Tag: prezi tips

Prezi Design Tips: How to Leverage Your Brand

brand

Branding

presentation branding

presentation design

prezi design

Prezi Feature of the Week

prezi tips

prezi tutorial

Dec 04, 2014

Prezi offers a dynamic and visually captivating way to present ideas, going beyond the traditional linear structure of PowerPoint. The tool’s unique zooming interface and canvas-based approach can help your brand stand out in the marketplace—if you know how to use it effectively. To fully leverage your brand in Prezi, you need to incorporate the core elements of your company’s identity, such as your logo, color palette, fonts, and messaging.Here’s a guide to designing a Prezi that not only engages your audience but also reinforces your brand identity.

1. Start with Your Brand’s Visual Identity

Your brand’s visual identity is the foundation of any presentation, and Prezi is no exception. Before you begin designing, gather the essential elements that define your brand—such as colors, logos, and typography. Consistent use of these elements builds brand recognition and trust with your audience.

How to Do It:

  • Customize Your Prezi Theme: Prezi allows you to create custom themes to reflect your brand. Begin by setting the background color, fonts, and title styles to match your company’s brand guidelines.
    • Go to the Prezi Editor → Customize → Advanced Settings to edit the background, font, and shapes.
  • Use Your Brand Colors: Incorporate your brand’s color palette throughout the presentation. Prezi allows you to apply your own colors to backgrounds, frames, and text.
    • Tip: Use your primary color for important elements like titles and calls to action, and secondary colors for accents and emphasis.

Example:

If your brand uses a navy blue and orange color palette, make sure the background or key elements in your Prezi incorporate these colors consistently.

2. Leverage Prezi’s Dynamic Features to Showcase Brand Storytelling

Prezi’s zooming and path-based format is perfect for non-linear storytelling. Rather than moving slide by slide, Prezi allows you to zoom into different parts of your presentation, which can help convey your brand story in a more engaging way.

How to Do It:

  • Map Out Your Brand Story: Prezi’s canvas is an open space where you can plot your content visually. Structure your presentation like a journey, using zoom-in transitions to reveal key elements of your brand’s story.
    • Start with an overview of your company, then zoom into different parts of the canvas to explore your mission, values, product history, and other details.
  • Use Frames to Organize Content: Frames in Prezi act as containers for content, allowing you to group ideas or sections together. Use branded colors and shapes to differentiate various sections of your story, such as product features, company history, or future goals.
  • Zoom for Emphasis: Zooming in on your company’s milestones, key achievements, or new initiatives makes them feel more impactful and exciting for your audience.

Example:

If you’re telling the story of your brand’s evolution, start with an overview of your company, then zoom into specific timelines or product launches. Each zoom reveals more detailed information, such as customer testimonials or product successes.

3. Incorporate Branded Visuals

Images, icons, and graphics are a critical part of your presentation design. In Prezi, visuals have an even greater impact because of the zoom feature. High-quality, branded visuals help reinforce your message and make your presentation more engaging.

How to Do It:

  • Use Branded Icons and Graphics: Instead of generic visuals, use custom icons and graphics that reflect your brand’s aesthetic. Prezi allows you to upload your own images, so ensure they align with your visual identity.
  • Maintain Image Consistency: Stick to a consistent image style, whether it’s minimalistic, realistic, or illustrative. This keeps your presentation cohesive and professional.
  • Brand Your Imagery: If possible, use images that directly reflect your brand. This could include images of your products, employees, or customer success stories.

Example:

If your company has a specific style of product photography (e.g., high-contrast images or minimalist designs), incorporate these images into your Prezi to visually communicate your brand’s personality.

4. Align Fonts with Brand Guidelines

Typography is a powerful branding tool that reflects the tone and personality of your business. Prezi allows for font customization, so use this feature to align your text with your brand’s typography guidelines.

How to Do It:

  • Choose Brand Fonts: Prezi gives you the option to choose custom fonts from their library or upload your own. Select fonts that are part of your company’s branding, such as the font used on your website or in printed materials.
  • Set a Font Hierarchy: Ensure that your headers, subheaders, and body text use a clear hierarchy to maintain readability. Stick to a few font sizes and weights for consistency and professionalism.
  • Keep It Readable: While creative fonts are great, make sure they are legible, especially on smaller screens or during remote presentations. Balance creativity with clarity.

Example:

If your brand uses a clean, modern font like Helvetica for headlines, and a simpler font like Arial for body text, replicate that in your Prezi to maintain brand consistency.

5. Structure Your Content with a Clear Visual Flow

Prezi’s zooming transitions allow for a more creative structure than traditional slide decks. However, it’s crucial to ensure that your audience can follow the flow of your presentation easily. A clear structure makes your message more impactful and avoids confusion.

How to Do It:

  • Organize Content Logically: While Prezi allows for non-linear navigation, it’s important to guide your audience through your presentation in a logical order. Plan out a path that takes your audience through key sections of your brand’s story.
  • Use Zoom for Subtle Transitions: Avoid zooming too far in or out, as this can disorient your audience. Instead, use smooth transitions that flow naturally between points.
  • Create a Strong Overview: Start with a high-level overview of your presentation’s key points, then zoom into more specific areas of interest.

Example:

For a product launch, create a map where each section of the presentation focuses on a different product feature. Begin with an overarching statement about the product’s benefits, then zoom into detailed explanations of features or customer use cases.

6. Add Interactive Elements to Boost Engagement

One of Prezi’s advantages is its ability to add interactive elements to your presentation, making it a more engaging experience. Interactive features allow your audience to explore the presentation at their own pace or to dive deeper into specific content.

How to Do It:

  • Embed Videos and Animations: Incorporating branded video content can help tell your brand’s story in a visually engaging way. You can also embed short product demos, customer testimonials, or behind-the-scenes videos to make your presentation interactive.
  • Hyperlinks to External Resources: Prezi allows you to embed hyperlinks to websites, reports, or documents. Use these links to direct the audience to your company’s landing pages, social media profiles, or other branded content.
  • Add Clickable Frames: Create frames that viewers can click to zoom into a specific part of the presentation. This makes your Prezi more interactive and gives your audience the freedom to explore your brand’s story.

Example:

For a presentation about a new service, embed a customer testimonial video or link to your company’s case study page to provide further insights and increase audience interaction.

7. Maintain a Strong Brand Voice

While Prezi offers many opportunities to get creative with visuals and structure, it’s important to maintain a consistent brand voice throughout your presentation. The way you present your content should reflect your company’s personality, whether it’s formal and professional or casual and conversational.

How to Do It:

  • Keep Your Messaging Consistent: Ensure that the language used in your Prezi aligns with your company’s tone of voice. Whether you’re using industry jargon or friendly, approachable language, consistency is key to reinforcing your brand identity.
  • Highlight Key Brand Messages: Incorporate your company’s tagline, mission statement, or unique value proposition within the presentation to remind the audience of your core values.

Example:

If your brand voice is innovative and bold, craft short, punchy statements that reflect that tone. Use headlines like “Transforming the Future of Healthcare” rather than longer, formal statements.

Final Thoughts

Prezi offers a unique and engaging platform to elevate your brand through presentations. By integrating your brand’s visual identity, storytelling techniques, and interactive features, you can create a dynamic presentation that not only captures attention but also reinforces your brand’s values and personality.With thoughtful design and strategic use of Prezi’s features, your presentation can go beyond delivering information—it can become an immersive experience that leaves a lasting impression on your audience. Leverage the power of Prezi to highlight your brand and stand out from the competition.

Collaboration in Prezi: Creating a Cohesive Vision

Prezi Feature of the Week

prezi tips

prezi tutorial

Nov 20, 2014

Technology continues to make communication and collaboration much easier. Share your ideas and collaborate with everyone in your team with a step-by-step guide in this week’s Prezi Feature. A presentation isn’t always a lone endeavor. Maybe you’re working with collaborators on a new project. Maybe you need to ask some people in your team to corroborate the facts and data you have. Whatever the reason, there will be occasions when your work requires close collaboration with others. If you want to make sure that the core message is properly represented through visuals and content, you’ll need to take into account everybody’s input.Unfortunately, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. The process of collaboration can get a bit tedious, especially when you’re building a presentation deck together. There will be plenty of back and forths between different individuals. Dozens of emails sent. Different versions of the presentation file shared. There are so many steps to go through before everyone can agree on a final “look”. In between those steps, there are a lot of room for error as well. The process will be so much easier if you can all just sit and work together at one time. But what if there’s a conflict in schedules? Or what if your collaborators live across the country from you?We often talk about how today’s technology has significantly increased our ability to communicate, specifically in the world of business. You can save a lot of time and effort if you know which tools to use. Speed up the process and see everyone’s input instantly using Prezi’s collaboration feature.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to keep everyone’s ideas clear and cohesive:

With Prezi’s collaboration feature, you can work with up to 10 different users. While editing your presentation, click on the Share button at the right side of the top menu.Choosing ‘Share prezi’ will prompt a pop up where you can type down the email address of your collaborators. Prezi will send emails informing them that they can edit the presentation with you.From there, it’s as easy as working on your prezi as you usually would. Except now you’re working together with several other people, making your own edits on specific parts of the presentation.If you want to see which part of the prezi your collaborator is working on, click on their avatar and choose ‘Zoom to position’.You can also invite other users to join by expanding the sidebar on the right. If you want to review your prezi once everyone is done making their contributions, just click on ‘Start presentation’.You’ll be the presenter by default, but you can allow your collaborators to take the lead by clicking on their names and choosing ‘Hand over presentation’.

Collaboration is a crucial part of any project. When it comes to preparing presentations, the old saying “two heads are better than one” is often true. Allow others to share their ideas and contribute to create a strong and cohesive vision. Creating a presentation involves a lot of creativity and innovation. With Prezi’s collaboration feature, you can combine the best ideas into a single vision.

Featured Image: Death to the Stock Photo / Prezi logo via Wikimedia Commons

Prezi Tips: How to Create Your Own Designs in No Time

Prezi Feature of the Week

prezi tips

prezi tutorial

Nov 13, 2014

Prezi is known for its dynamic, zoomable presentations that break away from the traditional slide-based format. With Prezi, you can create engaging and visually captivating presentations that move smoothly between different elements, helping you tell a compelling story. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced Prezi user, these tips will help you create your own designs in no time.

1. Start with a Prezi Template

Prezi offers a variety of ready-made templates that can be customized to fit your content. Starting with a template helps save time while providing a solid foundation for your presentation design.Why It’s Effective:

  • Saves Time: Prezi’s templates are professionally designed, allowing you to focus on customizing the content rather than starting from scratch.
  • Provides Structure: Templates provide a clear structure, making it easier to organize your presentation and create a cohesive flow.

How to Do It:

  • Open Prezi and browse the template gallery. Choose a template that matches your presentation’s style and theme.
  • Customize the template by adding your text, images, and other media.

Example: If you’re creating a business pitch, choose a professional template with clean lines and subtle colors that can be easily adapted to your company’s branding.

2. Use Prezi’s Zooming Feature Effectively

One of Prezi’s standout features is its zooming capability, allowing you to zoom in and out of content. This feature can help you present your information in a nonlinear way, making your presentation more interactive and engaging.Why It’s Effective:

  • Enhances Engagement: Zooming adds movement to your presentation, keeping your audience interested and helping them follow along.
  • Emphasizes Key Points: By zooming in on specific elements, you can highlight important information and create a visual hierarchy.

How to Do It:

  • When designing your Prezi, map out the flow of your content so that key points can be zoomed in on when needed.
  • Avoid excessive zooming, which can be disorienting for the audience. Use it strategically to guide the viewer through your presentation.

Example: Use zoom to start with an overview of your topic, then zoom in on specific points for deeper explanations, such as moving from a big-picture concept to detailed case studies.

3. Customize Your Path

In Prezi, your presentation follows a path that connects each element. While templates come with predefined paths, you can customize the path to better suit your narrative and control how the audience navigates through your content.Why It’s Effective:

  • Improves Flow: Customizing the path allows you to create a logical flow that matches the story you want to tell.
  • Tailors the Experience: You can adjust the path to focus more on key points and skip less important details if needed.

How to Do It:

  • Use the Edit Path feature in Prezi to customize the order in which elements are presented.
  • Rearrange, add, or remove elements from the path to create the flow you want.

Example: For a product presentation, you can start with the product overview, zoom in on its features, then move to customer testimonials, and finish with pricing details.

4. Incorporate Multimedia Elements

Prezi allows you to insert multimedia elements such as images, videos, and charts to make your presentation more interactive. These elements not only add variety but also help illustrate complex ideas more clearly.Why It’s Effective:

  • Enhances Engagement: Incorporating multimedia can break up the text and keep your audience visually engaged.
  • Simplifies Complex Information: Visuals like charts or videos can help explain difficult concepts more effectively than text alone.

How to Do It:

  • Drag and drop images, videos, or charts into your Prezi design. Make sure they are relevant to your content and support your key points.
  • Use multimedia elements sparingly to avoid overwhelming your audience.

Example: Include a short product demo video to show how your solution works or insert a chart that visualizes key data points.

5. Make Use of Prezi’s Frames

Frames in Prezi are like slide containers, used to group content together and control how the audience views each section of your presentation. Frames can be circular, rectangular, or invisible, allowing for flexible design.Why It’s Effective:

  • Organizes Content: Frames help break down your presentation into sections, making it easier to manage and navigate.
  • Guides the Viewer: Using frames allows you to control what the audience sees and when, guiding them through your narrative in a structured way.

How to Do It:

  • Use frames to group related content together. For example, one frame might contain all the key benefits of your product, while another contains customer testimonials.
  • Choose from Prezi’s different frame shapes to match the visual style of your presentation.

Example: Create a circular frame to highlight an important statistic and a rectangular frame to show a step-by-step process.

6. Keep It Simple

Prezi’s zooming and interactive features make it tempting to add a lot of movement and content, but it’s important to keep your presentation simple and focused. Overcomplicating the design can distract from your message and confuse your audience.Why It’s Effective:

  • Improves Clarity: Keeping the design simple ensures that your content is the focus and prevents the audience from feeling overwhelmed.
  • Maintains Engagement: A clean, simple design is easier for the audience to follow, helping them stay engaged with your message.

How to Do It:

  • Stick to one main idea per frame and avoid cluttering the design with too many elements.
  • Use zooming and movement sparingly, ensuring that every action serves a purpose.

Example: Instead of cramming multiple charts and text into one frame, focus on presenting one chart at a time, followed by a zoom into a key takeaway.

Final Thoughts

With these tips, you can create your own Prezi designs quickly and efficiently while still delivering an engaging, dynamic presentation. By using templates, customizing paths, incorporating multimedia elements, and keeping your design simple, you’ll be able to create professional, visually appealing Prezi presentations that captivate your audience.

Extending the Metaphor: 3 Tips for Choosing Images in Prezi

images in prezi

presentation design

Prezi Feature of the Week

prezi tips

visual storytelling

Nov 06, 2014

Choosing the right images is essential in Prezi, where visual storytelling and movement play a central role in how ideas are conveyed. Prezi presentations rely on motion and spatial relationships between content, making it important to select images that not only support your message but also enhance the flow and storytelling.Here are three key tips for choosing images in Prezi that extend your metaphor and strengthen your presentation:

1. Choose Images that Reinforce the Metaphor

In Prezi, visuals are often used to build upon metaphors that guide your narrative. To make your presentation more cohesive and compelling, choose images that directly support and expand on the metaphor you’re using to frame your presentation.How to Do It:

  • Extend the Visual Metaphor: If you’re using a metaphor of a “journey” or “roadmap,” choose images like roads, paths, or maps to visually reinforce that concept. If your metaphor is a “growth” story, use imagery of plants, trees, or seeds sprouting to illustrate stages of development.
  • Create Consistency: Choose images with a consistent style, color palette, or theme. This helps create a cohesive narrative and makes it easier for the audience to follow the flow of your story.

Example: For a presentation on business development as a journey, you could show images of winding roads, signposts, and checkpoints to symbolize the progress and milestones along the way.

2. Use High-Quality, Simple Images

Prezi’s zooming feature allows you to move in and out of different elements, making the quality and clarity of your images especially important. High-quality images enhance the professionalism of your presentation, while simple, clean images help avoid overwhelming your audience.How to Do It:

  • Use High-Resolution Images: Because Prezi zooms in on images, you’ll want to use high-resolution visuals that retain their quality even when enlarged. Pixelated images can be distracting and diminish the impact of your presentation.
  • Avoid Overly Complex Images: Simplicity is key in Prezi. Choose images that communicate one clear idea rather than those packed with too many elements. Complex images can confuse your audience and detract from the overall message.

Example: If your presentation covers financial growth, a clean, simple bar chart or line graph works better than a crowded chart with excessive data points.

3. Align Images with Movement and Flow

One of Prezi’s strengths is its ability to move seamlessly between content areas. The images you choose should align with the movement of your presentation, both spatially and thematically, ensuring that the flow of your narrative feels natural and intuitive.How to Do It:

  • Follow the Flow of Movement: Prezi allows for zooming and panning between different sections, so place images strategically to enhance the flow. For instance, if you’re moving from one idea to the next, use images that complement that transition, such as a visual that leads the eye from one point to another.
  • Link Images to Key Messages: Use images to serve as visual anchors for important concepts. Place them in a way that makes your narrative easy to follow as the presentation zooms in and out.

Example: For a presentation on project management, you could use an image of a Gantt chart or timeline that the Prezi zooms into, helping the audience focus on specific stages of the project.

Final Thoughts

In Prezi, images do more than just supplement text—they drive the entire visual storytelling process. By choosing images that reinforce your metaphor, maintaining high quality, and aligning with Prezi’s natural movement, you can create a visually captivating and engaging presentation. These tips ensure that your images not only support your message but also help guide the audience through your narrative seamlessly.