Journey from Designer to Presentation Strategist

[Theresa]

Hey, everyone, happy holidays. Thanks for being here for the Creative Pro podcast, where design professionals like you come for real world insights, practical tips, and inspiring conversations like the one we have for you today. Creative Pro is here to help you thrive by design.

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We do practical how-to events, and we have membership. And for being here, we have a discount code that you can use for discounts on both events and membership. It’s the same discount code, PODCAST, all capital, P-O-D-C-A-S-T.

Easy enough. You’ll get $100 off events. Go to creativepro.com, events page, to see our event lineup, which includes Creative Pro Week conference, going to be next year in Nashville, Tennessee. I’m so excited. I’ve never been to Nashville. June 29th to July 3rd, it’s an amazing conference of like-minded people hanging out, sharing what inspires them, their favorite tips for their apps.

Really hope you can be there. The same discount code, PODCAST, will also get you $15 off a one-year membership, and you can learn all about that at our website as well. Wherever you’re listening, hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss an episode.

And if you love what you hear, leave us a five-star review. It really helps us out, and we’d appreciate it. Today I’ve got two real special guests for you.

In today’s episode, we have Mike Parkinson and Jodi Wissing. They are both presentation designers who will be speaking at our Presentation Design Conference, which will run online next February, 17th through the 20th. Today they’re going to share their journey from graphic design to presentation design.

All right, Mike and Jodi, we’re so happy to have you today. This is the introduction that you asked me to give. So just putting that out there for the audience.

Both Mike and Jodi are geeks. They’re going to nerd out on presentation design for you today. Well, that came from Mike, so maybe Jodi can share whether she owns that or not.

They are phenomenal presentation designers. They’re both speakers, presenters for Creative Pro. They’ll both be presenting at the Presentation Design Conference that runs online February 17th through the 20th.

They’ll share a little bit about the sessions that they have planned for that event. Mike is an owner of two different companies. He’s got a do-it-yourself company, and we do it for you solution.

24-Hour Company Creative Services is his design firm where his design firm will provide services for you. He also owns Billion Dollar Graphics. That is the do-it-yourself brand where they offer products and training.

Jodi is an adventurer extraordinaire. We have been talking for over a year to try and set up an adventure with the two of us because I want to go all the places Jodi goes. Jodi is a creatologist and strategist, and primarily, she does work on slide makeovers.

All right, I hope I did you guys justice here. If not, I’m going to let you fill in the blanks and correct whatever I said that was wrong. I’m going to drop off the stage and leave the two of you to have this conversation.

I’m really looking forward to hearing about your journey into presentation design, how you got there. Would you do it again? Would you take the same path again?

What advice do you have for the rest of us? So I’ll be back in about a half an hour to wrap it up, but really looking forward to your conversation. So thank you again for being here.

[Mike]

Awesome. I know one of the things that she said she was most interested in was to get our path, our journey to becoming presentation designers. And I know I’ve heard yours before, and it’s fascinating.

Do you mind sharing it?

[Jody]

I would love to share it, and then we’ll hear yours. So my journey is, you know, I can’t answer this question without telling a story. So mine’s a little lengthy, but it’s kind of fun, I hope.

My first presentation was in kindergarten, and it was on the playground because I was that curious child, and I just was a little skeptical on things, and that whole Santa thing just didn’t make sense to me. So at five years old, I had my first presentation on the playground, telling all the children the real truth about Santa. And back in the day, my parents got, oh, about 13 phone calls.

So I know it was successful. So fast forward a little bit. My favorite childhood book was The Pink Motel, which was about all these really eccentric people.

They inherited a motel, and it was all these artsy people, and they kept saying they needed, the parents were like, we need to paint the motel because it’s attracting these really weird people. And they were artists. And I’m like, I guess I’m those weird people.

Like, okay, great. So then, you know, fast forward, a teenager got a job at McDonald’s and worked my way up, went to Hamburger University, which is a thing, don’t laugh. And I was a market training manager for them.

And that’s where I got introduced to presentations and got my love for them. They sent me to a presentation training class, and everyone in the room had eyeball cards and had clickers. And if you said any words like, any non-words, they start clicking at you.

And if you didn’t give proper eye contact, they pulled their eyeball card up. It was nerve wracking, but I loved it. And so then I just, I got into the whole world of presentations, but not really as a job.

I became a financial analyst. I worked for Toys R Us. I worked for a travel agency.

And I just loved the work. I ended up working for a church for 12 years as a visual arts director. That’s where I ended up meeting the woman that would change my life.

She was a CMO for a technology company. She offered me a job. She said, I don’t know if this will be like your dream job or if this will be your worst nightmare, but we have this big black hole in presentations.

And I’ve seen your work, and I really want to hire you, not only to create presentations, but to show all of our 5,000 employees how to do it well. And I’m like, oh, the angels were singing so loud. It was like the major dream job.

Okay, so I took it. I worked there for about six years. Then I went out on my own, which was about three years ago.

And here we are today. And just for the record, my LLC is called the Pink Motel.

[Mike]

Everything has a reason, doesn’t it?

[Jody]

Everything has a reason. So there’s my whole long journey, but I’m a storyteller at heart. So there you go.

So Mike, your journey.

[Mike]

Oh, like you, I don’t think anybody goes to school for presentation design. Maybe I’m wrong. I went to Baltimore School for the Arts for high school.

I got accepted. It was wonderful. I didn’t know how wonderful it was.

So I got that fine art background, painting, sculpting, and said, I don’t want to do that for a living. So I went to college and went into bioengineering and realized I didn’t want to do that either. So I went back to digital arts.

Graduated, started working, doing work as a designer for a medical training software. At the same time, I drew comic books. The reason why I’m sharing these two things is because both of those perspectives helped shape what I would become.

So I wound up, long story short, I wound up starting two companies. I didn’t start one. I became a partner in another company.

I started with my wife and I. And they’re all design firms and creative services firms. And people started asking me to do more presentation design.

And I was like, oh, PowerPoint. And so I fumbled through it. However, there was a turning point.

Years ago, when our design firm was struggling to grow, we said, what is one way we could grow? Well, to be a thought leader in an industry. So in our industry, I said, well, I’ll give it a go.

So I started creating and delivering presentations to help other people be more successful using design best practices. So I got better and better because I failed miserably. Fail forward, fail forward, fail forward.

I got better and better. And so more and more people kept saying, hey, that thing you just did in front of everybody with those cool slides, can you do that for our team? And that’s kind of how it evolved.

And I used those comic book storyboarding or storytelling skills. And I used my ability to create, to tell people how to do technical things like surgeries. So you put those two things together, telling stories with technical information.

That’s kind of how I got here. That’s a very long way to say your story is way cooler. But that’s how I got here.

[Jody]

I think they’re equally cool.

[Mike]

I don’t know. So forgive me, I’ve got questions for you. And some of them are self-serving because some of the things that I feel passionately about, I want to get different perspectives on because I certainly don’t have all the answers.

There’s no doubt in my mind, I don’t have all the answers. So right now, I’m doing a lot of facilitation, a lot of workshops for younger and older designers, people that have been in the industry for a long time and people that are coming into it. And one of the worry beads that I hear over and over and over again is the role AI will play in the near future and the long term.

And I have strong opinions on it based on information that I’ve learned from people way smarter than me. So I’m looking to you, Jodi, as someone who’s way smarter than me, what are your thoughts on AI in the near future and the longer term impacts to our industry?

[Jody]

You know, it’s such a loaded question these days because AI is everywhere, doing everything, and you can’t go anywhere or do anything without hearing about it. And in the world of presentations, what I’m realizing is it’s moving so fast. What I say today isn’t going to be relevant tomorrow.

And I don’t know if you feel the same way, Mike, but oh my goodness, it’s just, you know, at Creative Pro Week, I did a presentation on visualizing presentations and, you know, other media too, but mostly presentation-based. And what I’m realizing is all of that has changed. And what I mean by that is, you know, when we used to live in reality, you remember that?

Yeah. This thing where everything was real and authentic. You know, it’s like you would see a picture of maybe this amazing place.

I’m an adventurer, so I, you know, I would see a picture of like these mountains and a stream or something, and you just look at it and it looks like a painting or something. It’s beautiful. And you just marvel at it and go, oh my gosh, I just want to be there.

That’s so amazing. Now you see a picture like that and you’re like, that’s not real. It’s not real.

And our brains are processing media in a completely different way. Just this morning, I was looking for images, some stock images to use in a presentation I’m working on. And probably a good 80% of what came up were AI generated.

[Mike]

Yep. Yeah, I’m seeing it a lot too. In my world, I’m in the world of sales and L&D, so learning and development.

That’s the primary industries that I serve. And I’m seeing a very obvious pushback against the inauthenticity of the lack of authenticity that AI has. So what, for example, in the world of bids and proposals, which is sales, I’m seeing a lot of requests from no longer submitting a written proposal, but now you have to give an oral presentation instead.

Or in addition to why that is, partly is because AI is not giving the presentation. You are. I can meet the person that I’m going to present to, that I’m going to be working with.

The other thing that I’m seeing is, this is anecdotal, when I’m on Instagram and I’m just flipping, doom scrolling through Instagram, I find that once I hit something and it’s clearly AI generated, I rarely stick with it. As soon as I see it, I’m like, well, it’s fake. What’s the point of watching it?

Never happened. It’s just kind of additional stuff. And I’m not diminishing the importance, the massive evolutionary leap forward that AI is going to do for our industry.

What I’m suggesting is that how enamored we were with the possibilities is starting to wane. And now we’re looking at it from a different perspective. And that perspective in 2026 and 2027, as you said, as AI evolves, and it’s almost impossible to tell AI from reality, that perspective is going to cloud what we are emotionally connecting to, because if our radar tells us it’s fake, we’re not going to have the same connection.

So it’s like a Jody avatar is not a Jody in person or like what I’m seeing here. And our instinct is going to rewire how we accept that. So as an example, and this is hypothetical, let’s say you grew up with avatars.

You would probably see avatars as authentic as a human being, but we haven’t. So I’m seeing a pushback.

[Jody]

Right. You know, I think that the whole idea of a presentation, this is where a presentation is radically different than other media, because it is being presented by a human. So there is that human element in it.

And I think where AI, where people are, I guess I could say missing the boat on AI or using it, is if you’re trying to pass something off as real when it’s not. And I think that’s all that people are doing is looking for that authenticity. And so when you can use AI, you know, I use AI all the time, every day.

I can’t imagine life without it anymore. So let me just say that. I am, this is Jody.

This is not, I’m not an avatar right now. Like it’s getting hard to tell, but I am real. Mike is real.

Like we’re here. But that human element in there is huge. And when you can keep that in there, when you are, you’re giving authentic images, or if you’re using AI, what I use it for is I use it for helping me to word stuff.

I’m not the word girl. I’m pictures all day long. And sometimes I struggle with articulating myself.

So AI helps with that, but it really helps me to simplify. And that is one of the biggest things in presentations. Mike, I think you’re even doing a session on that on simple slides.

And that’s the big thing is like, if you can use AI to help you simplify your language, and this ties into what I’m gonna be talking about at Creative Pro Week also, I’m doing two sessions. And one of them is called Bullets to Brilliance. And I’m gonna be talking about what to do with that content.

Like, how do you take all this great stuff? They need all that information, but you can’t put it all in the presentation. So what do you do?

So there’s your reason. Go use that promo code and sign up today. But AI is really streamlining what you can do for presentations in the way of your content.

And that is just magical at this point.

[Mike]

100%. Whenever I give my AI workshops, I always try to use evergreen content. Because as you said, AI is changing so fast.

So the thing that I don’t see changing, and again, I could be wrong and I’m weak, is that AI is a friction fixer or an accelerator at its core. That’s what it is. When you hit a barrier, AI is a great way to get over or around that barrier.

And it speeds up work. It’s kind of like a page maker, or not page maker, good Lord, I’m old enough to say that, InDesign, it’s kind of like InDesign versus old school paste up on an actual physical board. It just sped everything up.

The three truths that seem to be accurate when I talk to people who are thought leaders in AI say so far, they agree with me. Again, a week from now, there could be some epiphany that happens where all of a sudden these go the way of the dodo. But one is that designers, presentation designers, page layout designers, any kind of designers, designers that use AI will thrive because it’s an accelerator or friction fixer.

It’s like saying, no, I won’t use Adobe Photoshop, or no, I won’t use Keynote, or no, I won’t use PowerPoint, or no, I won’t. Why wouldn’t you? It’s there to help you.

And the antithesis though, is that if we don’t adopt AI, we won’t thrive. Because AI will be integrated in everything we do. It’ll just be part, it’ll be happening in the background, and we don’t even know.

It’s helping us cut things out in Photoshop. It’s helping us to edit things in PowerPoint. It’s helping us to create an image or a slide layout in PowerPoint, for example.

It’s just this. The second truth of the three is that AI should, and I hate using that word. I’m going to say a best practice.

AI is part of the process. It is not the product. We need to be the adjudicators.

We have emotional intelligence enough to say what’s going to fit. And there’s nuance to what you and I do, what presentation designers do, that AI can’t do. And will it do it one day?

Who knows? It can’t do it now. I don’t see it happening anytime soon.

I’ve read a lot of articles, talked to a lot of people. I think we’re going to be safe there. And number three is, we have to know what tool to use for what need.

It’s kind of like the difference between using Excel versus Microsoft Word or using PowerPoint versus Adobe Illustrator to know what tool is going to give you the best results. So those seem to be the three truths. Did they resonate with you, Jodi?

[Jody]

Very much so. So I have a question for you, Mike.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Jody]

What are your fears about AI?

[Mike]

So my fears about AI are way beyond design. So my fears are the destabilization of the system that we currently have, meaning that without guardrails on AI, I fear that we are going to have some can’t put it back in the box. What is it called?

What is the Pandora’s box? That is my fear. So my fear is, what is it?

I’m not afraid of AI taking my job. I’m more afraid of someone using AI taking my job. But what I’m really afraid of is without guardrails, AI significantly destabilizing the system that we have in the world in ways that we can’t imagine yet.

So I’m not worried about AI becoming sentient per se. Forgive me. That’s way up in the clouds, fear.

[Jody]

No, it’s real. And I have almost the same answer to that because I’ve been binging Black Mirror.

[Mike]

Oh, yeah.

[Jody]

Oh, some of the stuff on there, like it’s so close to reality, like what is plausible in the near future that it’s just, it’s super scary. But I have kind of the same fear. It’s just that I’m waiting for the AI robot that can do all my chores.

Like I’ll do all the critical thinking stuff and do all my human stuff and it can do all that other stuff I don’t want to do.

[Mike]

Yeah. No, I’m in heaven thinking about the fact that I’ll be 92 years old, God willing, and I can tell my car to take me to the grocery store or I can ask my robot to clean. I mean, that sounds amazing.

[Jody]

Right?

[Mike]

Right? It seems, that’s a real friction fixer right there, you know? So I’m loving it.

So I’ve got a question for you. And this again is going to be a little bit of my focus or something I’m passionate about. And I know I just did the 25 minute thing.

So when it comes to being a presentation designer specifically, because I know that’s what we’re talking about what are, what would you say the top three skills are? And tell me if you don’t disagree, sometimes they’re a bit surprising, sometimes. Sometimes it’s like, well, you have to be able to design stuff.

So if you have anything that’s surprising, I’d like to hear what raises to the top for you. And I’m not suggesting you have to say anything surprising. When it comes to presentation design, can you tell me like your top three or four that you think has made you as successful as you are?

[Jody]

Yes. And one of them is pretty radical. And every time I do a presentation, I ask the question at the end of how many slides people think I showed them in my presentation.

So most of my sessions are around 45 minutes and most people guess, you know, 50, 80, 35, some people go over a hundred, you know, and I might be, depending on the session, I could be anywhere in the high 200s, possibly even mid 300s with slides. And the reason being is because it’s moving like a movie. It’s, we live in this age of information and entertainment.

We need the information, but we want to be entertained. We don’t want to be bored. And that’s where the whole death by PowerPoint thing came from is people just, our time is valuable.

You know, we value it. So make it entertaining, get us the info, but do it in a way that we can consume it. We can remember it.

And that’s where you get to the heart of the stories. All that to answer the question is I think the number of slides, but not only that is how we visualize them and a bunch of texts, not that you can’t have some slides with just texts, but you’ve got to have those visuals on there. And that’s a huge thing.

But what is your answer to that, Mike?

[Mike]

Oh Lord, shockingly, it’s changed over the years. And I agree completely. Echo Swinford, who, if you haven’t looked her up, look her up, she’s amazing, said slides are free.

Don’t be afraid to use them. In my world, sometimes you are constrained. They tell you you can only use a certain number of slides in a certain amount of time, so be it.

That’s the way it works. But if not, then I, like you, will use hundreds of slides in a half an hour. No, not even thinking about it.

But the thing that’s changed for me over the years, the reason why I’d like to think I’ve been fairly successful is because I care about the content. As a designer young in my career, I kind of didn’t care about the content. I was all about the aesthetic, the design, the animation, the look and feel.

And when I realized that I’m also a communicator, I’m just a visual communicator, that the author, the subject matter expert that’s creating this stuff and I, we need to put our heads together. Because if not, I’m just an arm. And I don’t want to be an arm.

I want to be a head on the design, on the creation beast. And so that’s when I realized the more I care about the content, the more value I bring to the table. Once I started what I call crafting the draft without, if I look at something and I say, that doesn’t make sense to me.

And then I put something in that might help it make more sense. And then the author looks at it and goes, oh my God, this is so wonderful. Or oh my goodness, you’re missing the mark completely.

It should be that. And I go, oh, now that you say that, now it makes total sense. That is so helpful.

So that changed my trajectory. I was being, I was growing, you know, I was, my salary was increasing. I was getting more work.

Once I cared about the content, I can’t handle my workload anymore because it is a hurdle for my clients that they might not even know is a hurdle. That they’re trying to tell a story, like you said. And it’s a combination of the narrative of the words and the visual that need to come together and the flow that it comes, that happens with it.

That’s a long way of saying that, but yes.

[Jody]

I love that. And anybody looking for a career in presentation design, that term presentation specialist, presentation designer, it’s all very misleading because that is not what we do. We don’t make slides look pretty.

That is not our job. You can give us a deck and we’re going to take that thing and we are going to, you know what? I tell clients all the time and I work with a lot of executives and I’ll get in a meeting and say, I’m about to jack up all your slides.

Like, you’re going to get this back. You’re giving me 10 slides with all this content. I’m going to give you back 30 or 40 slides.

Give me the creative freedom, let me do this. But I let them know upfront because that way they’re not blindsided because people do expect you to just take their slides and make them pretty. And like you were saying, when the content drives the slides, they’re going to be radically different.

And that allows, gives us the creative freedom to apply critical thinking to it, to be a strategist. That’s why I have the word strategist in my title is that’s what I do. I do content strategy and then I visualize it on slides.

And that, like Mike just said, that’s what makes me successful. That’s why clients call me back. And because what I do is so radically different than what a lot of other people do.

[Mike]

Yeah, as a designer, I jokingly said back in the day, my perfect job is give me something cool to do, go away. When I give it to you, tell me you love it and never bother me about it again. And those days are gone.

It’s much more iterative. I’m working much closer with the author, the content creator or creating the content myself. There’s AI.

When there’s a gap, I’m going to go to chat GPT and give ideas, craft the draft for the author or my customer to say, oh, I get where you’re going. Yeah, that’s completely wrong. Chat GPT was wrong.

Here’s what should go there. Wonderful, wonderful. Poor Teresa, I won’t be able to hear a word she says when she comes back on.

I do have one more question for you. When it comes to tools, like what are your top tools that you use every day?

[Jody]

Well, I’m going to start with one that is probably not on anybody’s list, but that would be my adventure clock or Apple watch, whatever you want to call it. I call it a clock because it’s big. It’s like a clock on your wrist.

But I, you know, when you’re, okay, so I’m ADHD, dyslexic, you name it. Ideas come and if I don’t record them immediately, they go away. And so I have it on a fast button right here.

I can turn on the record and I’m on it and I can record all my ideas. I transcribe them. I drop them in Evernote.

And I’m actually, I write, I do a lot of my writing through my watch. So that’s my biggest tool, which is surprising. Obviously I’m a PowerPoint girl.

I use all of the Adobe products and I love them. Aside from that, my favorite resources, I have to say for design stuff is Creative Pro, like, right?

[Mike]

100%, yep, absolutely. A lot of resources, it’s endless. I know.

And they have some amazing thought leaders that I’ve learned from over, I continue to learn from over the years. And I’m always going into the library of content, looking at the latest newsletters. I completely agree with you, except I don’t use the watch.

I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, not a fan of jewelry. That’s the only reason I don’t have it. Yeah, I know, I know.

But believe me, instead I text myself. The other tool that I have to say I rely on more than ever is Chat GPT. I really do because it helps, like you said, simplify, ideate.

I don’t, if there is something that can be automated, because I wanna free my brain up to do the things that I can’t automate, that I can’t ask AI to do, or I can’t ask another designer to do or another author to do. So I wanna have as much of my focus on that. So wordsmithing, finding synonyms, I’m like, you know, I’ll ask Chat GPT.

You figure that out because I wanna focus on the more creative stuff. So I have to say that every day I will use Chat GPT in concert with the Adobe Suite, with PowerPoint, with any other tools that I use. I’m a fan now of using something called Inkscape.

So Inkscape is kind of a free version of Adobe Illustrator. There’s certain things Inkscape does better than Adobe Illustrator for vector assets. So I recommend, it’s free, so I recommend if anybody’s interested, it handles SVGs better.

The fidelity of their SVGs is better, which doesn’t make much sense since it’s vector, but it does, but it does. I was talking to Mark Heaps and Mark Heaps was saying, giving me cool tips in Adobe Illustrator to help get higher fidelity or better quality SVGs out of Adobe Illustrator. And none of them worked as good as Inkscape for what it’s worth.

That’s a geeky answer.

[Jody]

Okay, so before we go back to Teresa, I have one more thing that I just think maybe people would like to hear this. Would you recommend a career in presentations to somebody that’s an up-and-coming designer, they’re looking for a career path? Why or why not would you recommend being a presentation specialist, strategist, whatever word you wanna put behind that?

[Mike]

So I’m going to cheat and boomerang it to you first and then I’ll answer second. So what are your thoughts?

[Jody]

All right, I’ll allow you to do that. I definitely would suggest it and say yes, it is a great career path. And the reason I like it because it’s like the Swiss army knife of communication.

Possibilities are endless. You can put video in, you can put social media stuff in, you can put blogs in, you can write, you can put anything goes. It’s a matter of just being creative in how you communicate.

Sometimes I bring props is like the first time I think I’ve done any kind of talking where I don’t have a prop. I always have crazy stuff. Well, I guess I did have a prop.

I have my venture clock. So, but yeah, it’s presentations again, keep the human element. And I think if you’re looking for a job where AI is a tool and you’re not worried about AI taking it, people still have to present presentations until the avatars take over.

But until then, it’s a great career.

[Mike]

Yes. Yeah, to dovetail on what you said, I think that if a creative person, I’ve also heard it called a slide engineer, all kinds of names. If a creative person is, I know, right?

If a creative person is comfortable with or okay with at least flirting with being a content editor or creator to be a storyteller, if you will, then I would strongly encourage PowerPoint because like you said, it is, it uses just about every medium that you can think of all woven into one. You have sound, you have motion, you have still images, you have video, et cetera. Storytelling, of course.

So that is very, it’s fun, it’s a fun thing to do. And when someone is very good at it, you can tell the difference between someone who just creates it. They’re kind of like a PowerPoint ranger.

You know, they just, they’re really good in PowerPoint. So they create these slide decks that are better than beloved slides, but- Not your grandma’s presentation anymore. No, no.

And then there are people that are slide engineers or presentation designers, and they really take it to the next level. Those jobs will never go away. If someone’s just about making slides prettier, I think GoPilot’s gonna eventually get better and better and better at that.

And it’ll be good enough that people won’t necessarily wanna pay somebody to just make it good enough. So yes, if you’re someone who’s okay with telling stories, if you’re okay with flirting with being a content editor and or creator, sky’s the limit, in my opinion. Sky’s the limit.

[Theresa]

That was such a fantastic conversation. Oh my goodness, I was taking notes. Oh, cool.

I have one question that I wanna ask both of you. Just as a follow-up on the tools that you use, because if I understand this correctly, you’re both PowerPoint experts, but you also use the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of tools. So I don’t know that all of our listeners are aware that there’s a plugin for PowerPoint.

Do you use the Creative Cloud Library plugin in your PowerPoint? Either one of you do that?

[Jody]

I don’t. I did try it at one point and it was early on and I just couldn’t get it to work the way that I wanted to. And so I don’t.

I do use Adobe Stock. I use the Adobe Libraries, but I use them outside of PowerPoint.

[Theresa]

Oh, that’s really interesting. Yeah, I was hoping to hear how it worked and maybe if you could try it again and let us know.

[Jody]

I can do that. It’s been a minute since I did that. So I’m more than happy to try it again.

Anything I can do to streamline workflow, I am all over it. I mean, that is, in our jobs, you have to be able to do that or you’re just recreating the wheel every single time. Right.

[Theresa]

We want our tools to work together. So Mike, I know you, Billion Dollar Graphics is like an asset manager with all types of graphics and there’s a plugin for that and that’s your plugin. Does the Creative Cloud Libraries fit into your workflow too?

[Mike]

It does not in PowerPoint. So what I’ve learned, and this is the session I’ll be giving at the presentation design conference for Creative Pro, is if I can’t create it natively in PowerPoint very easily, I will go over to Adobe Illustrator and I will create those vector assets, export them a very, it took me six years to figure out how to do this, a very specific way, export them from Illustrator and get them into PowerPoint as SVGs.

It’s not as easy as I thought it should be. It’s not, it doesn’t work that way. So I’ve learned techniques to do it.

So then I created this massive library of assets for myself and I was like, this is super helpful. And then I asked a company called NewPower, NewPower, by the way, they created SlideWise and NX PowerLite Desktop and oh my God, best add-ins ever. But so they helped me program the Builder Graphic add-in.

In Builder Graphic, the add-in that runs in PowerPoint, at its core, most of the assets were built in Adobe Illustrator, imported into PowerPoint as SVGs and then formatted in PowerPoint. So essentially what they are is now I can copy from PowerPoint back into Adobe Illustrator because they’re vector based, but that’s exactly the workflow that I use because PowerPoint is not a graphics package, it is a presentation tool.

[Theresa]

Right. It can do some graphics.

[Mike]

I know, but welcome to the real world. I’m an Adobe guy living in a Microsoft world. That’s the way it works.

I think- So this is how we do it.

[Theresa]

Or we’re Adobe people that have to live a little bit in the Microsoft world too. Absolutely.

[Mike]

And I learned it’s a powerful tool once I stopped thinking of it as a design tool. I was like, okay, it’s design light, if you will.

[Theresa]

It’s like a layout tool for presentations. I wanted, there was also something you said, Mike, that I wrote down because I just loved it. And I just want to repeat it here.

You described AI as a friction fixer or accelerator.

[Mike]

Yep.

[Theresa]

It’s not the product.

[Mike]

No, it’s part of the process. We don’t want it to be the product. Especially with this move toward authenticity, our instinct when we see something that reads like, sounds like, feels like AI generated, we’re starting to see derogatory comments just because it was AI generated.

As soon as I see something that I identify as AI generated, I’m finding that I’m dismissive of it automatically.

[Theresa]

Less trust. Yeah. You just automatically have less trust for it.

So, yeah.

[Mike]

Sadly, that’s the natural. Who would have predicted that one? I wouldn’t have predicted it, but here we are.

[Theresa]

Yeah, some of the predictions for the next year are as a real resurgence for the handmade or the human touch in our creative process. So I think it’s really imperative that we all get out into the real world and connect with reality and then bring that back into whatever it is we’re creating.

[Mike]

Agreed.

[Theresa]

Well, thank you both so much for being here. This was fantastic. Also, thank you to the audience for joining.

If you stayed all the way to the end, make sure that you subscribe or even give us a five-star review. That would be awesome too. We’ll be back again next year with a lot more podcasts.

In the meantime, remember podcast discount code. That’ll get you $100 off these great events. We have more.

Go to our creativepro.com website. Check out the events list. The same discount code will get you $15 off membership where you have access to so many resources.

Mike and Jodi were both referring to that. There’s so much content. Just about anything you wanna learn, we have some content on it.

Thanks again. Until next time, keep learning, keep creating, and keep sharing, and we’ll see you again next year.

[Jody]

Thank you.

[Mike]

Thank you.