Adding Custom PowerPoint Illustrations to Your Presentations

Many PowerPoint presentations need some of form of graphics and illustration to effectively convey the concept to one’s audience. Most often these take the form of charts and graphs, or in the case of technical PowerPoint slide presentations, scientific or technical illustrations. However, there is another need which is more abstract. This need occurs when the client has a concept that he or she wants to explain by using a metaphor. In this case a custom PowerPoint illustration is the way to go.

A recent PowerPoint presentation for a non-profit resulted in just such a requirement to convey a unique concept. My client needed an image of a commercial mall to illustrate a key point in their PowerPoint slideshow. Since the mall image was used to develop a point, a photo of a standard suburban mall did not fit the need.

A typical mall photo, and plenty exist, was way too literal. What the client was seeking was an illustration that would clearly be identified as a mall, but not any specific existing mall. More accurately, what needed to be depict was the idea of a mall. For this need we developed, with client input, this mall illustration. It has all the scale and visual cues of a large regional shopping mall, but it is obviously, a very small and compact design, much smaller the what would occur in a real world situation. It is an iconic representation of the idea of a suburban mall, created just for this one PowerPoint present slide. By using this custom PowerPoint illustration, the resulting slide clearly depicted the concept that the client needed to communicate to the audience.