 Camera. I might talk real fast, but don't worry. It's going to be online. Don't forget that while I talk. I was pulled on to float on to be the illustrator and graphic designer many years ago, and I want you all to know that I was not a designer at the time. This is important information. I was like, yeah, Graham, I can do that, but like, you should know that I'm specifically very bad at composition. He was like, that's chill. I'll train you. So I know a thing or two about not knowing a thing or two. And I've also seen firsthand what it's like to be a business owner who is trying to do all of their graphic design by themselves. So I'm hoping that I can share with you some of the things that I've learned over the last, I don't know how many years I'm tired, I can't count. So, oh, there's the mic. That's good to know. To be efficient, I put everything that I'm going to talk about on one slide. So you all can read that, right? I forgot my glasses upstairs, but you can read that. Well, how about we zoom in on the parts that I'm going to be talking about? We'll start with what kind of programs you should have installed. So we got, like, publishing software. We should have, like, an image manipulation software. And that's maybe a little bit cluttered. I'd really love to remove some of these elements, but I did build this in Photoshop, and now we're in PowerPoint. I'll put some boxes in front of it so that the elements don't, well, now those are black. They should be colored so that they cover up specific things. And some of those things are really blurry. So let's, like, put some text over the, it doesn't fit. Okay. This is very bad. It's almost like I should have built my slides in a program that I built to make slides. Part one, use the right software for the job. So how about those lines? We don't need these vertical lines because we already know this has columns. We can see them. Get out of there. There's a lot of colors on here, too. I don't think we need all these colors. We can already see that there are rows, and there's nothing particularly red about publishing software or purple about, what is that, design mock-up software. Let's limit it to one color. I don't have a style sheet for this slideshow because I was only going to do one slide. So I guess when we're in that position, the best thing to do is to copy somebody else's style. We'll just make it blue. Good. And the headers, too. Yes. Now that we've done all that, I can't help but notice that Microsoft Word is weirdly emphasized. They should pay me money for this. The sizing is all off. We should make everything the same size. Yes. But it's not the same size because there's like 10 million fonts on here. So get rid of all of those. Better. Now the alignment is very odd in the horizontal sense. So let's use the arrange tool here to get that into whack because you can get things out of whack. The arrange menu is on almost every program. If you don't know where it is and whatever you're using, definitely Google that. That will save you a million years of time. Great. Not so great. Those colored boxes are just all over the place. I don't have time to deal with that. I think there is actually a table function that I should have been using in PowerPoint, but I didn't know at the time I'm learning a new piece of software right now. So let's get rid of those. We don't need those. Oh, we needed those. The background is very ugly. Let's get rid of the background. That's fine. Oh, everything is centered. Why is everything centered? Did I think it was all headers? They're not. This is unscanable. Do it. Yes. Good. Now it's jiggly from top to bottom. I like this better, but there's like way not enough space for description. Let's get that spaced out. That's okay. That's going along. Now there's typos, and there's weird emphasis. Check this. Editor is just like capitalization. I can't add that. Now, also the line heights here. I can't find the line height function, but I really like these things to line up with each other across the board. That's a little better. Mm, the tidalese. The tidalese. Those sweet little tidalese are not feeling very tidally to me. What if we make the lower lines lighter so that the higher line has all the emphasis? That helps a little, but it's not quite enough, especially on this very well-lit screen. Let's try making the titles bold. It looks like nothing. Let's try making the titles underlined. They look like links. Let's make them bigger. Okay. That's alright, I guess. I think this is about as far as we can go with this without deleting some of this, honestly, egregiously copyright. You can't read it anyway. We'll start by getting rid of design mockup software. I don't really know that stuff very well, so what's the point? We already talked about spreadsheets, and I only mentioned text editors because I want to advise you not to try and make pamphlets and that thing, because it's not going to be a fun time. Okay, now we can fit this all on a page better. I made it all bulleted lips, too, so that you can actually read it. Okay, now that you can see that, why is this in a table? What are tables for? Tables are meant for comparing things. And we can see there are three different kinds of software, and sure, we could be like, ah, here's all the features that Catherine wants you to look at. And you could make the argument that I put this in a table to show you that these are all very distinct programs with nothing in common, but you want to know the real reason that it's in a table. I had too much to put on a page and I wanted an excuse to put lines in between everything. And that's a terrible reason to use a table. Let's give each of these things their own slides, as it should have been. I know more work for me, but part two, where do I try to expose you to tech jargon without scaring you? Wish me luck. We're gonna talk about text, excuse me, vector editors. This is very ugly. Let's get this into PowerPoint and give it a glow up. Okay. So again, lots of fonts. We got like, what is it for getting signs, teachers and other swag printed logos and icons like it bounces all over the place. And as you're reading it, you have all these opportunities to just get out of here. You're like, well, they're switching font again, I'll just leave. So let's get that all unified. There's a lot of bounciness also as we're reading because the text is centered, you have to go find the beginning of the line, every single line, loop, loop, loop, loop, loop, loop, it's nonsense. Let's get that all justified to the left as it should be. There's no shame in just going with the flow of the page, we read right to left, excuse me, the other way around and top to bottom. And we want to read of this side of the page first. We can just leave our text over there all cozy. On the other hand, I don't actually want you guys reading at all because I have a mouth and I can speak pretty fast. Vector editors, what are they for? posters, t shirts, icons for your website, mocking up your website, and your logos. Why do we use vectors for this? Well, I'll tell you, this is a model of a raster image, a raster image is made up of pixels. Every single pixel is given a color and a position, and every single pixel has to load. You might notice it takes a little while. Here we are waiting for our bitmap to load. Here we are waiting for a bitmap to load. And you can't read the text, because there's only so many pixels. So what do we do about that? Well, we've got compressed images. Here's an example of a JPEG. I mean, it's not exact, but this is roughly what a JPEG does to compress the image. You can see that it loaded way faster. But we've lost information. We call this a lossy compression. Even if you don't remember what type of file you're using, you can always look up is this lossy. JPEGs have this distinctive square artifacting. And you'll also see that colors start to bleed into other colors. And it's very ugly. I might be biased. I really hate JPEGs. This is a PNG. It loads much faster as well similar to JPEGs, but it uses a different type of compression. And it's lossless. Every single pixel is exactly the same as the original bitmap, despite the fact that it was loaded much more efficiently. However, you can see that there are still only so many pixels up here, and we can't read this nice text. And you could do all sorts of things to this image. You could load it into Illustrator and re-save it as a .ai file. You could make it into a PDF. You could blow it up in Photoshop, and that text is never coming back because there's only so many pixels. So this little thing right here that I was using on the other slide, if we want to make that big as a raster image, it's only going to show off whatever kind of compression artifact is on there. It's never going to get bigger. So what do we do? Enter the vector! How big? How big can we display a vector? Yes. Vectors can display a so big, and they display so fast. There are no pixels in a vector image. They're math. They're just mathematical descriptions of how your computer should draw the image, which is awesome. So if I've got this little bitty icon, as you can see, this is like 1080 by 1920. I can't be sure about this. This is not my projector, but roughly speaking, and this is 150 pixels by 150 pixels that we have to stretch out. Side note, don't ever stretch your images out of aspect ratio. You think, oh, well, I just needed to stretch it a little bit to fill this space. No, I will notice, and it will hurt me. Don't do it, please. So, say we want to use this icon, but it's very ugly. It's got a background. It's all fuzzy. I don't know what to do about it. Well, let me show you my very favorite tool from Illustrator. It's called Image Trace. You can chuck a thing into Illustrator and use the, like, just kind of do the, oh, right, if you can't find it, it's in the Windows menu. I did that. That was smart of past self. You can play with the tools here, and it will attempt to trace the image for you. This is great for me because I'm not, I'm an Illustrator by nature, so I often end up with more images than I do, just shapes. I just really wanted to show you this tool. It's, like, my favorite thing. Now, obviously, garbage in, garbage out. This is not the nicest looking vector. A lot of stuff on this page. Get out of here. Okay, this is not the nicest looking vector you could get. But if you put in, say, like an 8,000 by 8,000 image with three colors, and then you suck that in there, well, then you got yourself a t-shirt. There's also, it's a powerful stuff you can do with a vector editor. It's so great. If you want to up your skills in your vector editor program, I can't get into the stuff, but you could Google converting anchor points, shape builder and shape merge, and again, Image Trace. Image Trace is actually available, not just in Illustrator, but in every freeware program as well. So that's tight. I didn't know that before this talk. It's around. Part three, putting stuff with other stuff. Now it's time to talk about everybody's favorite kind of software, the image editor. That's your Photoshop. It's also your Krita and your Gimp, which are two freeware programs that have tools in them that Photoshop doesn't have. So definitely check those guys out. This slide is terrible in a fresh new way. We've got all the same font, but I've done some terrible things this time. Sorry. Let me get into PowerPoint and show you all about it. So this image already has several elements on it. We've got the hands, and we've got the heart in between them. We've got the surface of the water, and we have the ripples in the water. Every element on this page has a relationship to every other element on this page. The two hands form the heart. The ripples on the water define the continuity of the water. The highlights on the water, which intersect with the back hand, show that it is in fact a reflection and behind the surface of the water. So if you add another element inside of an element, I have created a hideous chimera of an element, which can no longer do either of the things that it wants to do. This text can no longer command your attention well enough to make you read it, and this hand can no longer do the compositional work that it was designed for. If you don't see why this is so weird, let me replace it with just any other element. Why is that mic in that hand, and why is it in a different style? It begs all sorts of bizarre questions that you don't really want to ask of your audience. So how do we put text on an image? Letting our text intersect with one of the major elements of the page I have established to the audience that this text is above everything. Your text and logo are not a part of the images that they're on. They are above it. They are more important. They are separate. This is not the most legible text, though, because there's a value shift pretty rapidly, which is what happens when you intersect things. So what do we do about that? Well, if it was on my website, I just removed the text. I just get rid of it. I figure let's give the image first, and after I have your attention, I'll do some words maybe. But let's say we don't want to get rid of any text. Let's say we've gone through every single word of this and we've decided that it is absolutely necessary to get our meaning across into leading any of it would remove the meaning, every single word. This is perfect copywriting. I definitely don't hate this copywriting. Well, if this was the buoy project, I might put a glow effect behind it. And that keeps the values in this kind of a smooth curve instead of a choppy curve is much nicer. Also, nice for float images. It has a nice glow to it. If this were float tank solutions, however, I'd give the text more authority by putting it into a handy dandy info box because the float tank solutions vibe is let's present all the information very efficiently and cleanly. If this were for the shop, I'd put it in a jaunty circle with some handwritten text because the shop's design is for showing that floating is not scary. And if this were for Helmbot, I would give the text an enormous amount of space to luxuriate and just a whole hotel room to itself. It's so cozy over there because Helmbot's design is made to say, this is simple. And what's simpler than they're just being text and they're being an image and you just get to look at them whenever you like. Sometimes overlapping things is too much for a design. All of these things were created in an image editor, and that's a great use for that. Other great uses for image editing software is putting an image into the software and turning it into your logo colors or making it into a tiling background image or making Steven Johnson into the Terminator. If you want to master your image manipulation software and you don't have time to look up absolutely everything, my top three things to Google are layer styles, layer masks, and just layers. You should learn about layers. Layers are great. Not everything should be made in an image manipulation software. This is the beginner's guide. This is the beginning of the beginner's guide. It was created in Photoshop. One of my first jobs when Graham pulled me on, he was like, you need to learn in design. And also, please put this thing that I made into InDesign. InDesign is far better for this kind of thing. It supports multiple pages. It has all sorts of tools for arranging things on the page. And it also has this amazing feature of linked files and styles that will make making changes much more fluid. I don't have time to get into it. I want to get the page layout, but here's the things you should look up if you want to be a bomber at your publishing software. LinkedIn embedded files. What is margin and bleed? Text and object styles. Okay, let's get to page layout. Page layout. This is, oh, this is a thing, huh? I love that E. That E is my favorite thing right now. Just kind of hanging out. I don't know. What is this page? I don't know what this is for. Let's remove some of these elements and see if we can't distill this into something that means something. Let's start with that glowy guy. Get out of here, glowy guy. I don't know what you're for. Over here, look, we've got a little Jocelyn. Jocelyn's great. She's been working so hard. This page isn't about her. We've got two things that have clocks on them. I don't need two things with clocks on. Get them out of there. We also already talked about which program we should use, so I don't need that. And I don't need an associated image. Let's see. What else can we get rid of? This thing, very low res. Look at that JPEG artifact. Get out of here. Let's see. We don't need memes, whatever. I can communicate more effectively than that, and that's ugly. That thing's also low res. I don't need that. That thing's squished, and that thing is stretched. And there's salt on my page. Oh my God. Get out of here. We can get rid of that spreadsheet and make Steven Johnson happy. Vectors are cool, but this isn't about vectors. What does that even say over there? Yeah, there are too many colors. Let's unify the colors as much as we can. Some of these images can't be unified, which is get rid of them. That's fine. Let's see. Yeah, get rid of those colors too. This is good. Get rid of that. We already did colors. That's fine. We don't crush elements into corners. That's good. What is that? Yeah, get gone. That thing. There. Everything is made up and the points don't matter. True. But what's that? I know what that is. I know what's on there, but you don't know what that means, so let's get rid of that. That's nothing. Yeah, let's say that E is still down there. Get rid of dolphin girl. This isn't about crushing elements. This isn't about alignment. This isn't about get gone. Oh my gosh, salt. Okay. We already know this is a page. In fact, we already know this is page layout. We don't need that first half. We don't need that second half. This is not in color scheme. We should get rid of these fonts. This background is smushed. We don't need a background. Let's get rid of this too. Let's get rid of that. Let's get rid of the freaking get gone. Do you want to know what the most powerful element on a page is? Is everybody's favorite thing? If you drop a single pebble into this luminous void, it will be lifted up and the page will shout, this is important because this was put here deliberately. The amount of space that I've been given in this room and the amount of time that you've given me, that's what's making me important right now. You could get rid of this podium. You could get rid of this art. You could get rid of half these lights and I would be in a spotlight. You could get rid of this thing right here, and I would only get more important. And that could be a really scary thing. People get stage fright. They see this blank page. They're like, oh, shoot. Maybe I'll bold this text. That'll make people look at it. Maybe I'll add an image. Maybe I'll make another paragraph of text explaining why people should care about this. Maybe I'll make every single letter a different color and then I'd seven different glowing arrows all pointing at it and then people will care. And you don't need all that actually. You really don't. Did you know that people love your business and they already want to hear from you? And you've already got important and cool things to say. We don't really have time to arrange every element on the page. There's like, you could put a hundred things on there, but you don't have to. You can just say what you need to say. You can sit down for your design and just be like, here's what I mean. This is what I want to say to my clients. And you can get something on the page. And then you can viciously remove absolutely everything that isn't serving your purpose and get the full power of nothing behind you. Thank you.