Richard Goring and Ingrid Mengdehl both work at BrightCarbon. Richard is a Director and he enjoys helping people communicate effectively using visuals, diagrams, and animated sequences. Ingrid Mengdehl is Managing Design Consultant. Originally from an animation background, she stumbles into PowerPoint and has not looked back. She is passionate about good design, engaging animations, and helping people create engaging content.

In this episode, we talk about creating compelling presentations with animations, presentation design and PowerPoint.

When should animations be used?

People usually do not consider the use of animations. The prejudice against them comes from the fact that what people have mostly seen are bad animations from which they get scared. But they can actually be helpful in many cases. Ingrid shares with us that they often propose to add some animations and after that their clients are always amazed.

Furthermore, Richard tells us three categories in which he puts the types of presentation animations – animation to pace the flow of information, animation to help tell the stories, and decorative animations.

The virtual world

The usage of animations in virtual presenting should be adjusted to the available network connectivity. Something that is lagging is not going to look good. Animation is great for pacing the flow of information, but a sequence of slides could do the same thing. You are building up the content either way. Only even a fade entrance animation would work great. If your presentation is heavily animated, you can always lower the broadcasted screen resolution to cut on the required bandwidth and still look good.

Top animations & transitions in PowerPoint

Ingrid tells us that her favorite transitions are the Fade, Morph, Push, and the Wipe transition, as the others are too flashy. Richard then adds that the Pan transition is also great. It can add more dynamic and makes the presentation smoother and more natural. The Grow and Shrink combination is great for emphasis animation.

Overall, they tell us that subtle animations are the most suitable for presentations, and combining them properly improves the naturality and smoothness. They also gave us some insight into their future session at the Present to Succeed conference.

Resources

You can find BrightCarbon’s free masterclass webinars here, their BrightSlide PowerPoint add-in here. Follow BrightCarbon on their Twitter. Richard Goring is available on his LinkedIn. Ingrid Mengdehl you can find on her LinkedIn or Twitter. Other resources mentioned in the episode are The Presentation Guild and Shaun the Sheep!.

Listen to the full episode!