First and foremost, Prezi is a tool for storytelling. If an image really can say a thousand words, then it's crucial that you use the right kind of imagery in Prezi to deliver your message in the most powerful way possible.
In this chapter, we will explore two different kinds of imagery, and look at how Prezi copes with each. You'll also get some advanced tips on how to create your own imagery that works well with Prezi. By the end of the chapter, you will understand the benefits of using certain types of imagery within your Prezi, and be well on the way to mastering this element of your Prezi designs. In this chapter, we will cover:
- What raster and vector images are
- Benefits of raster and vector images in your Prezi
- Places to find great imagery
- How to create your own vector imagery
- Creating illustrations for Prezi
- Prezi effects and animations
You may not have come across the terms raster and vector before, but they are used to describe two different types of imagery. If you've been building presentations for a while in Prezi or another piece of software, chances are that you have scanned through hundreds and hundreds of raster and vector images without even realizing it. After all, why would you need to know these terms? All you need is to make great presentations for your business, right?
While we totally agree that you don't need to be a professor of the arts to build great presentations, we do believe that knowing the difference between your raster and vector imagery will benefit you massively and help you become a true master of Prezi.
We hope you'll agree that the best Prezis are always the ones that have obviously been planned very well from the start. We believe that planning is of the utmost importance before you even touch the Prezi software. A part of that early planning should be deciding what type of imagery you're going to use and whether there is a particular style you want your Prezi to have. You might also want your Prezi to be small in file size, which is another reason why choosing the right imagery will help.
Let's explore raster and vector imagery together, and you can make up your own mind as to which would be right for you and your Prezis.
A raster image is simply an image made up of tiny pixels of color. Depending on the size of the image, there may be hundreds or even thousands of different pixels placed together in the right way to form the image you see.
In the following raster image, you can see that it looks great at normal size and that there is lots of different shading. However, you can see on the the right-hand side that, when you zoom into this image using Prezi, you will start to see the individual pixels that make up the shaded areas. This degrades the quality of the image when viewed at this size:
The preceding image has been saved as a Portable Network Graphics (PNG) file using the much-loved Adobe Photoshop.
Some other raster graphics editors you could use to create raster images are:
- KolourPaint
- GIMP
- GrafX2
- Microsoft Word
- Microsoft PowerPoint
I have mentioned that the example image shown previously was saved as a PNG file, which is one of the formats Prezi will accept through the insert image menu option. You probably know already that Prezi will also accept Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), and Portable Document Format (PDF) images but you may wonder what these different files mean.
The following table shows raster formats within Prezi:
|
File format |
Uses |
Tips |
|---|---|---|
|
JPEG |
This uses 16 million colors, so it is perfect for photographs and images with lots of shading. |
Compression can be adjusted so you get to decide how much of a trade-off you want between image size and quality. |
|
GIF |
This is great at compressing images that have large blocks of the same color, that is, logos or shapes; also supports transparency. |
Avoid using this format for photographs and images with shading. This file format also allows for animation. |
|
PNG |
This has many of the same qualities as the GIF format but compresses images in a much better way. |
This supports transparency, which is extremely useful when overlaying images in Prezi. |
|
|
This format preserves all visual elements within the file and compresses the file size very effectively. This format is useful when importing PowerPoint slides. This was discussed in Chapter 4, Importing Slides into Prezi. |
Prezi desktop player will need to convert the PDF files, so an Internet connection is needed for this. |
Vector images are not made up of pixels as raster images are. Instead, they are created using points, lines, curves, and shapes to represent a computer graphic. They use mathematical functions to determine where everything sits in the image.
All of this sounds very technical, doesn't it? Here's what you really need to know about vector images to determine whether or not you'll use them in your Prezi's:
The preceding image has been created in Adobe Illustrator and is saved as a PDF file. You can clearly see in the zoomed section on the right that there is absolutely no loss of image quality. I'll come back to this point later.
You can probably tell by now that I'm a big fan of Adobe products, but I do appreciate that there are other (less expensive) pieces of software for working with vector images. Here are a few you should look into:
- Inkscape
- DrawIt (Mac format only)
- DrawPlus
Vector graphic editors, such as the ones mentioned previously, will allow you to export your images in many different file types. The only ones that matter to us though are PDF and Small Web Format (SWF) because these are the only two file types that can handle vector images and are supported by Prezi. The following table gives a quick explanation of each file format along with some tips on using them in Prezi.
The following table describes the vector formats within Prezi: