Listen, I love doing creative projects in my free time. I’ve made the invitations for my sister’s wedding, graphic art for my walls, business cards for friends, you name it.
But my problem is that a little piece of me dies every month when I’m charged for the Adobe creative suite. I have guilt that I’m not using it enough to get my money’s worth and end up canceling it before I can really learn how to use the tools effectively. In short, I’ve never committed the time or money to learn the Adobe tools.
Here’s the thing though: I haven’t had to. During my Freshman year internship at SEP, I was tasked with making a deck of cards that laid out different user research methods for the engineering teams at the company. The goal was two-fold: I wanted to learn design skills and SEP wanted to encourage their engineering teams to test designs with users early and often. Enter, the user research card deck.
Since I didn’t know how to use the Adobe suite at the time, my manager had me create the deck in PowerPoint. By the end of the summer, I not only finished my first internship, but I had a new understanding of how powerful PowerPoint really is.
Fast forward 5 years, and I now have the privilege of working at Microsoft in the Office organization 😊 Even though I don’t work for PowerPoint specifically, my work at Microsoft has reminded me of how many design projects I’ve done in my free time using PowerPoint alone. When Mat Velloso tweeted about the endless tools in PowerPoint, I had an idea.
For 30 days, I want to share the unexpected ways I’ve used PowerPoint as a design tool. I’m calling it 30 days of PowerPoint. I hope it will serve to inspire others and pass along some tricks I’ve learned throughout my design process. Each day, I’ll post a design here and on my Twitter. Let’s get this started 💃🏼