Every once in a while I find myself preparing a presentation. Very often for our meetly meeting to share knowledge with co-workers and students.

A good presentation doesn’t have a whole lot of text in it, because text just distracts the audience from the things the speaker has to say. They’ll just end up reading everything themselves. Keeping the text amount small and building more on imagery and a good speech to communicate the content is key.

I keep a whole lot of reaction images and animated GIFs, so there are usually more than enough images for any situation. Neatly named and grouped to make finding them easier, which I get done using the upcoming version of Atsumeru, which can be found here. Once I got a fitting image it takes just a simple drag and drop to make its way into Keynote.

I use GIFs to spice up parts of a presentation. The bird running away from an explosion in the image above might illustrate the feeling of bug reports coming in after a software release, for example. You also might like to add (self-made) GIFs of screen recordings demonstrating some software feature that I am giving a talk about. My recommended and favourite software to create animated GIFs is GIF Brewery which can be found here. It allows to use almost any type of video file as input and has the ability to customise the resulting GIF by adding text overlays, for example.