Lincoln, looking pretty hip

This is actually the graphic that made me want to start this blog. I saw it on a huge banner while walking uptown, past the New York Historical Society, and it stopped me in my tracks. I love the stark simplicity and how it combines an old image with really current design. It's hard to see here, but in the print ad the white parts are actually just a bit yellowed (more than the natural color of the newsprint), combining with the muted blue and red to evoke a 150-year-old cotton American flag. I'm not sure I'll ever get to use design like this in a PowerPoint presentation, but it's an inspiration.

 

And while I'm at it, the header on the New York Historical Society website is pretty cool, too. Is there a term for text that dips into white space below like that? I've tried to do it a few times, but it never looks quite right for me.

Old, but excellent post on good PowerPoint design

I just discovered this post on Juice Analytics (actually, just discovered Juice Analytics) and it's too good not to share. It's generally about the "less is more" design philosophy as applied to PowerPoint. My inclination is always toward clean, elegant simplicity, although I do believe that some repeated graphical elements can be valuable for branding and visual interest. I think this post shows how the impact of one strong image or one strong sentence is very powerful.

 

Images copyright Juice Analytics

Republic of Tea Graph

I just received a catalog from Republic of Tea. I like the way the bars fade in from nowhere.

Boston Scientific template

I love when a client has a website with strong design elements. There's a lot of value in keeping a company's branding uniform across different media, so I try to create a PowerPoint template that feels like part of the family. It's actually a lot of fun to figure out how to massage existing design into PowerPoint that's useful and versatile. Often, the designers who created the website and other design collateral are long gone, so I will reverse-engineer their work and put it back together for my uses. Here's an example with Boston Scientific.

A chunk of their website:

Similar themes in their most recent annual report:

Finally, some very nice green bullets, also from the annual report:

And here's what I came up with:

Welch's website top banner