Today is Tuesday. And for the foreseeable future, a coworker (@KyleGeiste) and I will be partaking in what we call Always Be Improving or #ABI sessions. These involve coming into work early every Tuesday morning to improve ourself in some way. Today, we’ve both decided to write blog posts.

While this morning started out with a blog post on “how to persuade an audience” – I did something different and what I consider share-worthy, in the process.  I needed to create a slide that conveyed a thought and while doing that, I realized I needed my  own branded deck experience. I’ve been blogging for a while and creating my own slide decks and adding them to Slideshare, but without any consistency.

Whether you’re a major or minor company, or even an individual brand – you should have a branded deck, one that represents you. One that people will know is yours just based on the slides. One people will see and immediately connect with. At HubSpot, we have a large template for PowerPoints that speakers must use when speaking on behalf of HubSpot – it just makes sense.

Thus, while trying to create a slide to drive home a point in the blog post, I needed something unique, professional yet fun, something of my own to represent my own design ideas out there on the web – and this is where the idea was born.

All I did was take an image of a white wall and combine that with a $1.99 iPhone app titled Mextures (thanks @gavinmerlot for sharing this app with me) and added some cool layers – and voila, the slide design was born. I sent the photo to myself, added it as a photo and cropped to fit the size of the slide and it was ready for use.  This application is pretty incredible for regular photos, but for a white wall it has enough freedom to add textures, layers and filters over the photo to find the perfect combination for you.

Here are just a few of the different slide designs I made with a photo of a white wall (basically nothing) and the Mextures app:

 

Mexture-Slide1

Mexture-Slide2

Mexture-Slide3

Mexture-Slide4

Mextures-Slide6

 

Oh and of course, if you ever need images – see if you can take some of your own. You’ll probably be more invested in the deck and your messaging that way. Here is a fun one that I recently took to complete a deck on our Forms tool.

@GoodmanRe and me (@sbedrick) pretending to conduct a QA session.
@GoodmanRe and me (@sbedrick) pretending to conduct a QA session.

 

Happy presenting!

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