Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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It seemes to me that in the area of corporate communications, any powerful visual vehicle is better than stale bullets or text.

To that end, in the past I have written about Agent technologies like Vox Proxy in terms of both their promise and limitations (the artificiality of most text to speech technology). Another tool that is more clip art like is PointClips, but it has some "characters" and you could add text or thought bubbles to use them in a story oriented presentation.

One of my friends, Terrence Gargiulo, specializes in using stories in his facilitation workshops, and had gotten me interested in graphic novels. Up until then, my main knowledge of this media was limited to Flash cartoons aimed primarily at kids and students.

But a search for corporate graphic novels on Amazon was interesting. For one thing, the overwhelming response was a series of Dilbert books, including a personal favorite, Dilbert's Top Secret Management Handbook. Of course the problem with using this material in a seminar or presentation is copyright restrictions — which still doesn't prevent Dilbert from becoming fodder in PowerPoint.

Similarly I would highly recommend the New Yorker Book of Business Cartoons — even the samples on Amazon make me laugh out loud and they would make terrific openings for many types of training workshops in the corporate arena.

An InformIT article on Best of the Internet also featured Comics, Cartoons and Animation from a book published by QUE, but be careful using any of these assets due to copyright issues.

What really got me thinking about this area, however, was my introduction to Comic Book Creator, which exhibited at ShowStoppers at the Consumer Electronics Show.

According to the NY Times' Michel Marriott, "With Comic Book Creator by Planetwide Games, users can populate their comic books with practically any digital image, including their own digital photos, stock and Internet images as well as screenshots from DVD movies and video games. The latest version of the program, Marvel Heroes Comic Book Creator, which is available in stores for about $30, includes licensed images from Marvel's Spider-Man, X-Men and Elektra franchises."

I decided to try the product with the idea of seeing how it might work with a tool I use regularly — PowerPoint. I figured what would mesh better with an executive's exalted ego than putting his or her ideas into the text or thought bubble of a SuperHero or SuperHeroine?

Xtranormal, a 3D animation company in Montreal that previewed at DEMO08, created a 3D animation studio with templates for backgrounds and characters to allow you to create an animated movie.

Figure 1

Sites like Toonlet can offer a more traditional comic book format like Comic Book Creator.

Figure 2

As with many of these tools, using them in a business environment is a matter of courage and creativity — in some situations they will look corny or forced while in others they will be a perfect fit.

Would you want characters like these to be a spokesperson for a concept in PowerPoint?

Figure 3

Used effectively and with appropriate humor it could certainly set a different sort of tone, and you don't have to be an artist to add a simple thought or speech bubble to a character like this.

You could either drop the entire strip into a PowerPoint slide and display it to tell a story or convey a message — or you could build a story over a series of slides and use some wipe or fade transitions in between.

Whether you use Superheroes or goofy characters your slide show will be unique, at least until some competitors or other presenters begin to get the idea. Then, as always, you will need to use a bit of ingenuity to set your PowerPoint slides apart from the masses.

Online Resources

Comic Book Creator

Xtranormal

Toonlet

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