In the early 1990s, based on my graphics ability, my supervisor at the CIA gave me the graphics and presentations program Harvard Graphics to create slides for the office as a side duty. This program was a forerunner of Microsoft PowerPoint, which I started using when it became available. (Those were the days when a program was loaded on a computer using multiple diskettes.)

By my next job in the Agency in 1995, I was using and design PowerPoint presentations. At the time, some of the presentations were made to be sent to the printers to print overhead transparencies for those instructors without a computer. I had to convince my main training contractor to stop using overhead transparency slides because PowerPoint was far more efficient and slides could be easily updated. He balked but once he began using, he became a PowerPoint king.

When I began working for a CI/Security/CT training company, all courses used PowerPoint and I was frequently called upon to create the background graphics and to fix or enhance existing presentations. There were hundreds of presentations. I also became skilled at creating marquees with PowerPoint, using music and photos to show at the beginning of classes.

When I began working as a freelancer, I continued to create and/or enhance PowerPoint presentations for my clients. This usually entailed designing title and a bullet background master slides. Then taking the client’s content and enhancing the graphics, font, layout, etc to provide them with a professional presentation.

I must add that my design style can be quite bold and dramatic. I found this could be scary for a defense contractor who, when I asked, “don’t you want your presentation to stand out from the other (boring-looking) presentations?” he said no, he didn’t want to stand out. So I had to make very plain, “safe” PPT backgrounds for him to blend in.

All of this is to say I’ve been designing and working on hundreds and hundreds of PowerPoint presentations since the 1990s and it’s hard for me to show in my portfolio the wide range of examples over the years. Also, showing just a sample background slide doesn’t convey all the facets of an entire presentation, which I can’t upload for various reasons. 

If you don’t mind having bold and dramatic presentations that stand out from the crowd, send me your basic presentation for me to work on. Or, as my clients tell me, “do your magic” with it.