I decided to do Taylor Swift for my Presentation because she is my favorite artist. On the opening slide, I used Zapfino font at size 54. I used this font because it was very similar to the font used on her official website for her name. I also chose this font because I particularly liked how the “y” in Taylor appeared long and curvy. I decided to make the font a light tan color with a light pink tone because the color matched her skin tone. When I applied this, the type still appeared out of place. To help blend the type in the slide more, I added a outer glow to the type in a dark brown. This brown matches her guitar, further tying the type into the slide. Next, I chose Lucida Handwriting at size 18 for my name and the date. I chose this font because it came close to matching the font saying “Taylor Swift,” but did not take away from the slide. I chose to do the rest of the presentation in Lucida Bright. According to the text book, it is beneficial to stick to one simple, legible font for the entire presentation as to not confuse the reader. I chose Lucida Bright because the serif font seemed to match the message of the presentation. Lucida Bright is also very simple and can easily be seen from the back of the room. The only type that I bolded during the presentation was the names of the titles in the table. I did this to make the titles more salient, therefore distinguishing the titles from the rest of the table. I chose to italicize “Fearless” because in that instance, I was using the type referring to the album title. In APA formatting, italics are necessary when referring to titles of albums. On my second slide with the “Fun Facts,” I decided to make each bullet point a different text box. For me, this formatting was the most tedious part of the presentation. After making each bullet point a different text box, I added separate entrance effects. I made each bullet rise into the slide by doing Transitions → Entrance Effect → Rise Up. I formatted each bullet point to fade to gray by using a scroll down menu that allowed me to dim to any color that I would like. I chose grey because it signified that that bullet point was less important than the other ones. On the third slide, I formatted the type to rise from the bottom. I chose this effect because of the large amount of writing. It was simple, clear, and easy to follow.
I found the images that I used through Image Google. I found the high-quality images by searching under Large Images only. I recognize that the image shown on the first slide of my presentation at first glance appears fuzzy. After carefully examining the picture, I noticed that the only fuzzy part was Taylor’s hair, which I believe may actually be frizz. Her shirt, arms and face all appear in high quality, so I decided to keep the picture. I sized the picture by putting the image in Photoshop. In the original image, the entire guitar was shown and off to the right of Taylor it said “Taylor Swift.” I wanted to make my own type for that, so I cropped her name out of the picture in Photoshop as well. I added the image by Insert → Image and then further sizing it in PowerPoint. I added all the images used in the presentation this way. The image on the second slide is my favorite image. I chose to take this image because it was a mostly white background. I read in the textbook that black writing on white background was easy to read. I decided to keep it simple by using this image. My goal of this slide was to keep it simple because I did not want to take anything away from the text that would be over it. A busy image behind the words would distract the reader. In the image, Taylor looks like she is having fun so I decided to name the slide “Fun Facts.” The next image that I used was on the third slide. This image is the cover of the album Fearless. I chose to use this image to show the viewer what the album cover looked like. I got the image to stay to the left side by choosing a slide layout that allowed for a title, an image on the left, and writing on the right. I decided to fade in the image to break up the presentation for the viewer. The last image that I used was for the final slide. This is the image that appears on the back of her new album, Fearless. I chose this image because I wanted a white background to allow me to place the link so the viewer would see it. This image also matched with the theme of black and white in my presentation. Although I did have the option of formatting the link into decorative type, I decided to keep the link blue and underlined. I read in the textbook that the presentation should not confuse the viewer. I decided to keep it blue because most viewers would recognize that as a link.
Putting the audio on the presentation was my favorite part. I own Taylor’s CD, so I began by putting the CD in the CD drive. It opened on the computer with all thirteen tracks. I chose the two tracks that I intended on working with, which were “Love Story” and “Fearless.” I began with one of the tracks by opening it in iTunes. In iTunes, I converted the track to a WAV file. I dragged a copy of the file to the desktop. From the desktop, I dragged the file into Audacity. Luckily, I have worked with a program very similar to audacity before so I had experience with editing audio files. I added my track and trimmed the part that I did not want out. I kept a little under thirty seconds from my original song. Next, I did the same to my second track and selected about fifteen seconds from the second song. I copied and pasted my second song right behind my first song. Originally, I tried to get the beats to match. Unfortunately, the files had very different beats so it became very difficult. Still, I wanted a smooth transition between the two tracks. I decided to fade out of one song, and then fade in the second song. I liked this so much that I decided to fade in the beginning of the new track and fade out the end of the new file. This made the track much less distracting for the listener. The first thing that I did in the presentation was add the music. I found out later that this was a mistake. When I finished my presentation, I noticed that my audio file did not reach the end. I deleted my audio file off of the presentation and dragged it back into audacity. I took another clip from my first song, “Fearless,” and placed it on the end of the track. This time, I timed the presentation and timed the music to ensure that they would work together. I added the music to the presentation by doing Insert → Audio file. I had to play with some settings, but found that I could allow the music to play automatically when the presentation begins and continue throughout the presentation.
For my chart, I decided to compare Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, and Kellie Pickler, because they are all young country artists. I created the table by going to Insert → Table. I used a preset table, which was originally in purple. When I showed this table to the professor, he asked if I could find a way to get lines between the rows and columns. I tried all different types of settings, but I couldn’t find a way to do this. The next day, I read in the textbook that violet is not a good color to use on a projector because it is not easily distinguished. Due to both of these reasons, I decided to change the table entirely. I found a preset table that was light green with dark green lines between the rows and columns. I deliberately chose to have the table rise from the bottom. I believe that this kept with the theme of the presentation. The second and third slides had text rising from the bottom. The textbook said to stick with one animation, so I decided to do the table like this as well.
