The Best Presentation Design Tool of 2010

Back in January I wrote a personal review of Seth Godin's live Linchpin Session in NYC.  While Seth is known for his Marketing guru-ness, he's also a fantastic presentation designer.  He even wrote one of the earliest e-books on presentation design called "Really Bad PowerPoint (and how to avoid it)".  He has written a number of posts about the topic as well (just search "PowerPoint" on his blog).

In that review I had mentioned that Seth had some fantastic imagery that clearly was not stock.  I knew about sites like Flickr where I could get free Creative Commons licensed photography, but the search engines on most of those sites are crap.  Seth was nice enough to comment on the post, filling me in on the most useful presentation design tool I've come across this year - CompFight. 

CompFight is a Flickr search tool that uses the API to accomplish what the built-in search box in Flickr obviously can't do - intelligently find the images you're looking for.  It also has search criteria you can turn on and off like Creative Commons (commercial, only, or off) so you can decide if you want images that are free to use or copyrighted and Safe Search. 

Since Seth turned me on to CompFight, I've never looked back.  I have spent a fraction of the money on iStockPhoto this year as I have in any previous year.  iStock is almost an afterthought now, but it's still the best joint in town (IMO) for vector photography and more "corporate" yet affordable imagery.  However, many of the presentations I work on buck the corporate trend and embrace vivid, original imagery.  I also use it very often for imagery for my blog posts.  If I credited the image to Flickr, you can rest assured I used CompFight to find it.

Here are a few slides that I've created with Creative Commons imagery on Flickr via CompFight.  If you're familiar with typical stock imagery, you'll see the difference.  Simply click on the image to go directly to the image's original Flickr page.

I hope this tool proves as useful for you as it has for me.  I'm not 100% sure of the guidelines and protocol around Creative Commons licenses, so please do your due diligence before using images from Flickr, and do so at your own risk.  

Have you used CompFight?  If so, what do you think?  What other tools have you found useful for PowerPoint presentation design?

Comments

[Clay]

Awesome. I love CompFight and use it all the time. Another great post, Jon.

[Tom Catalini]

Thanks for sharing... I use Flickr Creative Commons images all the time, but had not heard of this tool. I like the search options and speed, much improved over the standard interface. I'll be curious to see if (or how much) it improves my results going forward (either less time searching, and/or better images found).

Thanks!
Tom

[Jeff Hurt]

Jon:
I use Compfight regularly! The only challenge I have is that sometimes the search terms I use don't exactly match the images found. I find that I spend more time looking for the best image to use in my presentations.

It still beats istock images any day. Especially since so many presenters are using istock these days.

[Jonathan Thomas]

Jeff,

The tagging is an issue, since it's up to the photographer to tag their photos accurately. They do a pretty good job all things considered. I tend to spend a lot of time image searching. I haven't figured out if it's my own fault, looking for that perfect image, or simply a technology shortcoming. I'm sure it is the former.

Thanks for reading.

JT

[Kathleen Friesen]

Found your site via your post on Garr Reynold's http://garr.posterous.com/ today. Thank you for the tip on Compfight. I agree with Jeff that it's good to have an alternative to iStock.

Kathleen

http://www.friesengroup.net/

[Bill Hammersmith]

Hey, Jeff.

Thanks for alerting me to the CompFight tool. Another way to get appropriate photos is using visualbee (www.visualbee.com). It inserts images according to your the text of your presentation, rather than the other way round...
Though it uses stock photos, I found it also enables you to choose a different photo from their image bank.

Check it out.

[Fred E. Miller]

Great ideas, information and links here, John.

Thanks for the Post!

[Jonathan Thomas]

Much appreciated Fred.

JT