Prezi

New Prezi Templates – Cliched no matter what they say

Check out Our Prezi Gallery for some of our Prezi ideas.  Prezi, the funky, flash-based presenting tool, is adding and changing their templates at an impressive rate. I bet the drive has come to make the tool more ‘PowerPoint’ like, even though their fans hail Prezi as the ‘PowerPoint Killer’.

Stories are Linear

Stories (and therefore presentations) are linear in nature, and so Prezi without linear structures offers risk and reward for the would-be user in unequal measure. So many Prezis we see at Prezi.com are like the presenter has grabbed a handful of ideas and images and thrown them at the screen ‘SPLATTTTT’.

So adding these templates is a good idea if Prezi is to penetrate the cold, hard heartland of Corporate America. As you might expect, the images and ideas Prezi uses for these templates are (for the most part) good looking, smooth and sophisticated. That’s why I often recommend delegates on our Prezi training courses use these templates when they are starting out – but with a big warning.

Templates get old very quickly

If you’re old enough to remember the first wave of PowerPoint mania, you will likely have cringeworthy memories of presentations jammed full of sound effects and slide transition animations. These got old fast, and (thankfully) professional presenters now by and large avoid these cliched, dated techniques. The same will happen with Prezi’s templates. It won’t be long until audiences have seen the same Prezi big pictures too many times to be impressed or even interested.

So once you understand the basics, put time into making your own big pictures –  even if you create one or two standard designs to be used for all of your corporate presentations, at least they will be just that – yours! You won’t look old, tired and reliant on somebody else’s handy work. And let’s remember, that for all Prezi’s tricks, and no matter how people drone on about ‘Organic’, ‘Big Picture’, ‘Information Architecture’, Zzzzzzzz.  The ‘new’ templates are all essentially linear and slide-based anyway. Yes, Prezi has some great advantages over PowerPoint, but Powerpoint also has strengths that Prezi can’t even begin to approach.

For some big picture inspiration, take a look at our Prezi Big Picture Pinterest Board. We also have our own range of Prezi Graphics Packs, designed for those occasions when you are short on time or inspiration and could do with some help in finding useful graphics for your presentation. (And with these packs your template doesn’t need to get old as the image files in them are completely editable and adaptable.)

4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. Pingback: 12 Best Presentation Blog Posts in 2012

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