PechaKucha! So what is it? Hint: it’s not an exotic breed of small dog.

It’s a Japanese word that means ‘chit chat’. And it’s also a global phenomenon where people from all walks of life present 20 PowerPoint slides, with each slide showing for 20 seconds each. About anything at all! No, this is most certainly not TED.

The 20×20 format is the brainchild of two architects and who, back in 2003, basically decided ‘less blah-blah-blah and more oomph!’ when it comes to PowerPoint presentations. It’s taken off like a rocket, and now PechaKucha 20×20 nights are taking place in over 436 cities around the world – there’s bound to be one happening near you! It’s great for presentation designers….

From a PowerPoint design perspective, attending a PechaKucha night is a good place to find out what works and what doesn’t when telling a story using presentation software. This is not the place for long bulleted lists and complex info graphics. And because ANYONE can present – even a housewife who’s showing off her fabulous cupcake baking skills (see, we told you this isn’t TED), there’s no excuse that you can’t too. And perfect for public speakers!

If you’re a bit of a nervous Nelly when it comes to public speaking, find a PechaKucha 20×20 night in your area, sign up and dust off the old PowerPoint. Even if you’re just slapping together the photos from your scuba-diving trip! At only 20 seconds a slide, that’s less than seven minutes in total that you’re standing up there. And there’s no time for cheesy fade-outs and whooshing Word art; all those things that give PowerPoint a bad name… To find out more about PechaKucha 20×20, and how you can take part in one, visit www.pecha-kucha.org.

Here’s a shocker… almost no one is going to read your company’s annual report. Why? Because it’s boring!

Aim of publishing an annual report

Consider why you put your annual report ‘out there’ in the first place. It comes down to two reasons: one, you want to make your end-of-year financial statements known, and two, it’s your chance to market your company’s strategy.

If you want those numbers and flowery statements to pack more punch with your stakeholders, ditch the fancy printed packs. An electronic, interactive annual report is the way to go. What you don’t want it a simple PDF version of your annual report that can be read on an iPad or another e-reader. That’s so bleh. We said: interactive. You can even include multimedia content like a video message from the CEO, a poll where shareholders can vote, or a button where readers can subscribe to your company newsletter.

Reasons to design for the iPad

Annual reports are rich in content, and a professional presentation designer can transform those long-winded corporate write-ups and financial statements into prose and graphics that pop!

Presenting your annual report as an iPad app increases your company’s credibility

• The audience can interact with the content, as opposed to a static printed copy
• You choose what information you’d like to highlight for your investors
• Graphics communicate information better than long-form writing
• The content will still be available offline once downloaded

Things to keep in mind…

Your main audience will be shareholders, potential investors and analysts. Include a search function in your annual report’s iPad app to make it easier for them to find info. Also, make sure there are links within the content that will lead them to more detailed information, whether it’s on your company website or a downloadable PDF.

Ideaseed’s iPad app design team transforms content like presentations, catalogues and annual reports into riveting, interactive material that makes you want to munch popcorn as you view it on your tablet’s screen. They’ve got five rules of thumb that translate into better content for iPads.

Hello, anybody out there…
Who exactly is going to be reading this content? And what is it they’re hoping to glean from it? Defining your audience and its information needs is the first step to designing a great iPad app.

What’s the story?
Get out a big, black marker and some A3 paper and map out the content’s storyline – yes, like a comic strip. How do you intend to walk your audience through your company’s brochure, or year-end report? This simple exercise will also help you nail down the interactive elements needed in your iPad app.

Less is more
Don’t overwhelm your user with all manner of toggles and controls – they don’t need to feel like they’re piloting the Starship Enterprise as they work through your content! Keep the layout and navigation simple.

Vertical or horizontal
With the iPad’s nifty ability to showcase everything in one of two orientations, ask yourself: which way is the end-user most likely to prefer looking at this content? You need to think about how your content will display both vertically and horizontally. However, don’t make your portrait and landscape display options too drastically different from each other – the user craves a consistent, familiar experience.

Think with your fingertips
Imagine touching the iPad’s screen as you navigate through the content. What would be the most natural physical gesture? For instance, page flips are bettering than scrolling endless through content. This is a great example of a duplicating a ‘real life’ action on an iPad. You don’t scroll down through the magazines next to the loo, do you?

Stage fright! Power failures! Projectors that just won’t connect! Vengeful IT guys… Oh yes, things can go horribly wrong when you’re presenting your slides.

In the case of the latter, CNET recently reported on an angry ex-employee, who just happened to be the IT manager, and broke into his CEO’s hard drive, adding naughty pictures to a PowerPoint presentation gave to a board of directors. Yikes! It happens.

So what do you do when things go belly-up? Ideaseed has some pointers to handle the four most common disasters that happening when you’re standing Up There.

I forgot my lines!
Good presentation practice is to only have 10 slides, and keep your talk to no longer than 15 to 20 minutes – so that’s not too much to parrot-learn. However, if you need that safety net, put the main points of your speech in the Notes section at the bottom of each PowerPoint slide so that you can refer to them if you need to. But DON’T leave the Notes section visible to your audience, and DON’T read from your slides – it makes you look uncertain and unprepared.

Power failure!
99% of the time your slide deck is stored on your laptop or iPad. Never walk into a boardroom or a client’s office without your presentation device fully charged. It’s good to hand out printed and bound copies of your slides with your audience AFTER your talk, but in this case won’t you be glad you had them on hand to give out BEFORE, just this once?

What’s with this projector?
Either invest in a mini projector to keep in your laptop case, or ask what make or model projector is in the boardroom a week before your talk. There is almost always an assistant to help you set up, but arrive 30 minutes early in case you need to do it yourself, or would like to set up the room.

You left the PowerPoint file at the office…
Ideaseed suggests you keep a neat Desktop, and put your correctly named PowerPoint file in the top right corner – so that it’s easy to find and you don’t accidentally open the wrong file in front of the audience. Also keep your PowerPoint or Keynote file on a cheap flash disc, which you can leave with the client if necessary. And to be extra safe, keep a copy in the cloud – on Google Docs or Dropbox.

What’s the worst thing that’s happened to you while you were doing a presentation?

So, being a design agency, we often need to trawl through bucketloads of stock imagery to find that perfect pic. Fotalia recently offered us a free trial of their online library (who’d say no to free stock, right?) and sold themselves to us by letting us know that they’re “the largest image bank of free and most affordable royalty free photos and illustrations perfect for any medium, web or print”.

Now, we hate to diss anyone, but whilst their website was easy to navigate, clean and appealing, and they certainly do have a ton of stock (12,278,167 images, vectors and footage at last count) the resulting matches to our searches were a little random and didn’t seem to deliver quite as many results as what we were used to with our other suppliers.

However, we must confess, we didn’t use them as extensively as we could have and perhaps with a little more time (and effort on our behalf) we might have been able to find that winged chihauhua-cross-labrador in a wetsuit with a rose in its mouth and black pearls around its neck.

Or not.

But when there’s love to spread, we’re right there spreading it: the lovely people at Fotalia are keen for the readers of our blog to give their site a go and have offered 2 coupons for the first two interested parties to email us through our website. Each coupon will entitle you to two weeks access to Fotolia and 3 image downloads per day. Something for nothing, anyone? Yes please.

June 28 – mark that date in your calendar. That’s when it’s out with the not-so-catchy-named BPOS (Business Productivity Office Suite) and in with Office 365 – Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity suite. The public beta’s been out since April, and Microsoft is offering a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

So what does this mean?

• It’s a subscription service, and depending on the package, you’ll be forking out between US$6 and US$24 a month.
• It’s not just an online version of Office 2010, and has oodles more functionality than Google Apps. Sure, you have Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but it’s also bundled with Microsoft Exchange for email, SharePoint for collaborating and sharing, and Lync Online.

Wading into the cloud is a huge step for Microsoft, and there will no doubt be teething problems. (There are plenty of chuckles about whether or not Office 365 will work in a leap year, or if Microsoft will demand a special licence just for 29 February 2012.)

But is Office 365 worth it for creative professionals?

There are benefits aplenty. For professional document designers, formatting remains consistent no matter what device you’re using to view pages – even from a smartphone, on any operating system. And SharePoint means that you can collaborate and make light edits to documents no matter where you are, by setting up a Team Site. Unless, of course, you are internet-less…

Speaking of collaboration, Lync Online makes video conferencing, online meetings and instant messaging a snap! Especially for project teams who have creative professionals working together all over the world, as is often the case in the modern agency environment.

But many reviewers of the beta version are suggesting that you should still keep a full version of Office 2010 Professional installed locally.

What have you heard about Office 365? Are you going to sign up, or wait and see?