episode 20: Holiday Edition

Summary 
In the final episode of 2016, the hosts fill the hour with holiday related conversation! Along with the holiday discussions, there is plenty of design talk, great design gift ideas, and plenty of presentation design holiday cheer!

 

Discussion

What do you do for the holidays?

  • Nolan: Splitting time between families for Christmas/Hanukkah, and in Key West for New Year’s.
  • Sandy: For my Presentation Wiz business, I will continue to offer my animated holiday greeting cards created in PowerPoint, free to whomever wants them. You’ll find a download link in the Show Notes. This year we are hosting around 20 family members for dinner on Christmas Day.
  • Troy: On the business side, TLC Creative designs and sends out a fun personalized holiday card to many of our clients and friends. We also give time to everyone on the design team to create a custom holiday themed PowerPoint animation that we stitch all together and post online. The Show Notes, TLC Creative Facebook and The PowerPoint Blog will all have a link to it. We also have the entire TLC team and their families over to our home for a great holiday dinner and an amazing White Elephant gift exchange. On the personal side, we live in one of those Christmas lights and decorations neighborhoods, so we go all out with lights on the house and outdoor decorations and our own holiday wonderland inside.

 

2017 Predictions in the Pres World

  • Nolan: More misleading slides and charts in the world (fake-ish news)
  • Troy: 3D, better charting with Data Viz focus help
  • Sandy: Slow death of iconography?

 

What are plans for company website, blogs, LinkedIn and other online destinations next year?

  • Troy: We have a few projects that are services TLC would like to launch that have been on the back burner. I would like to finally have at least 1-2 go live. We will try to be more organized with the year’s blog posts, get more portfolio and case studies on the TLC Creative website, along with ambitions of being more organized and consistent with social media.
  • Nolan: I need to get back to blogging more, and also work on updating a couple parts of the website.
  • Sandy: I’ve been working on my website update for the last year (I’m not kidding). So my goal is to have the new site live soon.

 

Looking back at 2016, what was one of the best presentation projects (you can talk about)?

  • Nolan: Continued work with Upstream USA.
  • Sandy: My favorites range from the templates for Ameriprise to the self-running presentation I did for my godson, the founder of Dahlman brothers, when he launched his fundraiser on Kickstarter.
  • Troy: Jacob Greene, a very inspirational presenter, asked us to completely overhaul his presentation for a Ted Talk and I think that was a very rewarding project. Also one of awards shows we did the visual design on was a large multi-screen event where our PowerPoint got to take over all 180′ of convex screen. We designed these amazing visually immersive background designs, and it was one of our first big uses of Morph with content moving across the huge screens is pretty awesome, especially when you look at how easy it was to develop.

 

What does 2017 look like?

  • Nolan: A focus on a lot more training programs.
  • Troy: We are focusing on the business side of things.
  • Sandy: Well, I hope to have the Microsoft Surface on my desk, but I’m not sure. Maybe less travel and hopefully more personal & professional development.

 

Best new techie item of the year for you?

  • Nolan: My 65″ Samsung TV in our home.
  • Sandy: I’m still searching for the ultimate smart watch…
  • Troy: It’s kind of boring, but I am going with SSD hard drives. At the very beginning of this year we made an investment in lots of hard drives and updated every computer, designer and show to all SSD drives. The performance boost from traditional hard drives is just amazing and we literally squeezed another year of use from our existing computer fleet.

 

What can we say about The Presentation Podcast and 2017 – the future?

  • Sandy: More guest speakers, experts in varying areas of the presentation business. We invite listeners to suggest podcast topics.
  • Nolan: I am ready for it to continue and just get better and better.
  • Troy: We have topics to carry us almost through the entire year already.

 

Any fun Christmas or New Year’s plans?

  • Nolan: Key West.
  • Sandy: Trip to Minneapolis to be with some long-time friends.
  • Troy: A family vacation in Colorado for Christmas at my sister’s home with her family, then skiing in the Rocky Mountains for several days.

 

What is one feature, or update, you feel stands out for you in 2016?

  • Nolan: Hands down – Morph.
  • Sandy: I use Morph the most but I really want to work with the Zoom tool more.
  • Troy: Morph animation.

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