We all remember the days of laboring over intricate school projects, which then led to even more complex college presentations. Then, you enter the work world and creating and showing presentations takes on a whole new dimension.
PowerPoint has its charms – or, more accurately, its uses – but diving into a PowerPoint presentation can suck hours and days of your time away and create a lot of frustration. It is definitely not simple, unless you spend all your days working on it and are a PowerPoint whiz. For most people, it is a chore and a real headache. Even Wix promised to be an easy tool for creating online presentations but it was complicated and limited, especially when you compare it to the new iPad app Haiku Deck. How many times have you twiddled your thumbs at a conference or a meeting waiting for someone to get their presentation to show up correctly? Or even worse, how many times have you been the presenter in that situation.
Haiku Deck, which launched in 2012 from Seattle-based Giant Thinkwell, Inc., makes this all much, much simpler. You can create beautiful presentations and eye-popping decks easily and quickly – and this is coming from a person who nearly had a PowerPoint-induced breakdown more often than I’d like to admit. The app “promises to do for presentations what Instagram did for photos,” as Time Magazine says. That’s a bold statement, but based on the rave reviews Haiku Deck is getting, it is not such an exaggeration.
When you’re creating your presentation, you can choose from different themes with similar fonts and styles across the deck. When you’re finished you can see it on your iPad, share the link, or easily embed it on a website. There’s a reason they named the app after the Japanese three-line haiku poems: They are both clear, simple, and effective. Simplicity does not mean unappealing or dull in this case. The presentations look professional and slick. You are limited to a few lines of text for each photo (which is fine), and you can pull images from Creative Commons, or you can pull from Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram. The app also suggests photos based on keywords. For example, if your presentation is about inspiring entrepreneurs, you could type in “entrepreneur” or “business leader” and get a whole selection of images to use to make your point. You also have the option to make your presentation private, public, or restricted when it is finished and uploaded to the Web.
The creators of Haiku Deck have a helpful blog, which is a good practice for any business or creator to put in place. They have suggestions for people who are using Haiku Deck for the first time: 1). Create your deck on the iPad (they encourage you to “play” and spend some time with the “magical” app while you’re “curled up on the couch, on the subway, over a cappuccino.” Then 2). Publish to the web – just click “Share” and create the link by sharing it on Twitter or Facebook. Step 3). Finishing touches, means sign up to the Haiku Deck website where you can link to your social media accounts. Sounds pretty simple.
Haiku Deck is worth looking into not only when you want to create a slick but simple presentation. It’s worth a peek is you are a creator looking for some inspiration. Complexity is not always best. Sometimes, simplicity rules.
Image Courtesy of Giant Thinkwell Inc.