Spectacle recently completed an unusual internal communications project for the Finance Team at Lloyds Banking Group. The in-house creative team at Lloyds was overloaded with work and needed help, so our brief was to design and edit the first issue of a new Finance Team "eZine", a newsletter full of stories and information designed to help the team's employees feel more positive about a wide-ranging programme of engagement and development activities. What we wound up creating, however, was effectively a portable website in PDF form: a document with all the convenience of an email attachment but with the elegance and interactivity of a fully functioning website.

Did you know Spectacle knocks one-third off its normal fee structure for charity clients? We believe in making a difference for clients that are trying to make a difference, and our latest example of this was an A5-sized brochure we created for Believe Organ Donor Support.

Small charities very rarely possess the skills or the means to create their own marketing collateral. Indeed, whereas bigger companies often need help refining their message and making it look and sound good to their audiences, smaller companies also often struggle even writing an articulate message in the first place. That's not a criticism; it's just a fact of life that we try to help address in our daily work.

Is your website making the right first impressions with your potential customers?

The great Jack Donaghy – the mega-successful businessman played by Alec Baldwin in the sitcom 30 Rock – knows a thing or two about making good first impressions: he gets his hair cut every two days. “After all,” says Donaghy, “your hair is your ‘head suit’”:

So you’re planning to give a presentation, and you have a lot to say. How can you make a content-driven PowerPoint presentation look great?

This is a question I recently put to the test on behalf of John Nugée, a friend and former senior figure in reserves management at the Bank of England and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. Not too long ago, John started a firm called Laburnum Consulting that provides original analysis and commentary on a range of economic and political subjects, and in that context I’ve just finished supporting him on a standard presentation of his regarding Central Bank Reserves Management that he plans to use again in the future. John has kindly allowed me to blog about our collaboration as a case study in redesigning PowerPoint presentations.

Tonight is Burns Night, and as such I thought I'd share a speech I wrote a few years ago for a senior manager at State Street, a large financial services company, to use at a corporate Burns Supper event. I do enjoy the challenge of writing corporate speeches for mixed audiences of corporate and non-corporate attendees, speeches with the dual purpose of staying on message and saying something relevant and insightful about my client's business without boring the spouses and partners who just want to have a good time. Hopefully you'll agree I've managed to achieve that here!

I really enjoy bringing corporate videos to life. Whether I’m helping create a new concept, writing a script or advising on production, I get a lot of satisfaction from seeing corporate executives transform into fully-rounded, three-dimensional characters who become comfortable reading off an autocue – or better yet, speaking off the cuff – and connect with their audiences in a truly personal way.

Usually I take a firm backseat in the video creation process; occasionally I’ve volunteered my services as an on-camera interviewer, but even then, mine is very much a supporting role. However, some of you may know that I occasionally moonlight as a sports commentator on television. This usually involves staying firmly off camera, doing play-by-play commentary either “off-tube” (watching a monitor within a studio booth) or onsite at the venue where a game is taking place. But recently, as part of my work on the European Champions Hockey League, I was asked to feature in a demo recording for a studio show we hope to more fully launch next season. And because it’s always much more painful to critique one’s own work than the work of others, I thought I’d share some of my tips and tricks for video production within a medium that also helps others delight in my suffering. A bit of seasonal schadenfreude for you, if you like!

Here’s the video – our current working title for the show is “CHL Chat”, and while a sports studio show may seem different from the business-related content you’re used to thinking about, in most ways it’s no different than any other corporate video designed to engage an audience regarding a specific subject:

A wise man called Paul Watzlawick once said this: “One cannot not communicate.”

Watzlawick was among other things a communications theorist, and the above was his First Axiom of Communication: essentially, every behaviour is a form of communication. The words you say, the gestures you make, the expressions you show, even the silences you keep and the ways you attempt to avoid communicating all signal something to other people.

Watzlawick’s axiom has an obvious corollary with regard to printed material. Every aspect of a printed document communicates something. The words themselves matter greatly, of course, but so does their appearance within the overall layout: colours, formatting, images and other graphics, fonts and font sizes, and yes, even the blank areas within a document all say something. Reading is fundamentally a visual activity. Typography matters.

Here’s a digital version of the worst typography I’ve come across in my professional career:

Why does everyone hate PowerPoint so much?

Here’s my theory: people rarely see PowerPoint used as it’s meant to be used.

You may know that organisations like Amazon don’t allow PowerPoint presentations at company meetings, or that a call to ban PowerPoint was recently written in the Washington Post. You’ve also probably suffered through numerous tedious, PowerPoint-centred meetings and events featuring barely legible slides, many of which your presenter will have read verbatim. So if you harbour ill will toward PowerPoint, I don’t blame you.

But here’s the thing: none of this is PowerPoint’s fault.