Tips for a better presentation

Presentation color
The late Steve Jobs was a master presenter. Part of what made him so good was the simplicity of his Keynote presentations. Here are 10 Presentation Design Tips from Envato that can help you create a more compelling presentation.

My two pet peeves: Color and repetitive obviousness.
Bad color combinations can absolutely destroy an otherwise good presentation. It’s easy to use a decent color palette, but a unique and bold color combination can really make your presentation memorable.

Repeating the obvious drives me batshit crazy. Please, for the love of God, don’t place your logo in the corner of every slide! And if you’re pitching company X for their business, don’t put their logo on every slide either—they know who they are, and they probably remember who you are since you probably just told them on slide one.

50+ Free designer fonts

InkyDeals free fonts
InkyDeals has offered-up more than 50 delicious designer fonts, completely free to download. All are high-quality, handcrafted display fonts in OpenType or TrueType (or both). They’re perfect for website, brochure and ad headlines, logos, and presentations.

They’re only available for a short time, so download the fonts now.

Quickly view only one layer at a time in your PSD file

PS Layer visibilitySometimes you want to view only a single layer in a multi-layer PSD file. Rather than clicking multiple layer view icons (the little Eye next to the layer preview and name), you can speed up the process by Option+Clicking the one layer view icon you want to view. The other layers will turn off. To turn them all back on, Option+Click the layer view icon again.

Find the logo you’re looking for

Instant Logo Search

It seems like every time I do a Keynote presentation for a client, they’re looking to use a logo or two of other companies for examples. Of course just grabbing the logo off that company’s website rarely works out well. Thankfully, there are a few sites out there that make it easy to grab a nice, clean, vector version of the logo.

I recently came across another site called Instant Logo Search. They have thousands of logos, all searchable, and all available in SVG (vector) format—as well as PNG, if that’s all you need.

How to speed-up Time Machine backups

Time Machine
Time Machine, Apple’s built-in file backup and recovery tool, is awesome… eventually. I say that because it’s sloooooowww. You can quickly speed-up Time Machine’s backup process by typing the following in the Terminal:
sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

Type in your password and hit return and you’re good-to-go.

Unfortunately, this trick won’t hold through a restart. To do that, you can follow Mac Kung Fu‘s advice on how to permanently speed-up Time Machine.

Inside the mill: How an Apple rumor gets made

Apple rumors

You’ve definitely heard an Apple rumor before. Like, maybe there won’t be a headphone jack on the next iPhone? Or that iTunes is getting a major overhaul. They come from “unnamed,” “well-placed,” “reliable” sources who are “familiar with the company’s thinking,” or a blurry factory photo of unknown origin.

How does a piece of information from one of the world’s most secretive companies materialize online? It’s a much more opaque process than you might expect.

If you’ve followed Apple rumors online for any amount of time, none of this has escaped your notice. That being said, the last several years have seen “legit” media outlets jumping into the game, and quoting these sites as fact. As for me, I’ve found that 90% of “rumors” are little more than common sense guesses based on technology and past actions by Apple. The rest, well… I just wait for the official announcements before I get too excited about anything.

Quick way to improve your resume

Start by framing your bigger picture before adding those smaller bullet points. Tell compelling before-and-after stories. Hiring managers will see what you have done — and can do for them. You’ll show how you’d improve their organizations, based on what you’ve done in the past.

I completely agree that telling a potential employer of specific actions you took that resulted in positive outcomes is much better than simply telling them your title and typical job duties.