Prezi

Not too long ago, my awesome wife, Kara, forwarded on a cool website / presentation application to me. It is called Prezi.

Prezi provides a different take on presentation graphics. Instead of the standard linear approach that PowerPoint or Keynote slide presentations take, Prezi provides what can best be described as an infinitely large whiteboard. This whiteboard allows you to plop down text and images* easily so that you can arrange them in cool and creative ways. When presenting the material, you can interact with the canvas, zooming out to get the big picture or zooming in and around to individual pieces. And this is where the magic of prezi happens. Now, instead of bullet points to create contextual hierarchy, you can move the “camera” in creative ways to really emphasize the relationship between the pieces of subject matter.

For example, if you wanted to present that flour, sugar, eggs, butter, chocolate chips and baking soda are ingredients for your awesome chocolate chip cookies. In slide form you may have a heading of Cookies and a 6-bullet list of the items; in prezi, you might have the word “cookie” centered on the screen and, with one click, your camera zooms into the “c” to reveal “flour” in text that was previously too small to see; then smoothly animate over to the first (zoomed in) “o” to show the next ingredient; and so on.
Tough to describe verbally, but what happens is that you now have this subtle visualization of how those ingredients are contained within the cookie. if you start with jumping through the list of ingredients, then at the end, zoom out to reveal the word “cookie.”

I’m not gonna lie, the eye-candy quality of it all is really amazing as well. Because prezi is based in Flash, the author can create in vector-based imagery - this is what allows you to zoom in and out to extremes without the text and images* from getting fuzzy like you would normally see if you zoom in really tight on a digital photograph. I keep throwing in that dang asterik (*) after the word “images” because for this scaling effect to work perfectly, you need to have vector-based images. Granted, you can import photos and videos, but when you start scaling things in an extreme way, you are going to run into problems - but maybe we are getting a little too in-depth here.

Here is a project I worked on for Balihoo.com. They were interested in prezi, but didn’t really know how/where to start and I was able to help. The ultimate guidance was to turn an existing web page that  into a prezi presentation that could be embedded into their site. Here is the proposed version that I created. Please understand that the final piece may be a little different, but I am excited to share the piece I created. You can move around the canvas, but to get the full story, you just need to click through using the provided navigation arrows.

Balihoo Microsites [Proposed] on Prezi

Prezi has more than one million subscribers in business, education, and the arts. Headquartered in San Francisco and with an office in Budapest, Prezi, Inc., is backed by Sunstone Capital and The Sapling Group. For additional information about Prezi, visit www.prezi.com.