Ideaseed

MS Office design specialists working 24/7 to make you look amazing.

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HOW TO BRIEF A GRAPHIC DESIGNER TO GET WHAT YOU WANT 

Whether you’re working with a graphic designer on your new website, designing a catalogue or logo for your start-up, or creating promotional flyers for your business, it’s crucial to give your graphic designer a clear and detailed brief. Essentially, your brief needs to translate what you want.

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8 GOOD REASONS TO AUTOMATE YOUR TEMPLATES 

Still creating documents from scratch? Here are 8 good reasons to create robust templates:

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HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF SLIDESHARE As the world’s largest online community for sharing presentations, Slideshare is the best platform to get your content some airtime, attract readers and build your brand story. Whether you’re sharing a presentation, video, webinar, case study or brochure, Slideshare will connect you to an audience of millions. It’s the 273rd most popular site on the Internet, with some 33 million unique visitors every month. Here’s how you can get the most out of it:

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GET YOUR TEAM ON BOARD WITH TEMPLATES

You’ve got templates. You’ve had them custom-designed to include time-saving automation features like branded tables, key message boxes, and entire pages of content. Visually, they communicate your brand’s unique story. Functionally, they solve common problems. Your templates are awesome.

So why isn’t your staff using them?

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COLOUR PSYCHOLOGY

Colour appeals to our visual senses and impacts on how we think, feel and behave. Considering that consumers place visual appearance and colour above other factors such as sound, smell and texture, colour is your most powerful marketing tool.

When buying a product:

1% of consumers base their purchase on smell or sound

3% of consumers look at the texture of the product

93% of buyers focus on the visual appearance

Colour directs our eye where to look, what to do, and how to interpret something. Colour puts content into context. Colour helps us decide what is important and what is not. While the psychological impact of colour is subjective, there are some general associations.

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IDEASEED'S MS OFFICE SHORTCUTS: POWERPOINT

We know what it’s like when you want a MS Office keyboard shortcut, but just can’t remember what it is.

We’re here to help you so we’ve created a handy list of the most useful shortcuts.

Today, we’re covering MS Office Powerpoint, but we also have a great list for MS Office Word here and even for MS Office Excel.

Download the pdf for it here: Ideaseed MS office shortcuts_PPOINT

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HOW TO PRESENT LIKE STEVE JOBS

It’s been 3 years since Steve Jobs lost his battle against cancer, but the charismatic Apple co-founder is still lauded as the world’s greatest corporate storyteller. His keynote presentations have become the stuff of legends, and continue to attract thousands of views on YouTube.

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IDEASEED'S MS OFFICE SHORTCUTS: EXCEL 

We know what it’s like when you want a MS Office keyboard shortcut, but just can’t remember what it is.

We’re here to help you so we’ve created a handy list of the most useful shortcuts.

Today, we’re covering MS Office Excel, but we also have a great list for MS Office Word hereand one for Powerpoint coming up soon.

FREE DOWNLOAD!

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5 GREAT SOURCES FOR FREE STOCK IMAGES

It’s no secret that using compelling high-resolution photography in your presentation is the best way to put your audience in the picture.

But where do you find these amazing mood-selling photos? Forget the free stock images of the past (those bland representations of airbrushed models using sleek computers and guys in suits shaking hands). Answering the need for visual inspiration, a growing number of websites across the web have curated and collected a new wave of stock imagery.

Best of all, they’re free, meaning you can use them for commercial purposes without infringing on copyright laws. Depending on the licensing, you needn’t even ask permission.

Here’s our list of free (and fabulous) stock images sites, but please double check the licensing – some images may require attribution.

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IDEASEED'S MS OFFICE KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS - WORD 

We know what it’s like when you want a MS Office keyboard shortcut, but just can’t remember what it is.

We’re here to help you so we’ve created a handy list of the most useful shortcuts.

Today, we’re covering MS Office Word, but we have PowerPoint and Excel coming up.

Download the pdf for it here: Ideaseed MS office shortcuts_WORD

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3 PRESENTATION TRENDS FOR 2015

Out with the old and in with the new. Here are 3 trends to take your presentations from stale to sparkling in 2015. Fire those fuddy-duddy fonts, kiss boring bullet points goodbye, and make your story visual.

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2015's BIG TREND - VISUAL STORYTELLING  Did you know that ‘Storytelling’ is now a skill that you can endorse your connections with on LinkedIn? Perhaps, not so surprising – it’s a buzzword that’s been thrown about in various contexts for a few years now. More specifically, it’s the art of visual storytelling that you need to be paying attention to.

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BIG DATA 

Last week we talked about Infographics as a great alternative to presenting data. These are becoming more popular as we move away from the standard table and chart format – and praise the lord for that!

Another new buzzword in business reporting is big data.

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INFOGRAPHICS: THE USEFUL BUSINESS TOOL

What are infographics? 

Infographics are a way to present your data in a graphic format that is easily interpreted. They tend to be more focussed on the design and can be static, moving or interactive. Interactive is perfect for tablet presentations in that you can present high level information initially, and the user can click through on the graphic to explore data where they want.  These are common now on digital news apps.

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MS OFFICE VS INDESIGN - WHAT TOOLS DOES MS OFFICE OFFER? 

In the next few weeks we’ll be evaluating why we here at Ideaseed, made the conscious decision to work with MS Office over other design software.

MS Office has – despite a possibly widespread opinion – wonderful tools and benefits for its users. These assets far outweigh the advantages of design programs such as InDesign.

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DESIGNING YOUR BID PROPOSAL - ARE THERE ANY TRAPS TO AVOID? 

4 traps to avoid when putting together a bid proposal

The bid and tender writing process is a complex and difficult one, in which you can easily lose sight of what’s most important to get across. The request for proposal (RFP) documents are often lengthy and it feels like they ask the same question in different ways over and over again. This makes it difficult for you to truly understand what the client is looking for. To top it all off, often the bid writing process comes with a tight time-schedule and lots of pressure. To help you wade through the mess, we’ve put together the most common mistakes that are made when producing a proposal.

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THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS - REACH HIGHER GROUNDS WITH YOUR NEXT TENDER

For the last couple of weeks we’ve been talking about what’s important when it comes to the content of bids and tenders. Those ‘important things’ can get quite complex quite quickly and it’s vital to keep a clear structure throughout the entire document. You need to make it easy-to-follow, easy-to-read and of course it needs to stand out from the crowd.