My kids toys - A treasure box for PowerPoint presentations

Dumbledore

A post on what I discovered while taking care of my sick kid for a couple of days and how it has taken my PowerPoint presentations to a new dimension. Good or not, judge yourselves, at least I like them.

You got to admit, those LEGO minifigures are cool!



I have during the last couple of weeks put together a number of different PowerPoint presentations. I have also seen a huge amount of tips on how to design your presentations on the web. It's always interesting to see how other people think when they design their presentations. However it seems that most people don't design at all, or at least to a very minimal extent.

For many years I have seen myself as a person who is not very visual in my thinking. I have never been interested in art and don't ask me to draw anything because you will not be able to identify what I have scribbled down on the paper.

But when I started to work on my presentations I realized that working with pictures and images are actually quite fun. It brings another dimension to my presentations.

Up until now I have usually mixed text with images I found on the web. That is a tricky business since there are those copyright laws that you have to take into account. So I needed another way to find pictures to use. I visited the image bank we have on our Intranet. I work at a furniture company so there were basically tons of images of chairs, tables, rugs, pillows, sofas, et cetera. And, of course, these images are used in basically every presentation that is created at our company. I needed something else...

When I was home taking care of my son who was ill the other day I found the thing I had been looking for, his toys. They are fantastic to use to represent all kinds of things. Below are some topics I will talk about next week and the images I use to highlight the topics:

Steering group

Working group

IT-tools

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Sub process

Senior co-worker

And I can assure you, there are tons of other toys that I will use in the future to represent my topics.

At least to me this is much more appealing than bullet lists, flow charts, diagrams and tables. I am actually completely moving away from using text at all in my presentations. I use images to highlight the topics and then I talk about these topics. 

Another thing this adds is humor. Often I talk of very hard and "boring" stuff and I need to make the content a bit lighter. As I am no comedian I use the images instead to create this humor and also to de-dramatize the topics a bit as they are sometimes a bit scary for some of in the audience.

Ok now I have shared a little bit of how I work with my presentations. 

What is your view on this? 

Am I totally unprofessional when using pictures of LEGO minifigures and toys?

Is text necessary in PowerPoint presentations?

Should I continue doing this or should I take a step back and do what everyone else is doing?

Next week I have a presentation where I will only use images of toys and no words. I am really looking forward to see which reactions I get on this presentation. I will write a post and tell you how it went.

Thanks for reading,

/Mattias