08 June 2009
Dr Dave Merchant

The global invasion of the bullet-pointed list is mostly the fault of Microsoft for littering PowerPoint with layout options based on the thing, and not much else.

Of course, text has a place, especially when you want your audience to remember a specific phrase or the spelling of a word, but even here we can improve things with a bit of thought.

Sparse text is good; if you show a 30-word quote on a slide, you'll find yourself reading it aloud while everyone else reads it to themselves. For a brief moment you look like a Muppet.

Stick it in the course handout - that's why you printed one after all. If you're actually planning to attend your presentation, then your slide text is not there to convey your message; it's there to keep you and your audience focused on what's coming out of your mouth.

Where you need text lists, and you often will, try gently animating them so only the current item is prominent. This stops review distraction, where people aren't listening to your voice as much as they're scanning their eyes over the other stuff on the screen. Your goal is to keep in sync with the text, but not to be a slave to it. Animation, however, is a black art, beloved by "creative" graphic designer types with strange hair and desks in the basement. Done badly it makes your skin crawl. Slow fly-in text lists are deadly as you have to wait for them to "do their thing". The PowerPoint slide is controlling you, not the other way round.

Always ensure the new item becomes legible very quickly, otherwise people expend brainpower trying to process it, and stop listening. Fly-in text should be almost instant (if used at all). Fade-in text can be a bit slower but, above all, animations must not be distracting (which usually results from trying to patch up an otherwise badly designed presentation - a pig in a wig still tastes of bacon). If it's well executed, people should only semi-notice it's even there, and faster is always better. Watch TV news and take note of how they do their graphics, and note the total lack of bullet points!

Graphic detail

Talking of graphics, appropriate use of drawings, photographs, clip art and even videos does much more than just fill a space to the right of your text.

• They can show something which is impossible to describe in text, such as a building plan or the layout of a control panel.
• Complex ideas are more easily committed to memory as graphics than long sections of text or spoken words.
• Graphics break the flow of a presentation. It's the little pauses and diversions which help people to remember what you're talking about.
• They make it seem like you put effort into the slides (even if you didn't!) and, subconsciously, your audience will feel they should put more effort into listening.
• They are great for anyone whose English isn't perfect.

Above all, they are comment-flexible. Show a bullet-point list and you pretty much have to talk about each one in order, or your audience gets distracted by the mismatch. Show a graphic and you can talk about anything it contains, even if that's not what you originally intended to spend time on.

Quality is important too: a low-grade JPEG image thrown onto a slide screams "I stole this from Google" even if you didn't. Try playing with transparent backgrounds, animating images to full-screen as required and, whatever you do, don't try and draw something complicated inside PowerPoint. If you need a flowchart, use flowchart software. You are only as good as your slides make you look!

Before we start searching for stuff, it's worth considering your slide layout and printed notes. The "busier is better" approach to choosing a design template is hard to resist, but wrong; it's the information on the slide that matters, not the background. Sure, a well designed layout is better than black-on-white, and making your own corporate style is better than picking one from the PowerPoint gallery, but think about legibility. If your background is green, you can't use certain colours of text in case anyone's colour-blind. If it's red, you can't photocopy it.

Make sure the slide works in all lighting conditions and, if need be, keep a high-contrast version to hand for emergencies. If you're making course handouts with the same graphics, check if they work when copied ("for those watching in black and white, the green ball is behind the blue") and really really try to avoid just printing out your slides. Seriously - it saves you doing any work, and looks that way too.

A presentation is built for dynamic delivery, and if so it doesn't work as a printout. The handouts are there to carry the details you didn't mention, explain things in depth, and remind people of what you said. Your slides should not say what you said.

One point though: PowerPoint is not good at video. It'll embed one into a slide if you ask, but scrubbing about in the timeline is nasty (especially if you're using the Presenter View screen or a remote-controller). There are other options if you avoid PowerPoint entirely, but if you're using it with a video clip, make sure the file runs end-to-end without needing to be stopped. Video is demanding on your battered old laptop, so test your slides before using them, including moving back and forth, as it's not uncommon for the entire thing to crash. In some cases you'll find it helps to keep the video file open and paused in a "proper" player, so if PowerPoint throws a hissy fit you can flip to it without trawling through your hard disk in front of 300 people.

Hot property

The point so far is that pretty graphics are a good idea. Imagine you've been told to make a presentation on forklift truck safety, and so you're on the hunt for "stuff". Jazzy, impressive stuff. What's your first stop? Google Images of course! Search term "forklift truck", and you're presented with 714,000 pretty images. Man on a truck. Man not on a truck. Naked person. Truck on another truck. Three forks in a lift. Download, copy, paste, sorted. Yes?

No. Every image you're looking at is subject to copyright, and of those 714,000 only a few hundred are legal for you to use commercially in your training course, student notes, safety poster or company website, and Google will not tell you which. Crucially the UK law changed in 2003 removing the "fair dealing" defence for any training, research and study which is even slightly "commercial" - and that means if you've recently snaffled a photo from the web to use in a training course, or quoted a line from a book or a website in a policy document, then you've probably already broken the law.

Most people didn't even know the rules before they changed, so we've posted a copyright primer on the HSP website (see 'This months tutorials' below) explaining what you can and cannot do, and how an Act of Parliament connects a statue, a London hospital and Julia Roberts. Essential reading for anyone planning to ever quote anything or enter a pub quiz.

The copyright on most books and photographs created in the UK expires 70 years after the author's death, so many old works are in the "public domain" (PD), which means either the copyright has expired or the rights holder has voluntarily released any claim, but either way they can be used freely for any purpose.

If you find a random photo, video or piece of text on the web and can't see who created it, that doesn't mean it's legal to use, and it doesn't have to show the © symbol to be protected. Of course, 99% of the things we want to talk about weren't even invented 70 years ago, so we need to use copyrighted work, but there are simple ways to stay legal.

The first method is just to ask the person who owns the image, text or video for permission. If it's an official work from a manufacturer they'll often be happy for it to be used, provided you're not being critical or using it to promote a rival product, and may send you lots of better quality photos to use instead. Never be afraid to ask. They can only say yes or no, and you started from "no" in the first place.

Just behind PD we have Creative Commons (CC). This is a voluntary licence that copyright owners can apply to their work, which grants everyone permission to use it without charge, but with limits.

There are several different types of CC agreement, and some workplace training uses aren't covered, but it's worth a look; 99% of the images on Wikipedia are CC, and Flickr allows you to search just for photos with a CC "commercial use" licence.

You'll almost always have to credit the owner, which means putting "© Joe Bloggs" next to the image. It may look strange on a PowerPoint slide, but it's legally required if they tell you to. Don't like it, don't use the photo. Beware though - searching on Flickr can return anything.

Stock answer

If you can't find something for free, the next stop is the stock agencies, which exist to buy and sell photos, videos, diagrams and clip art of all types. Major sites such as Getty Images and Shutterstock have millions of items, and tend to sell in two ways; either "royalty-free" (RF) or "rights-managed" (RM).

RF means you pay once, and can use the item as many times as you want, forever, subject to limits on legality and so forth. RM means you pay per copy you want to make, which is fine if you're making one poster for the canteen wall, but is useless if you want to email your presentation around the company and can't stop copies-of-copies.

Which is cheaper depends on how many copies you need and where you go - some agencies charge hundreds of pounds a shot, others a few pence. A few stock agencies are not only royalty-free, but completely free: Morguefile and StockXchng have reasonable selections uploaded by pro-amateurs, but of course if you're looking for something very specific you might only find it on the larger pay sites.

As a comparison, the table below shows results for "forklift" from each agency, but quality and quantity are different things. Of course, if you've taken a great photo of a forklift, stock agencies will be happy to sell it for you.

Pictures at your fingertips:

Stock photo website results for an image search on "forklift"

Morguefile.com	7
SXC.hu (Stock.xchng)	13
istockphoto.com	900
gettyimages.com	675
shutterstock	400
Flickr.com (CC only)	350
Safetyphoto.co.uk	30

Finally, we have the safety-specific websites where people can share amateur photos, such as Safetyphoto.co.uk It's really important to understand that these member-donated sites cannot guarantee the photos are legal or even where they came from, and there's a big difference between the sites intentionally sharing photos and the ones which simply have a gallery page.

We all recognise the famous "bad practice" photos that everyone drops into their slides, but very few of them come with authentic permission. If you're about to put an image in your annual report and post it to 50,000 people, make sure you won't get a phone call from someone demanding £10 a copy in royalty compensation.

There isn't a stock agency for text quotes per se, but there are licensing agencies acting for many UK authors (www.cla.co.uk) and designers (www.dacs.org.uk) if you can't contact the creator or publisher and ask permission directly.

Good news for health and safety though - you can quote UK statute law (Regulations, Acts, etc) without charge provided the quote is 100% accurate and includes a specific copyright statement, so yes - you can stick the full text of the DSE Regulations in your student handout.

However, there's no such blanket permission for BS/EN/ISO standards, ACoPs or guidance notes, and using even a single line from one of those documents could land you in court. Did we mention it's best to ask first? For more info, see our copyright primer.

Sometimes, though, we want a photo we can't get. We want "a" forklift, but not an identifiable brand. Maybe we want to see it from underneath or above, and don't have one to photograph ourselves. Here is where we enter the world of 3D.

Once the domain of movie studios, there's now a massive global market in 3D computer models of things, from a spoon to a 747, and the software needed to turn these models into 2D images is within the budgets and abilities of most companies. 3D is not just about making a photo from a funny angle; increasingly people are finding that interactive 3D can be a great training tool - being able to spin your virtual little forklift truck upside down as people are watching, or make the roll cage transparent to point something out. We explain how to find and use 3D model files, and even make your own, in this month's online tutorial (see below).

Of course if you want something from Independence Day you'll need some of those creative types and a blank chequebook, but even creative folks have to eat, or they can't make all the pretty stuff you're relying on to keep your audience awake and boss happy.

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This month's tutorials

This article is backed up by two online presentations on the Healthandsafetyprofessional website.

• Copyright primer: at www.healthandsafetyprofessional.co.uk/quick-guides Dave Merchant gives the lowdown on copyright, licensing work and fair use.
• 3D modelling tutorial: at www.healthandsafetyprofessional.co.uk/3dd he walks you through livening up your safety presentations with three-dimensional models of anything from scaffolding platforms to company logos, and offers a few free 3D samples to experiment on. For reasons best known to himself, Dr Merchant also explodes a virtual donkey.
  

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Next month we take a break from helping you train other people in health and safety, and delve into the ramifications of all this new technology on your health and safety. 

Categories:
Training, Article, Training

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