Tech Demo Guy

I often have to find company logos for powerpoints or branding of servers – finding a nice logo can be difficult for both small and large customers. Although you can always find a small logo on the company website it often does not scale (for PowerPoint). I have several strategies for finding logos:

Image search on Google. This is far and away my most common method of finding logos – go to http://images.google.com/ type in the name of the company and the keyword ‘logo’ and you can often come up with several. If that does not work, go with the keyword ‘site:’ and put in the domain name of the company – this will search their entire site for images (although some sites that are dynamically generated won’t work with this technique). And finally, you can do an advanced search where you specify the size of the image. Some example queries for HP:

“logo site:hp.com”
“HP logo”
“HP logo” with large images only (selected by hand in advanced search)

All these produce some decent results, but often a company may be too small (or too protective of their logo) for these Google searches to work. For example, try the above queries on “Dell” and you won’t get much back – I have a feeling that someone in their marketing department does the same thing and sends cease and desist letters to any that they find out on the Web.

Annual Reports. This is where I go for large companies that are protective of their logo or public companies that just don’t have any clean logos on the Web. If you can find their annual reports in PDF format you can often get a logo that will scale. For example if you go to Dell’s 1997 Annual Report, you will see a logo on the first page (turned sideways) that you can zoom in on infinitely. Zoom that thing up to a nice size, screenshot it and turn it around and Viola you have a nice big, clean logo (scaled down her to fit in the blog)

A question that might come up is whether hacking a logo like this is “fair use”. I have a feeling that if you get a question like this from a prospect because you put a nice logo in your PowerPoint or on the Portal, you might need to work on your relationship with the customer. That said, I have had “proper usage” come up in demo’s with the Web heads in companies – if I hack a logo to fit into our application I have gotten comments about how the logo should and should not be used or that it is an old logo. I still think they appreciate the effort over having a nasty pixelated logo kludged from their home page…

dsohigian Collateral, Demo Prep, PowerPoint

Okay, so this is ridiculously obscure, but if you use Snagit to capture stuff in web application it might come in handy.Tooltips…
..are notoriously difficult to capture – if you use the “print screen” function key it will often keep the tooltip but drop the cursor. If you use the Snagit hot key it will drop both the tooltip and the cursor – even if you set the profile to include the cursor. So if you want to capture a tooltip you need to set a delay in Snagit to give yourself a second or two to make the tooltip appear before it captures. I said it was ridiculously obsure.

dsohigian Applications demo, snagit

Here is a program that will enhance any demo (and your general productivity): ActiveWords. The application is a little thing that runs on top of your OS and can fire off commands based on words you type. For example, you can launch an application by entering a keyword (which you define) and hitting F8 (or another function key you define) it can launch that app. It can also got to a URL, open a folder or even execute full scripts. Here are some examples of what I am already using this for:

• Launch apps: ot = outlook, psp = Photoshop, xl = Excel etc…
• Open specific URLS: app = local install, blog = blog view, remote = remote server etc…
• Open Specific files: tech = Standard Tech PPT, vb = vb code for .NET demo etc…

I am going to work on the scripting aspects of the application – might make some of the more rote tasks much simpler. You can script long sequences (it’s not terribly technical) that you fire off with a single word. A great example of how this is useful in a demo is to fire off background processes by typing a single word (even batch files or other funky technical stuff).
The only downside I have found with Activewords is that it uses up some CPU, and, like any other system level program there is the potential of conflicts. But my experience with it has been very positive and it can make for a very slick demo experience if used wisely.

dsohigian Applications, Demo Tips