaphorical idea that intrigues and illuminates.

Take a look at how Brandon George uses clever images with a playful spin in this information-sharing presentation, “How to Get Ideas.” It’s a very creative take on beauty!


How to Get Ideas – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Poetry in Practice: Use high-quality imagery, and don’t rush the selection of your images — they should be more than just decoration. Be sure each image you choose deepens and extends your meaning or tells a story.

5. Emotion

In the age of big data, it’s common to value information over emotion, and to structure presentations accordingly. Yet in the words of Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal, “Humans simply aren’t moved to action by ‘data dumps,’ dense PowerPoint slides, or spreadsheets packed with figures. People are moved by emotion.”

“Humans simply aren’t moved to action by ‘data dumps,’ dense PowerPoint slides, or spreadsheets packed with figures. People are moved by emotion.” — Jonathan Gottschall

When we celebrated our company’s one-year anniversary last summer, I wanted to acknowledge the milestone with a mix of compelling stats and stories. Here’s how I wove the two together:


Celebrating One Year of Haiku Deck – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

For another example, check out how a creative teacher infuses a basic scientific formula with storytelling in this educational presentation:


Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app

Poetry in Practice: No matter how data-heavy your presentation is, your message will be more memorable if you can turn your stats in stories. Emotion and information can work together to elevate your key points.

6. Brevity

Certainly there are grand, epic forms of poetry, but most poetic forms favor brevity. Keeping your presentation concise and focused will nearly always make it feel more poetic.

This personality-packed presentation, created to cap off what was surely an epic Startup Weekend event, is an excellent example of how little text you actually need to get the point across.

Poetry in Practice: Instead of trying to pack in more — more words, more ideas, more thoughts, more data points — see what you can remove. Give your ideas some breathing room, so they can bloom.

In Closing

Here’s one last example I’d like to share, in which I tried to incorporate all of these poetic building blocks to some extent. I created it for presentation expert Nolan Haims, based on a blog post he wrote that inspired me. (Sending this to him felt a bit like cooking dinner for a famous chef, and I offered to make any changes he requested, but he liked it!)


Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app

There’s no foolproof formula to creating poetic presentations — like poetry itself, there are plenty of forms to explore and ways to experiment. But I hope these poetic building blocks can plant some seeds for future presentation inspiration.

Do you have favorite examples or poetic presentations, or ideas to share? Let me know in the comments!

And if you appreciate what we’re doing, please cast your vote for poetic presentations in the Webby Awards — every vote makes a big difference!

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Death by PowerPoint, Deconstructed

A Comprehensive Guide to Diagnosing and Fixing the 15 Worst Slide Problems

Last time we checked, there were 13.3 million Google search results for “Death by PowerPoint.

     13.3 MILLION.

And more likely than not you’ve experienced it — that sinking feeling when someone says “Let me just fire up my slides,” you see a hodgepodge of bullets and clip art framed in an overbranded corporate template, and you know instantly you’re not going to get the next hour of your life back.

Death by Powerpoint example

Death by Powerpoint Exhibit A, via Boing Boing

It’s worth noting that we have nothing against PowerPoint itself — in fact, PowerPoint can be used to create some incredibly awesome presentations, if you have strong design skills or you know someone who does.

But let’s face it — as a culture, we’ve developed some pretty bad, and pervasive, habits in the PowerPoint department, and the truly excellent ones feel like the exception rather than the rule.

Continue reading

Missing Vizify? How To Create an Attention-Grabbing Visual Resume

Our friends at Vizify announced recently that they have been acquired by Yahoo and will be shutting down the site. They were awesome enough to recommend Haiku Deck as an alternate service for creating standout visual resumes. (Hai-5, Team Vizify!)

Like Vizify, we believe there are many compelling reasons to present your story visually.

  • Images engage your audience’s emotions and make your story more memorable.
  • Presenting content visually helps you stand out from the crowd.
  • Visual content is easier to consume on mobile devices.

In an age of information overload, visual content is an increasingly powerful way to communicate, and we’re here to make that part simple and fun. To make your transition from Vizify — or your leap to visual storytelling —  as easy as possible, we’ve created two flexible Haiku Deck presentation templates you can use to whip out a visual resume in no time flat.

Create a Professional Profile

Here’s a template you can use to create a stunning visual resume or professional profile. Continue reading

PowerPoint for iPad? Try the Haiku Deck Way

PowerPoint for iPad

There’s been a lot of talk in the news lately about the long-awaited arrival of PowerPoint for iPad, and as you might expect, we have a thought or two on the subject.

Should I Use PowerPoint for iPad?

It depends. We have long believed in the flexibility and power of the iPad as tool for content creation and productivity, not just content consumption. We love being able to work on a presentation whenever and wherever inspiration strikes, whether it’s at a coffee shop, on a plane, or curled up on the couch while half-watching House Hunters International. That’s why we started with Haiku Deck for iPad.

So we are all for creating and sharing presentations on an iPad, but we’ve also worked hard to make that experience uniquely tailored to the tablet — simple, fluid, and even fun. One key difference between Haiku Deck and PowerPoint is that we build the experience around images, not words.

We build the experience around images, not words.

We do this because we believe that people are tired of seeing presentation slides crammed with text (and, even worse, presenters who read that text word for word). Dave Paradi’s Annoying PowerPoint Survey provides more detail on this subject. Here’s our Haiku Deck version of the findings:

PowerPoint for iPad: Annoying PowerPoint Survey Results

Click to view the full Haiku Deck with Notes

Like many presentation design experts, we believe that images speak to our emotions and make what we have to say more engaging and memorable, and we’ve purposefully designed our Creative Commons image search to trigger creative flow.

Images speak to our emotions and make what we have to say more engaging and memorable.

Continue reading

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