I’m currently in Austin, Texas at the HOW Design Conference. It’s been a great time so far and I’m totally looking forward to some more inspirational presentations tomorrow.

I presented on “Working with Indecisive Clients” today and passed out this handout/paper toy. The F’N Lemon thing has to do with a story I told about a friend trying to cut a lemon with the blunt end of a knife.

I got some good comments on my Powerpoint layout/flow. A lot of people wanted to know how I did it, so I thought I’d document it here. I used a PPT technique that I first saw in the book slide:ology called the Push Transition. You can download an example here. By overlapping design elements between the jpgs for your slides, and hooking them together with Push transitions you can create the illusion of a single larger image that is being pushed around on the screen.

I got the idea to do a whole presentation this way from the online presentation app called Prezi. Unfortunately Prezi is an online-only app with no offline mode. Until that changes, the Push transition will have to do for conference talks.

A word of warning; doing a whole presentation (70+ slides) using Push is very time-intensive and also limits your ability to switch slide order at the last minute (which I usually do a lot of). I probably ended up spending over 12 hours gathering artwork and creating the slides (not including writing the presentation itself). Since it’s HOW Conference, which I have wanted to speak at for years, I figured it was time well spent.

If you were at HOW and caught my presentation, I hope you enjoyed it. If you had any further questions, feel free to drop me a line on twitter.