How To Create Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
I’m James Taylor, and you’re listening to the SpeakersU Podcast, a show for aspiring and professional speakers.
Today I’m joined by Ash Pemberton, founder of Overnight Design, a professional PowerPoint designer whose clients include Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, Unilever, Pfizer, and Heineken. Together, Ash and his team have produced over a million PowerPoint slides for their clients. Today, we’re going to be talking about how to create really amazing PowerPoint presentations, and why you should perhaps be considering Thailand as a place to live and work. Thanks for listening.
Questions:
- Based in Chiang Mai, Thailand
- Please can you explain your service because it’s pretty niche?
- How did you get started in this business?
- What kind of work do you produce for your clients (pitch decks, presentations, explainer videos)?
- What are the common mistakes you see people make when designing their Powerpoint presentations?
- Are easy rules of thumb when it comes to using visuals in presentations? (10-20-30 – Kawasaki)
- Apart from Powerpoint, many speakers use Keynote, Prezi, or even Canva. Do you have a preference?
- My team is in the Philippines but what’s it like building a team in Chiang Mai, Thailand?
Artificial Intelligence Generated Transcript
Below is a machine-generated transcript and therefore the transcript may contain errors.
Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
So ash Pemberton, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, James. Now, I, I first heard about you through a gem called, I think, Brett Dev, I think based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, as a vlogger, talks about nomadism, digital nomadism, lots of other kinds of interesting things. And he was talking to you about your service. And I just thought it was such a brilliant service that you offered, that I thought I got to get you on the show to talk about your service, I think it could really help so many professional and aspiring speakers. So let’s get straight to it. Like, what is your service? Because I think it’s brilliant. I think more people should know about it.
PowerPoint Designers
Ashley Pemberton 1:12
Sure, sure. So originally, we were simply called PowerPoint designers. And it wanted to be, you know, deliver what it says on the tin. So essentially, we work with people who should not be designing their own presentations. Generally, they are subject matter experts, they’re consultants, they’re busy professionals, or they’re people that are under pressure because they’re about to go and deliver a presentation the next day. Please don’t stay up late hunched over your computer desert doing your own presentation design. It’s frustrating, it’s probably not your number one skill set by outsourcing that to a design professional, especially as we utilize the time zones. So we work while our clients sleep, we will deliver you just this remarkable deck back so that at 8 am in the morning, you open your email, and you’re like, ah, these guys have designed it, it’s on-brand. It looks beautiful. And I think the essence is it justifies all the hard work that my clients have put into writing the content, developing the pitch, and then they’ve got to go and present it. But that middle stage is designed for NES, following brand guidelines, choosing the right images, typography, that’s a completely different skill. So that’s what we offer, we offer that middle stage, which is later in the presentation design, but delivered fast.
James Taylor 2:43
Because obviously, we’ve all experienced those you go into a presentation, you may go to a conference and someone starts presenting it looks like PowerPoint slides from 1995. And it’s like, there’s no particularly think maybe the content is brilliant, but the person is actually saying, but it’s just not being presented very well. I would love to know like when your clients, whether they’re consultants or big, you know, firms or speakers when they come to you, let’s say it’s 10 o’clock at night, they send you something in order produce something, something lovely, beautiful and useful The next day, what is the something that they’re actually sending to you? How are you ingesting that all that information? Absolutely.
Ashley Pemberton 3:21
So 13 years ago, it used to be someone would draw something on a piece of paper, and they would fax it to me, I had a service called effects which translated it to a PDF, I print it out. And literally, I would type up their words. And I would draw whatever marketing model or organizational chart or bar graph that they basically hand-drawn. Now, obviously, people are more familiar with actually putting that together digitally. So that might be a Word document. It might somebody you know, from time to time, people would send me a script and say, Please, can you build me some slides out of my script, you know, just something for me to talk around. that follows the essence of what I’m trying to communicate. But the vast majority is people who know exactly what they want on each slide, and have to we just say, dumped it, dumped it down, pasted it on, or stolen some bits and pieces from different PDFs or websites, and then put it into a file and sent me a messy file. And the ones that I get worried about other ones when they send me something beautiful. It’s like, oh, now I’ve really got a job. you construct.
James Taylor 4:37
There. Yeah, it’s
Ashley Pemberton 4:40
when I open the file and it’s a mismatch of fonts, it alignments out the typography, the color scheme, the first thing I do is look at the template, you know, there’s no it’s not following a template. It’s like, Ah, well, I know that I know what’s needed. I know what we can do. So the thing that I’m saying is is really words, pictures, images, but thrown together.
James Taylor 5:04
Fantastic So, so that they can have to throw all this kind of stuff to you as well, then take us through the process because we should stay here. This is not all just you doing all this, it doesn’t just come to you. And then you’re just doing everything yourself to October because what you’ve done is you’ve put together a really interesting can a team of mixtures of different talents and abilities and skills. Hmm,
Ashley Pemberton 5:28
absolutely. So it did use to be me, it did use to be just me. And then it used to be me and my wife who would help me with cutting and pasting. So I might, I might set up a page. And I know that we’ve got another 90 pages to go into that style. So she would assist me with that. Then my first hire was a graphic designer, very similar to myself who stayed with me is his name is Jason, and he and I do a very similar job. But then we realized actually, because we’re in Thailand, and the majority of our clients are either in America, Europe, or the UK. Having that timezone advantage means we start work at about midnight UK time. So we actually became about five times more in demand for our service because of the timezone. Now I’d love to tell you, I plan this. Like you can see the name is Overnight Design. I didn’t plan this, it was just, I wanted to live in Thailand at falling in love with the country. Originally, I think I even said to my main client who I was working for that I would work UK hours, you know, don’t worry, I’ll make up the hours like I really didn’t have the division to know that. It was the timezone it was the overnight express service, that was going to take me five times busier. But it did. So it was me, my wife, and one other designer working pretty much remotely. But we knew that we needed to build a team. I wanted to have a physical team rather than a remote team, because some of the briefs are tricky like I understand them, but could I just pass them on to a Thai graphic designer, probably not. I wanted to have a team that I could literally kind of put my arm around and guide and be able to design say five different presentations at once with five different designers working on them. And the other thing that I’ve really learned is that presentation design can be quite stressful. Like every day, you’re hitting deadlines sometimes in with my team now 20 deadlines to hit every single day, you’ve got 20 people’s work that needs to be delivered back to them for ATM, it can be quite stressful. So one thing that I really wanted to instill is like the team culture is where you support and you help each other. And if you see someone struggling or they’re, you know, they’re stressed out trying to hit a deadline, you can divide that workup if we’re all together. It just gives you that sense of teamwork. And it just it’s a nicer environment to work in. But also, it’s way more supportive. So trying to get back to that original question. What we did is we recruited Thai designers, I put an advert in the Bangkok post asking for PowerPoint designers. And I got a complete mix. Like everybody kind of thinks, they’re a PowerPoint designer. So I was overloaded with very odd requests to work, you know, as a PowerPoint designer. So actually we streamline that, move to Chiangmai because there are two or three really good design universities here.
James Taylor 8:44
But with people that don’t know Thailand, so yeah, explain like Chiang Mai. Most people may have been to Bangkok, for example, explain where Chiang Mai is. And also maybe it’d be useful as well to explain how it’s part of the whole tech ecosystem that’s been going over the past few years in Thailand.
Ashley Pemberton 9:02
Yeah, Thai Thailand. Obviously, the number one city is Bangkok. I couldn’t hack it there. It’s just too intense. Everybody. So
James Taylor 9:14
because my wife and I spent a lot of time in both Bangkok and Chiang Mai as well. My wife loves Bangkok. I don’t know why it’s like she’s not really a particularly big city person, but she just loves the energy in all things. I much prefer Chiang Mai because it’s just as cool physically as temperature-wise as cooler. Yeah, and it’s a little bit of an I know that the street that you’re based on or just off on that’s gonna equate a hipster kind of street that you’re you’re in is very,
Ashley Pemberton 9:42
very Yeah, I mean so much to talk about there. Maybe your wife does she like to party does she like fine food and restaurants and shopping and
James Taylor 9:51
I think I think it’s the food thing. I think it’s probably the food thing that’s that she just loves and obviously there are great food places in China. Am I as well but I guess Bangkok is a little bit more kind of international cuisine now.
Chiang Mai
Ashley Pemberton 10:04
Yeah, you can go kind of Michelin star and in Bangkok, which we don’t have in Chiang Mai. But we do have amazing street food. We have the northern food anyway, which is slightly different from Southern Thailand. But essentially, Chiang Mai is the second city in Thailand. But it still feels very small. We have the Old City surrounded by an old historical wall with so many temples and so it’s like a really slow pace. And it’s attracted a lot of digital nomads. It’s attracted, basically, and quite an international business community but still very laid back the pace of life in Chiang Mai is still very laid back. It’s still a very nice place to live. But yeah, more and more there is a bit of a tech scene here. People are predicting that Chiangmai could be like a massive tech hub. We’re so close to China. A lot of Chinese prior to COVID. A lot of Chinese visitors would come to Chiang Mai we’ve even got like our own little section of Chinatown. But the bit that I decided to set up my office in is called Neiman Haman. And let’s just call that the trendy part of town and I was trying to give a like a London analogy. It’s -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
James Taylor 11:25
basically Shoreditch, London, but transported into northern Thailand. We love white guys with beards like hipsters that have tattoos. Yeah, cool coffee shops.
Ashley Pemberton 11:35
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the food here is amazing coffee shop culture. Yeah, there’s a lot of arty boutique e type shops that when you walk into, you just think, how are you making money? And the answer is they’re probably not, you know, they’re just doing it for the love of having a boutique key RTX environment and being and being there. So I love that. And I probably wouldn’t have moved to Chiang Mai. If it didn’t have nim and Haman then Haman is like the call area that I thought, yeah, I could live here. And I have done for the last seven years. -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
James Taylor 12:12
So tell us a little bit more about the kind of work you’re producing for your clients. We’ve obviously spoken about maybe those more traditional presentations. The client goes to sleep at 10 pm in London or Paris or New York, send you all the stuff. You don’t get you to get it you work on it overnight, you deliver something fantastic The next morning, but what are the types of work you’re creating for your client? What kind of briefs you’re getting from your client just now? -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
Professional Solutions
Ashley Pemberton 12:37
Yeah, good question. Because it started, as I told you as PowerPoint designers because that was 90% of the work that we did. And the reason being, everybody kind of knows how to use PowerPoint, most people have it installed on their computer when you open it, you get this blank screen. And if you drag and drop, it’s pretty simple to use. So for that reason, when we if the agency standard design, like beautiful design, presented using PowerPoint objects and PowerPoint shapes that are all totally editable, people can make small amounts, they can cut and paste things into their own presentation, they can reuse and re-edit our content very easily. So that’s why PowerPoint was number one. But of course, we use Adobe Creative Suite for, let’s call it more professional solutions. So for instance, if you wanted a really beautiful brochure with, you know, bleed, and crop marks, and for color separation process that was going to be professionally printed. PowerPoint falls a little short. So we do use and we do, it’s actually what the Americans called standard collateral. So this is branded brochures, fact sheets, white papers, everything that a sales team comes to their marketing department for and the marketing department comes to their designer for, and the designer is either overloaded or possibly doesn’t quite fancy doing that standard collateral work when they’re also working on a much more exciting design project. What that designer can do is kind of outsource some of the more repetitive tasks. So like working from a boilerplate with text and images, and you know, you’ve got 20 to do and is potentially 20 hours work ahead of you. For a really creative designer. That can be quite dull, it can you know, it can be quite restrictive, whereas their skills might be better, like working on some, like what I would call like hand-holding type design where you really need to collaborate with people and get to the bottom of their brief or maybe come up with something completely unique as is more standard. production. In fact, some people some of our clients do us as more like a production house. And just some other things that we do for them. One would be preparing graphics for the web. So that could be hero images. It could be banner adverts, and again, production of these files so that they’re in the right format ready to go. And more exciting than that is explainer videos. So these are traditionally sick about 60 seconds long, where every client says, it won’t be longer than 60 seconds. But like, you’d be surprised how quick that goes. So between one and three minutes is how long they tend to last. And what they would be is animated to D illustration that goes in sync with the voiceover. And so the clients would write the script, we’d get it professionally, voiceover, we’ve put in some background music, and then we’d storyboard it. So what that means is going through every element of their script, and suggesting some visuals, suggesting some animations, and some transitions about how it would move and flow from scene to scene. So we do an awful lot of those. And one of the -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
James Taylor 16:20
main reasons I see like speak late like myself, for example, we use, or sometimes you use that kind of explainer videos or no of our speakers, you members use them. Sometimes, if there’s selling online courses, online memberships, online programs, because it’s just a really, if you’ve got something that’s kind of a bit more of a complex topic, some it’s quite a nice way to kind of bring it down, getting the focus. And the other way I’ve actually seen them is some of our speakers who have books coming out as well. And they just want to create that, that sizzle video that one little thing that looks 60 seconds. Thing is that’s fantastic. And obviously, we’ve got a lot of people here probably watching listening to this just now who are speaker trainers. And so trainers love explainer videos. Because you can take your ideas, even voiceover, you can give it to someone like you know, yourself or your team, and they can create something fantastic. Some great videos from it. Yeah, -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
Ashley Pemberton 17:14
I mean, there is a couple of other applications for it. And I’d love to, I’d love to share one. But obviously, I think the most obvious would be like an instructional video. So I remember the first time I went to a dropboxes website, and it was quite a new concept. At that point, you know that online file sharing and how it all works. Now give me the choice of reading, or watching a 45-second explainer video, which just shows me exactly how to do it. And I know what I prefer, you know, I just find that is a really nice way to communicate and to stay on brand. And to explain something that potentially is a little bit complicated in a really simple way. That’s what I think the essence of an explainer video should do, and use illustrations to make that process even simpler to understand. -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
James Taylor 18:01
Now I’m sure you’re to get sent PowerPoints from clients. So this is what we’ve been using. This is what we’ve been doing up to this point, you have to name names and things like that. But what are some of the common mistakes that you see folks are making who are not professional designers have these, they’re just kind of doing their PowerPoints, but it could be a keynote they’re giving it could be a sales picture, sales deck that they’re doing, what are some of the common errors you’re seeing them making? Okay, -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
Common Mistakes Using PowerPoint
Ashley Pemberton 18:29
so number one would be Who are we presenting to? So in my industry, when I’m working for consultants if we’re presenting to brand managers, or to marketing managers, and we don’t correctly follow their brand guidelines, you’ve lost them on day one. So an example of that a long-term client of mine is Heineken. When we choose images for Heineken presentations or any of their sales material, we never pick anyone under 25. That’s actually in their brand guidelines because they don’t want the association with young people and alcohol. So that’s just one example. But if you didn’t know that, and you put a very cool-looking 20-year-old, and the brand manager just picks up on that straight away. You know, even on the front cover, you might have lost them. Or more than that if you use the wrong logo or you incorrectly apply their fonts or their colors. There are so many things that you can do to lose those marketing or brand people before you even started talking about your content. But the biggest one, I would say is, is this a presentation or is it a document? How are you actually going to be presenting it? Are you sending this document for someone to be able to browse through it at their own pace? Or are you presenting to them? If so, think about the use of reveals don’t overpopulate your slides. If you put things on a screen, or if you’re presenting from a laptop and you put it on a screen in front of people, they will read ahead 100% of the time, you know, they won’t follow you, they won’t be listening to you. And, and you’ll have, you’ll have created a distraction with how you’re doing. So my number one thing is, let’s take a step back, how are you going to deliver this presentation? You know, is it now going to be on a zoom call? Is it going to be a face-to-face meeting? Or is it a document that you’re sending ahead? Because there are different requirements. And often you need three, you know, often you might need four because you might have the explainer video. So you’d send something ahead, you give them something that they can read, you’d present something with way fewer words, way more visual, and some builds so that you’re not giving away all of your information ahead of delivering it. Yeah, and then this is the beauty leave them with an explainer video, which is new, it’s not the same as what they’ve seen already. This is something new for them to look at. And the explainer video will help you sell your story to people who weren’t present in that meeting, so I can -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
James Taylor 21:14
help them sell essentially,
Ashley Pemberton 21:16
yeah, don’t rely on the person that you’ve presented to then do your internal selling to other key stakeholders that leave them with the video. And it’s easy for me to say because they tend to cost about two and a half 1000 pounds to produce each one. But if it’s a multi-million or 1000 pound pitch, then it could well be money well spent. -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
James Taylor 21:39
I’m James Taylor, keynote speaker, and speaker business coach and this is the SpeakersU podcast. If you enjoy listening to conversations that will help you launch and grow your speaking business fast new thought possible, then you’ve come to the right place. Each week we discussed marketing strategies, sales techniques, as well as ideas to increase the profitability of your speaking business and develop your craft. You’ll find show notes for today’s episode as well as free speaker business training at SpeakersU.com. This week’s episode is sponsored by speakers, you the online community for international speakers, SpeakersU helped you launch grow, and monetize your speaking business faster than you thought possible. If you want to share your message as a highly paid speaker, then SpeakersU will teach you how just go to SpeakersU.com to access their free speaker business training.
Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
I was doing a presentation recently, I needed to kind of brush up on my just in terms of some of the kind of presentation that kind of slide stuff I was wanting to do. And I read two great books, actually three great books around it. One was presentations and one was Nancy Duarte is resonated. And then I think she did a follow-up. One was called slide ology. And that was one of the key things I took away from this book, what you just explained there was thinking about, what are the document what the, what they think and advertising they call it to the not outputs is another word phrase that they use for deliverables or what are the things are for it? Because I am sometimes Mike, I think possibly I’m maybe the only speaker that I know, say all the Bureau’s I said you’re the only speaker we know that asked this. I am the only speaker that asked for the brand guide from the client. Right? Before I deliver a presentation because I want to know, you mentioned things like the imagery, like for example, here, I’ve got loads of different like pocket squares, because when I present I want to be using their brand match colors. And if I’m using certain backgrounds, you mentioned, like in your brand, guys, they’ll say if we’re going to use pictures of has to have people doing something active, for example, you know, things like that. And so you think, okay, that’s great, how can I enter you don’t have to be either of you, I have to be slavish because they also bring in me from my expertise as well. But I feel it’s just like part of it is just showing respect to the client that no, there’s that phrase I heard the other day, I was doing an event for Bell in Canada. And they had a phrase which I’d never heard before. I really loved their salespeople use all the time. It’s called show me that you know, me, to me, and I just thought was a really nice phrase. And you can do that visually. There are lots of different ways to do that. So that’s great. So you’ve got these, these real kinds of common ones. What about working on this topic of images? What do you see? Where do you where you could have seen bad PowerPoint around the use of images? What is those kind of like you just kind of see as they are now they’ve done this again, that what are those things? -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
Ashley Pemberton 24:32
I mean, if you really want to start at the bottom, let’s go for Comic Sans fonts and clipart. So that you don’t get any worse than that. Yeah, it really doesn’t get worse than that. And then kind of next stage up would be I’ve chosen an image, but it’s pixelated. It’s really poor quality or it’s watermarked because I’ve stolen it from a photo library and not paid for it. That’s the next day’s job. Probably third would then be just totally wacky or bizarre or unrelated or distracting. And then kind of working your way up to a picture that really encapsulates the message that you’re trying to deliver. And I’ve got so many cases where I’ve chosen an image, presented it to people, and they’ve just absolutely loved it. And they’ve said, You’ve just app, you’ve nailed exactly what it was, I was trying to communicate with one image. And my philosophy is to get that on the front cover. So when you come into the present, put up your front cover, which has this beautiful image and just sets the scene and can say so much about you your understanding of the brand, or, you know, the proposal you’re about to deliver. If you can find that killer image, get it up there, make it full page, and then maybe, you know, beautifully typeset some copy around that. And there are so many really good photographic libraries online. Now, there’s this kind of like no excuse to be using bad images. Yeah, and I don’t know if you want me to share. -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
James Taylor 26:16
Yeah, I mean, I know the ones I use all the time, we use Unsplash and pixels, to the ones we use. And then we use paid ones like Shutterstock, which is I can relate but ones you are you recommending.
Images For Presentation
Ashley Pemberton 26:30
So I would say if you want free images, Unsplash is great. It will tell you the name of the artist and just give them a reference. And then you’re free to use that image commercially, which is brilliant because you’ll get high res images from that. If you’re not publishing. By that, I mean putting it online, if you’re not printing or using it, cook food for your commercial benefit. You can use any image, don’t be restricted and think that you can’t use images you can as long as you’re not commercially gaining from it. But my tips are number one user uses a Google Images search and adds the search term wallpaper. So I’m going to go back to Heineken because I’ve done so much work for them. If you type in Heineken and do an image search, you’re going to get what you’d expect pictures of beers, possibly people drinking. But if you do Heineken wallpaper, you’re going to get these beautifully professionally designed 16 by nine high res images. And when you use them in your presentation, people just look at you and go How long did it take you to do that? It didn’t it took me a search. But you could you’ll be amazed, you can change the word Heineken but keep the word wallpaper and do some Google searches and see what you get back. It’s quite unbelievable. That’s that’s -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
James Taylor 27:56
that’s great, really good. That’s a really nice tip there. Thank you for sharing.
Ashley Pemberton 28:00
And then we’ve got just one more if you want it. Yeah. So if you’re looking for inspiration about how things should look, go to Pinterest, Pinterest is phenomenal for this. And it will just set you off in the right direction you’ll get as a designer, the first thing I always do is seek some inspiration seek, like let’s see what’s out there already. And then how I can adapt that to fit my client brief. the final one, Getty Images. So I started using Getty Images when they used to send thick booklets to design agencies full of images that you would scan or download from a CD. But now everything is online. And the reason why I say go to Getty is that their search engine is phenomenal. It’s it will give you so many really creative alternative images. And one example that I’d like to share is I used to do a lot of work for segmentation, right? This is a marketing process where you divide things into different socio-economic groups or just segment a market. And people would always say to me, I need an image to represent segmentation. So it’s like pieces of orange slices of cake, pieces of pizza. And it was just always the same thing coming back. But by going to Getty Images, and using just your normal search terms, gives you just this array of options. So even if you’re not willing to spend 100 or 1500 pounds for that killer image, use Getty get your inspiration from there and see what it gives you in terms of like options, and then maybe go to Unsplash and find a free image or, you know, use a different option. But I think you know, -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
James Taylor 29:49
for some of those you mentioned that you like Getty, I think I’ve used Getty before because I am then I guess I’m the client. I’m the like I’m persistent and getting licensed for it. And, and if you’re giving a presentation, especially if you’re giving a signature presentation where you’re going to be giving multiple times, if an image does cost $1,000, but you’re giving for over the course of a year, you may be giving that presentation or that part of the presentation. 50 times actually pay is fine. It’s not really it’s not it’s not the worst thing in the world. And it’s a great image and no one else is probably going to be using that image as well. So it’s something that, yeah,
Ashley Pemberton 30:28
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there when a lot of our work is very corporate. And there’s no possible way that a big corporation like I mean, we’ve used Heineken all the way but the one I’m thinking of now is SAP, there’s no possible way that they would want anybody to use an image that they’re using to the point where they’ll probably commission, a professional photographer to create something totally bespoke. But the next stage down from that is to go to Getty find this amazing image and then buy it exclusively. So no one else can use that. And when you’re dealing with big corporates, yeah, that $1,000 or 1000 pounds for that are is not an issue. Now, maybe, maybe, maybe for you and I and my -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
James Taylor 31:14
visit this episode maybe should have been sponsored by Microsoft. So we have been talking about PowerPoint a lot. But I’m guessing some of your other clients use other things like keynote or Prezi. Or I’m seeing some people start to use Canva for certain things as well. Do you? Do you have a preference for any of these platforms?
PowerPoint Is The Most Powerful
Ashley Pemberton 31:31
I do. I do. And yeah, Microsoft should have sponsored us. So I’ll talk about the others in a sec. But the reason why we do everything in PowerPoint is that it’s the most powerful when you when I if I was to do something in Canva. And I’d present it to my client and that go, yeah, it’s good. But I just need this moving this adjusting, and I want some flexibility. Can’t do it. Same with Prezi. If you love that, that dive in animation, you know, if you love to be able to navigate around. And most people when they see Prezi they’re like, Yeah, that looks really brilliant. But if you do that too much, it makes you nauseous. It’s like it’s overkill. So if you really want that effect, Mr. client, then what I’d suggest is that we animate something for you using Adobe Creative Suite, because then you’ve got complete control over, you know, what the next sequence is and how it would work and how it runs for you. So the customizable solution is Adobe Creative Suite, and PowerPoint, these are our two. These are what we do best. -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
James Taylor 32:42
And it’s interesting. So over the past 14 months, it has been all virtual kinos or hybrid or hologram ones I’ve been doing. And we’re usually when you’re in these spaces, I’m filming guests an entirely green screen full body, they place me in the middle of a virtual arena or conference place, wherever it is and the use of the great tool called Unreal Engine to create these virtual environments like I’m in a game, essentially. And what I found just kind of using different things is because everything around me I basically just in a green room doing it, but everything around me is moving. they’ve organized their macros in terms so that that camera pan to then and then put the red light up a little bit longer. And then do this so you can see it in more of a shadow. Because there’s so much going on there. I actually found it’s better to keep the part of the slide which maybe even still presented me on a virtual screen behind me quite 2d quite flat because there’s just so much 3d going on. Like the eye is just getting confused and I just need to bring it back and like I use a pitch the other day I was talking about something which was about Madagascan lemmas like monkeys. So and it was just a really beautiful image of a Madagascan Lima I had behind me. And I just thought it just really punched out when you set it in that 3d environment. If I’d used a 3d graph, or something that was kind of fancier, I think it would just felt weird, it would have got a loss of great photography and great typography. In that virtual space, I’m just finding that’s what I’m I’m doing as a speaker just now that it’s
Ashley Pemberton 34:26
interesting, because you’ve made me think of when we design presentations for a physical conference. You need to know what the conference set is going to look like. Like, how branded is that conference set? Because if it’s heavily branded already, the last thing you want on a PowerPoint slide is another logo. And also how do the colors and like the overall impression what size is the screen? So yeah, there’s a lot to consider when, when you’re doing this but obviously 90% of the cases that we do, our people will just be looking at the screen, you know, there’s nothing, there’s no 3d Studio. There’s no big conference set. It’s just a PowerPoint presentation that’s going to be presented on screen. So let’s forget PowerPoint. It’s just an onscreen presentation. And potentially, we’re going to follow up with a PDF document because everybody can open a PDF. The fact is that we power both of those deliverables from PowerPoint. Because it’s the designers choice is as -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
James Taylor 35:31
ancient as we started to open up. Now the word starts to open up when people trying it I am starting to see there’s a little bit of a move. It’s almost like we’re going through. Like when I was last time I was in the first I was in Chiang Mai. I was there was a whole I think I was living in California. At that point, I decided to take a break from California, my wife, and I and were kind of going through digital nomadism 1.0. So like probably the early Tim Ferriss version, I think I’d met Tim at an event in San Francisco. And he got a copy of his book and was being determined, like, Oh, this sounds really interesting. Okay, let’s go and do Chiang Mai for one winter. And at that point, it was us as the foreigners praying, I guess, you know, going into Thailand, having a great life because you’re getting paid in dollars living in Thai baht. But it was like a 1.0 version. And there’s a certain kind of thing there is interesting because what I’m starting to see now a little bit is either because some speakers now can do all of their stuff virtually don’t even have to get onto a plane, it could be a 100% virtual keynote speaker if they want to do that. And I know some speakers that are doing that there’s suddenly or even if they are traveling, maybe not traveling as much. So they don’t need to be right sitting at Orlando airport be living like some speakers would do. They would be right next to Heathrow Orlando or because it’s easy for them to fly in and out. It’s allowed them to think about where do I want to be based, and for many more successful speakers, they’re gonna have a team. And so like, so like me, I’ve got a team of five in the Philippines. And as we’ve been talking about, we’re thinking about like, well, maybe it’s time now to maybe take a switch to go into I guess a DVD was called digital nomad 2.0. But where you actually, you can have that kind of lifestyle going and living in a really beautiful place like Thailand, but actually building your team physically around you in the space that you’re in. So I would love to know because you’ve got to live different lives. You’ve kind of done the digital nomad thing you’ve done living in a big city in the UK in London, you’ve done that building a team in Thailand. What does that part that final part? What does that been bringing to you, to your life, your life as an entrepreneur as a person? -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
Living In Thailand
Ashley Pemberton 37:38
Hmm, wow, I don’t know how to answer that. I mean, because you’ve kind of, you’ve kind of stumbled on three different stages of my life. So working in the city in London, for big banks, management consultancies, but as a PowerPoint designer, tiring hard work, physically draining having to work until 3 am and then you know, given up I always remember this from the banks their chauffeur driving home in a Mercedes that felt good age 20. But getting home at 3 am No, no, no sleeping during the day no hated it. As a digital nomad, I never really considered myself to be a digital nomad because I wasn’t that nomadic. I would go to Thailand to myself and my wife lived in so many different parts of Thailand. But my first thing would be I’d get my laptop out, and I checked the internet speed. And is it good enough for me to work from here? You know, asking them questions. Who’s the internet with how reliable is it? You know, how often do we have power cuts. And my favorite place to live was Koh Chang. And we actually got cat Telecom, which is a big internet service provider in Thailand to why a hardwire my internet connection down appear. So my home was actually on stilts over the sea. And I had a four Meg internet connection sort of 12 years ago. And it was the best. It really was. I yeah, it said one thing. When I turned my webcam on, my clients started to hate me. Like, you live there. So in the end, didn’t do that. And then moving to Chiang Mai was really about finding people that could support me. And when I told you I didn’t wanna live in Bangkok, and I would never have found a team in Koh Samui, Koh Chang, or any of these Southern beautiful islands, I would never have found the caliber or the commitment that I was looking for from a graphic design team. So Chiang Mai has a couple of universities. It has a pretty good standard of English literature. You know, all of my designers work in English. Language, they’re not fluent. But they are kind of digitally fluent like messenger-type fluency. You know, they we commute using an app called line. And you can type anything for them and they understand. But if you were to write a brief, quite an elegant brief in English, there are many things that they would stumble across. So I wanted to be in a physical office with them, I wanted to be able to control the workflow, to be hands-on where needed, and to be able to guide them. So that was why we went for Chiangmai. And that’s why we went for a physical office with a physical team. But saying that still, probably 80% of my team is still working remotely because COVID pushed us remotely. And my last hire, because I needed to hire more staff, we’re always recruiting, looking out for talented PowerPoint people. Because we now have become sort of like an 80% remote company. The last time I was from Mumbai, was an Indian. And he’s just been a breath of fresh air, you know. And now the idea that I can recruit outside of Chiangmai, but still have my office there. And a couple of my clients have said that they feel more reassured that they’re sending it to an agency with a physical office, as opposed to just sending it out to the Internet, and not knowing if it’s going to be in Thailand, or if it’s going to be in India, or if it’s going to be anywhere. Because presentations normally contain quite a lot of confidential information, we sign non disclosure acts with all of our clients. Often it can be presenting like brand strategy for the next five years. And it’s incredibly sensitive information. So my clients needed that reassurance from me, and they kind of wanted me to have this physical office and to control it. -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
James Taylor 42:03
Well, it’s great just seeing that progression, like what you’ve been doing, also has been great just watching it from afar and come occasionally visiting back into Chiang Mai, seeing them go from people just sitting in coffee shops, to then co-working spaces, to then taking large offices and starting to employ local ties as well. For those of you who don’t know, I know that there’s the there’s gonna be some big changes happening just now with the Thailand government in terms of their smart visa for entrepreneurs and for individuals. Oh, much easier. Because I know a lot of people that were living in Thailand, we’re having to do what they call the visa run without having to go over to my mom different places.
Ashley Pemberton 42:45
It’s loaded, let me do let me just share just something on that. Because this was madness, the Thai government was missing an opportunity to actually get some visa tax. They were busting they were raiding co-working spaces. This is how insane it was. And people are just sitting there going, I just want to try and earn a living from my laptop. Yeah. And they were getting arrested because they didn’t have the right visa. And when you ask the authorities, well, what visa Can I have? You’re not eligible for one. So it was just complete madness. So it’s very good that the smart visa is here. Also, there’s been a bit of relaxation on visas, but that what they have done is they’ve eliminated that, that 90 day or 30-day border run. Yeah, they didn’t want that they don’t want Thailand does not want that type of tourist here anymore. And they’ve made it incredibly hard for people to do that. -Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
James Taylor 43:46
But it’s great. Just seeing that is I guess it’s the evolution of a country as well, seeing how they’re really going after. If you’re, if you’re a speaker, like for example, if you have a skill where you maybe have to travel around the world, or you’re taking online courses, and you’re building and you’ve creating intellectual property, you’re creating worth value. Perfect. You can work from anywhere. Perfect, there’s that. But also, I think it’s interesting, because they’re also going after another type of visa, they’re really promoting, which is a kind of early retirement visa. So if someone’s over 50 years of age, I think it was and there’s a lot of speakers that fall into that situation of being the work may be for big a Deloitte or a big, big, firm, big bank, the big consulting firm, decided to go out on the road, now be a keynote speaker because they’ve got this passionate thing that they want to share with the world want to lower their costs don’t need to live in New York or San Francisco anymore can lower their costs, but they’re not really retiring. That’s not the vibe, you know, they want to have a different pace of life. So I think between that whatever the kind of call that Nomad, entrepreneur visa, and the retirement visa part. I think that’s going to be a real boon for Thailand. I think so too, and you’ve missed the visa that I’m Which is marriage? It’s always an option. But yeah. This there’s someone for everyone over here. Well, Ashley, thank you so much for coming on today sharing all about you. If people want to learn more about you maybe schedule a consultation call a discovery call. We want one of your teams to talk about their PowerPoint and their requirements. where’s the best place to go and do that?
Ashley Pemberton 45:27
Sure, please start by coming to visit my website, which is overnight.design. So that’s the best place and if you want to contact me directly, it would just be emailing ash@overnight.design
James Taylor 45:42
Well, Ash, thank you so much for coming on the show. I’m going to continued success with your business. I really appreciate that. Thanks, James. It’s great talking to you.
You can subscribe to the SpeakersU Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast while you’re there. leave us a review. I really appreciate it. I’m James Taylor, and you’ve been listening to the speakers you podcast.
Effective PowerPoint Presentation For Speakers
