Presentations - Powerpoint v's Adobe Illustrator

PowerPoint is a fantastic tool for creating presentations and information slides, and can be beneficial for relaying large chucks of text to students, in a visual form. Videos and sounds can be embedded into the slides too, to create an interactive presentation. Though I have used this program many times in the past, and no doubt will in the future, I do find the application can be limited from a design perspective. I much prefer structuring my slides on Adobe Illustrator and inputting these into Adobe In-design to create a Pdf. This allows more control of the layout, font, colours and uploaded imagery. Though this is a more time consuming than creating a slide on PowerPoint, I feel the overall look is more professional and individual.

Below are a handful of screen shot from a presentation that I did for the Foundation Art and Design student at UWTSD, in December 2015. I was asked to speak to the students about my journey into design, my job role at the clothing company howies and about my teaching role. The whole experience, though nerve racking in the beginning was very rewarding. The students gained a great deal listening to a variety of professional people, and were also given the opportunity to approach the speakers individually at the end. I tried to keep my presentation slides simple and visual, with limited text. I know from my own experience of sitting in wordy PowerPoint presentation, how boring these can be.

Though it did take my awhile to design the presentation using Adobe Illustrator and In-design, I am pleased with the outcome and received some positive feedback from the students and lecturers.