Our latest website for Venta UK: a local company who specialise in sales of safety lighting and equipment for all types of vehicle, but especially for the emergency services. This showcase of the wide range of products available from the company needed to be flexible enough to allow them to include detailed product information and photographs as well as information on their bespoke services.

Venta UK Website

The website needed to reflect the professional nature of the company and subtle enough to allow their product photos to take centre stage. Helping customers to find what they are searching for easily was addressed in their comprehensive system of menus.

To visit the Venta UK website please click here.

Create Design Studio are specialists in all aspects of new media marketing for small to medium sized businesses. If you would like to talk about your website please call us on 01962 737989 and speak to David or Charlotte.

The three simplest methods are to save your logo as either a JPEG, GIF or PNG file. GIF and PNG files can be saved without a background colour, but a GIF file is limited to only 256 colours, so logos with gradients or soft shadows may appear with bands rather than smooth gradients or shadows.

JPEG files do not have such a low limit on the number of colours they can contain, hence why they are the format of choice for photographs, but JPEGs cannot be saved with a transparent background.

Recent versions of PowerPoint, 2000 and newer, have a picture editing tool to allow you to set a single colour in an image to be transparent, so you can use this tool to remove the background colour of your logo. However it does not always produce satisfactory results with complex logos and you should also be aware that if the selected colour appears as part of your logo’s design it will be made transparent along with the background.

A little used format is WMF (Windows Meta File), unlike JPEG, GIF and PNG which are raster files (i.e. the files contain information about individual pixels), WMF is a vector file (stores information about objects e.g. circles, squares etc). When it comes to logos the WMF file three big advantages over the other formats:

1. Logos imported into PowerPoint as WMF can be resized without any loss in quality.
2. They have transparent backgrounds.
3. WMF files tend to be smaller than JPEG and PNG files.

Saving your logo as a Windows Meta File (WMF)

You cannot convert a JPEG, GIF or PNG into a WMF file, so you will need to go back to the original source file of your logo, provided that it was created in a package such as Adobe Illustrator or Freehand, you or your designer should be able to resave your logo as a Windows Meta File.

When saving your logo as a Windows Meta File, make sure you use the option to “save text as curves”, this will avoid any problems with non-standard system fonts that were used as part of your logo’s design.

Give it ago, having your logo in PowerPoint as a Windows Meta File (WMF) makes it much easier to use and gives you more flexibility when designing your presentations.

Check out the website www.soundsnap.com as it contains over 100,000 MP3 and Wav files arranged in a host of categories including animals, industrial, multimedia and sports.

You can sign up for free and download 5 clips per month, there are also various paid membership levels, with the top level offering unlimited monthly downloads.

These are ideal clips for your website or PowerPoint presentation.

There is a theory that colour can have an effect on how we behave and affect our mood. Red is associated with danger, or excitement, and is supposed to raise our heart-rate. There are also those who believe this effect can be harnessed by sports-people who wear red to compete, think of Michael Schumacher in his red Ferrari, and the Chinese athletes wearing red vests at the Olympics.

It’s not just in sport that this effect may be at work, the colours used by companies in their logo, their brochure and on their website can be used to help reinforce their company’s personality to their customers.

Opposite to red is the calming presence of blue, and energising shades of green are supposed to remind us of the natural world. Yellow is warm and optimistic and reminds us of the rays of the sun in a similar way to orange, a vibrant colour with a tropical mood. Black and grey are sophisticated and often used with technological implications.

Because we may associate these colours with certain moods sub-consciously it can be useful to carefully consider the colours you use on the materials you use for your business. It may be better to use red prominently on your PowerPoint slides if you happen to sell safety equipment than if you run a health spa, in which case perhaps blue or green might be wise.

If you want to create the right impression with any of your marketing materials then call I to Eye on 01962 737989 and we’ll make sure they get your message across to your customers.

Many presenters make the mistake of believing that their PowerPoint is their presentation.

The truth is that people buy from people and not from PowerPoint presentations, this holds true if you are selling a product, service or ideas to colleagues.

A strange thing for PowerPoint presentation designers to say you may think, surely we should be encouraging presenters to have bigger and more flashy presentations.

A PowerPoint presentation should be used as an aid to support a presenter not as a presentation.

So why use PowerPoint?

Used correctly PowerPoint will help a presenter communicate information and ideas, it is brilliant at explaining figures and trends, as well as focusing attention and giving emphasis to topics and points.

Include still photographs of products, facilities or offices, but be careful how you use video. Don’t use it as a substitute presenter. 

If your pitch is your PowerPoint

Then do your audience a favour and just email them your slides, the out come will be the same.

Your presentation plays back OK on your PC, but now that you have burnt it on to CD the video/audio clips no longer play. 

When you import video or audio clips into PowerPoint it just creates links from your presentation to the video/audio files. It is really important that when you burn your presentation to CD-ROM that you also burn the video/audio files on to the CD as well and that their relative postion to your PowerPoint file remains unchanged, otherwise the PowerPoint file will look for the video/audio files in the wrong place.

The easiest way to achieve this is prior to creating your presentation collect together in one folder all the video and audio files you are going to use. Then create your PowerPoint presentation in the same folder. 

When you come to burn the presentation to CD-ROM, burn the folder’s complete contents on to the CD, in that way your PowerPoint presentation will retain its relative position to your media clips and hence will know where to find them.

JPEG is fine for most presentation requirements, provided that the compression is not to high when the JPEG file is made.

If your images are large and paint up slowly on the screen try saving them as PNG files, they should then paint up quicker than JPEG files, but the overall size of your PowerPoint presentation file may be larger.

You should ensure that all bitmap images (i.e. scans etc.) are saved as RGB format files, rather than CYMK. This simply means that the colour information in your image is made up from RED, GREEN and BLUE (RGB) rather than CYAN, MAGENTA, YELLOW and BLACK (CYMK). Computer screens and  projectors all build up images using RGB, however colour printers tend to use CYMK to reproduce colour images.

We always recommend the use of the simpler styled fonts such as Arial, the characters have a constant thickness. Fonts such as Times Roman, with thin vertical strokes, can be difficult to read at a distance. Instead of using the underline feature to emphasis titles, it is better to use colour or a bold style of font. From a distance an underlined F will look like an E and an I can become a L.

If you have not used a standard Windows or Mac OS font such as Arial  you may need to install the font on the second computer.

If you have used a number of scanned images, audio or video clips you should check to see if the second computer is of a high enough specification to play the presentation correctly.

Check to make sure that you have imported all your images and not embedded them or appended them, otherwise they may not display correctly on the   second computer.

If you have not used any video, audio or linked files in your  PowerPoint presentation you need only burn the presentation file to your CD-ROM. Scanned images and clipart will be included in the PowerPoint file if they have been embedded and not linked, so you do not need to burn the individual scans or images to CD.

If you have used video, audio or linked files you will have to burn these to the CD. You must ensure that they are burnt on to the CD in the   same relative position to your PowerPoint file as they were on your hard drive.

The easiest way to achieve this, is prior to creating your presentation collect   together in one folder all the video, audio and linked files you are going to   use. Then create your PowerPoint presentation in the same folder, by burning the folder’s complete contents to CD your PowerPoint file will retain its relative   position to your media clips and hence know where to find them.