Presentations have gained a lot of prominence recently. As a matter of fact, they have taken on a life of their own. They’ve gone far beyond the scope of what presentations originally meant: Conveying an idea or demonstrating a product to a live audience. Visuals that used to serve as an explanatory aid to a speaker (not to mention the speakers who used/abused them as a teleprompter) have long since evolved into standalone slide shows. This was made possible through the power of desktop computing putting design tools like Powerpoint in the hands of you, me and Joe from Accounting.

Thus, today the word “presentation” may refer to the visuals alone as well as to the act of presenting. One caveat of this is that the presentations you view on services like Slideshare, SlideRocket or Prezi serve completely different purposes than visuals you would prepare for a live presentation. Another problem is that with a growing amount of services, file formats and platforms, you will face technical difficulties in making your visuals accessible to all parties. In case you did not know this: You cannot rely on Powerpoint to display your slides the same way across computers.

Avoiding Presentation Portability Issues

It all starts with the idea that the authoring tool for your slides need not be the tool for presenting them. Would it surprise you to learn that I have used the Acrobat Reader for high stakes presentations? Or an image viewer like IrfanView?

When you can’t control the setup in which your material will be displayed, but want to make sure that the projected slides are a pixel perfect match of your design regardless of OS and software, exporting your slides to .PDF or high resolution images might be your best bet. Sure, you’ll lose the added benefit of animations or presenters’ notes that presentation software would bring, but you won’t lose sleep over conversion issues. A rare font that might not be on the host computer or your diagrams turning into a garbled mess due to a different rendering engine of the host OS? Not your problem. Anything that allows fullscreen advance through a set of images will display your deck just fine.

The only thing you need to do is prepare your slides to work as a sequence of static images and the look of your presentation will stay intact, no matter what. Unless there is a compelling reason for you not to use images in place of slides, like in-house collaboration, doing so can save you some headaches. The beauty of desktop presentation software is that it allows for both export of slides to images as well as import of images. Hence, you may even use your images as slides in the slideware of your choice with all the comfort that entails.

Going One Step Further

While some online services allow you to embed your visuals in flash format, you could just as well harness the power of modern web browsers and create an html-based presentation. With some JavaScript thrown in for good measure you may even have some advanced interactive effects. If you think this is out of your reach, just you wait:

Apple has started developing a platform for you to publish your Keynote presentations straight to the web but so far it only works for iWork users on Safari. If you are feeling adventurous you could instead use the aforementioned Inkscape and the JessyInk extension to create something a little more suave than this: JessyInk-Demo (This link requires modern browsers and enabled JavaScript to work. Advance with your “right” key). JessyInk can even do zooming like Prezi.

Presentation tools like these might be experimental still, but the next step in presentation design is clearly on the horizon. What will you do to get your message across?

Guest Author: Jakob Jochmann

Jakob Jochmann is exploring meaning in communication. He develops frameworks to streamline the transfer of information. Apart from dabbling in semantics and the social aspects of media he has a penchant for design and presentations. His blog can be found at http://blog.jochmann.me and he shares 140 characters about cognitive science, design and other things he likes at @Jochmann

Image courtesy of Jonathan Steffens on Flickr