insights from the king of presentation design

Sneak Peek::An Interview with Emiland De Cubber On Creating Better Presentations

Sneak Peek::An Interview with Emiland De Cubber On Creating Better Presentations © New Haircut 2014 www.newhaircut.com

http://www.newhaircut.com

Are we not human? When cut, do we not bleed? When the design community rallies together online to hate on a government agency’s terrible presentation, do we not wholeheartedly agree? !Yes, yes to ALL of it. …particularly that last part. !And particularly when it comes to THIS government agency’s terrible presentation and THIS designer’s wildly popular update on it.

We saw it, we loved it, and so we had to ask: Emiland De Cubber, will you play Twenty Questions with us?

Lucky for us, his answer was yes, yes to ALL of it.

Yes!


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-collection-documents/

http://www.slideshare.net/Em


I don’t know why, but I know when it started. I made my first presentation when I was 14, to present a skate park project to the mayor of my small village in the West of France. I haven’t stopped since then.

Let’s start small – we obviously have a crush on your design work, so we want to know – why focus on presentations?



The first thing to do is to simplify, get rid of the useless elements, free some slide estate. Overly corporate presentations are often full of shapes taking up 20% of the slides, logos that people don’t care about, or illegible footers.

You gained recognition from your repulsion for the NSA’s PRISM presentation – when you see something that visually offensive, what are the first things you do (whether in thought or in action) to rein in the mania and create something even a privacy-pirating government official could love?



I once heard that the content of a slide should be able to be put in one or two tweets - I pretty much agree with this. !

How much content is too much content for a single slide?



It’s not original, but I think that would be Apple. Designing one of their keynotes is a dream. I’m sure they work like crazy before the event, but the impact of those keynotes is so wonderful.

If you could design for any client – present or past, real or fictional - who would it be and what dream project would they ask you to do? …and would you talk about it nonstop until your friends staged an intervention?



I would keep Neue Helvetica, Source Sans and FF Meta, and reluctantly leave behind Avenir, Futura and Gotham.

If you were shipwrecked on an island with 6 fonts, but only enough rations for 4 of you (…could happen), which 3 fonts would live, and which 3 fonts would die?

Helvetica Neue

Source Sans



Read the entire interview:

blog.newhaircut.com/interview-emiland


http://blog.newhaircut.com/interview-emiland


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