Presenting your portfolio on the iPad

15 Jul 2010 13 Comments

by AnaFxFzin Presentations, iPad Tags: , , ,

If you are a presentation designer, you might want to get an iPad now! Especially if you work for yourself and occasionally need to pitch your services to clients.

The iPad is the perfect device to showcase your work whether you have pictures, movies, PDF files, or presentations. There has been a lot of discussion about the Keynote for iPad. A lot of people are unhappy with the fact that their presentations (originally built in Powerpoint or Keynote for Mac) do not display correctly on the ipad. First of all, the Keynote for iPad is NOT the same Keynote you have on your Mac. You have to learn about the limitations of the Keynote for iPad and adapt to them. If you have a font, frame, build, or transition that is not supported on the iPad, stop complaining and change it to one that is! There are plenty of options in the Keynote for iPad, and I will show you that in this blog post.

In case you are asking yourself if you will need to reformat your presentations just for the iPad, the short answer is “yes”. The [not so] long answer is: Of course you will have to make adjustments to your presentations on the iPad, what did you expect… magic? And if you think that taking the time to do that is not worth it, I’m sorry but you are wrong!

This morning I had a meeting where I used the iPad to show some of my sample work. Guess what? It was just awesome! Two days ago, as I prepared for this meeting, I put together a new portfolio containing examples of my Keynote designs, Powerpoint before & after, Photoshop, and Illustrator… I ended up with a presentation of 70 slides, and although I knew I would be presenting it on the iPad, I did not limit anything while designing the deck on my iMac.

When I uploaded the file into the iPad, it did not look bad at all. In fact, it looked great! Luckily, the font and some of the picture frames were available on the iPad and looked just perfect. The only thing I had to do was to adjust the picture frames that didn’t work well and add transitions between each slide (which I did not do in the original file). Again, this portfolio has 70 slides and it took me only a few minutes to do it.

So here are some notes about this experience. As I said, there are plenty of formatting options:

- Fonts can be easily edited, the iPad currently supports over 40 fonts and font families that include American Typewriter, Courier, Futura, Optima, Zapfino, and more.



- There are several style options, and you can add shadow or reflection, and even change the opacity of objects.



- Adding elements such as tables, charts, and shapes is very easy. Note that for each of these elements there are 6 pages of options.



- Pictures from your library are easily accessible through the media menu.



- Animations and builds will make your portfolio look even better. Note:
1) When importing a presentation that uses a transition or build not available in this version of Keynote, it is replaced with the dissolve transition/build.
2) There is no way to select more than one slide at a time. I had to add transitions to all 70 slides one by one.



- Ah-Ha!! In the Tools menu you will find Check Spelling, Slide Numbers, and Guides.



-As for the basic stuff, you will see that editing text, resizing boxes, and navigating through slides using the left sidebar is a piece of cake. It is very easy to reposition, copy/paste, and delete slides (am I overusing the word “easy” in this post?).



- Built-in laser pointer!! Yes, that’s right… If you buy the VGA dock adapter and connect your iPad to a projector, there is a built-in laser pointer. How cool is that!? Once you’ve started your slideshow at any point on any slide you can hold down your finger on the iPad’s display and it will turn into a red dot just like a laser pointer. Just move your finger around to have a visual of anything you want to point out on the big screen. *big smile*



Unfortunately, you can’t add movies to your slides in Keynote for iPad [yet]. But if you have a media-rich presentation, you can export as movie file and add it to your iPad’s movie library. You can even use iMovie to edit your presentation first, adding music and sound effects to it (that’s what I did!). Of course, it only works if you don’t need to have absolute control of how fast your slides advance (the iPad does not support Manual Advance QuitckTime movies). The display of a movie presentation on the iPad is just beautiful… and fun.



That’s it for today folks! :) This is my review of the Keynote for iPad. It took me a while to post this because I wanted to have a real hands-on experience before I said anything. I don’t understand why people are complaining about such a powerful tool. It has been great for me! Take some time to reformat your presentations (or make new ones from scratch) and try delivering them on the iPad, you will see what I am talking about… and don’t forget to hit play and get into presenter mode before you hand your device to your client! ;)



PS.: It is always a good idea to export your portfolio-presentation as PDF and add it also to your iBooks library. It looks great too! ;)

UPDATE: Please see the follow-up post of this article HERE.

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13 Comments (+add yours?)

  1. Linda Chreno
    Jul 15, 2010 @ 16:33:53

    Thanks for a great presentation and allowing me to realize that I can do an awesome presentation on my iPad!

  2. AnaFxFz
    Jul 15, 2010 @ 17:08:37

    Thank you Linda! :)

  3. kudiarto
    Jul 15, 2010 @ 19:02:00

    Nice tips mate!, thanks……. ^_^

  4. Bill Hibbler
    Jul 15, 2010 @ 19:04:40

    Hi Ana,

    Nothing like having Chris Brogan tweet about your post. Excellent info and timely as I’d just been reading about presentation mode on Apple’s site.

    Can I make a suggestion? Add a Retweet button and/or a share this plugin to your site to make it easier to share your post. Congrats on all the notice you got today.

    Bill Hibbler

  5. AnaFxFz
    Jul 15, 2010 @ 19:06:35

    Thanks kudiarto! ;)

  6. AnaFxFz
    Jul 15, 2010 @ 19:07:25

    Thanks Bill! You’re absolutely right, I’ll add that plugin right now. :P

  7. FM
    Jul 16, 2010 @ 01:50:33

    One BIG thing though. There is a file size limitation on TEN megabytes. A BIG deal breaker. Have made a few snazzy presentations in keynote for iPad. So one movie is OK but not to many though. Prepare the basics in keynote for Mac because fiddling on the iPad takes time. But over time I think keynote will kick even more presentation ass 8-)

  8. AnaFxFz
    Jul 16, 2010 @ 06:59:39

    You’re right FM. Creating the presentation in Keynote for Mac and just making adjustments later on the iPad will be much easier and faster. Cheers! :)

  9. D Meadows Retouching
    Jul 19, 2010 @ 10:47:54

    I’m still debating the benefits of an iPad portfolio, I’m sure I’ll succumb at some point :)

  10. AnaFxFz
    Jul 19, 2010 @ 11:15:32

    And I am sure you won’t regret! ;)

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