Here are the first two “foils”:

Findings:

• Grey doesn’t work.
• Anything below font size 26 in PowerPoint doesn’t work.
• Plastic mounts are the best suited.
• You don’t need to leave a margin in PowerPoint.

Under Mac OS X the presentation can be “printed” as a PDF quite easily from PowerPoint. The individual pages of the file can then be “placed” in InDesign quite simply. Here is the result:

The experiment needs content. I thought for a long time about what it could be — at one point the idea was to bring together several other old ideas for a database and turn them into a concept (in one of the previous posts I linked to Google, because the Rollei P 355 has no URI, this urgently needs to be changed!), but considering the vacation about to end, that was too ambitious. So the first presentation will be an introduction of the very idea pursued here, which will also show what is actually feasible. Hence the following requirements for the first slide presentation:

• Text in different sizes
• Icons and graphics
• Grey type

This is what came out of it:

The author received about 500 slides together with the projectors. How do you get an overview of them? How do you find the right motifs? Unfortunately there is only one way: look at all of them…

A setup made of a webcam and a projector lends itself to this, see below.

The next step is then to manage and tag the images in a suitable program.

The first choice was supposed to be Picasa — the Windows version also offers capture via webcam. Unfortunately it was not possible to make this version work with the webcam under Wine or VirtualBox . Under VirtualBox, a five-year-old bug stood in the way.

In the end a combination of Picasa and Photo Booth remained, with Picasa monitoring the output directory of Photo Booth.

The window of a slide mount has a size of 36mm x 24mm. To insert the foils from PowerPoint, a corresponding template is needed. The template below was created with InDesign — the PDF files that can be produced with PowerPoint fit nicely into it.

The working material has arrived: two projectors and about 500 slides! The projectors are a Braun Paximat and a Rollei P355 .

The Paximat is the older and thus more representative one, the Rollei “faster” and therefore well suited for viewing and cataloguing.

Special thanks at this point also go to the generous donor, the flea market expert and slide enthusiast Thomas Heinemann!

Vacation! The right time to implement a few old ideas. My interior design has now been completed (wardrobe). So something a bit more daring — since the whole thing seems to work, it’s time to document the result.

The Idea

PowerPoint and projectors are no longer anything special these days. Impress? Well…

It’s time for something new again. And as always, when you’re lacking creativity, you simply reach for something old to suggest something new. With this tried-and-tested method, the author does not want to be an exception.

Instead of the tools mentioned above, you can also use old technology: Old slides, onto which you clip or stick small plates made of printed foil. These can easily carry up-to-date content. IT stuff, for example. That’s what the author does for a living.

The contrast between, on the one hand, the old slide (i.e. the image shown, usually in an aesthetic of the past) and, on the other, the old (and above all analogue) presentation technique and the digital (textual) content.

Let’s see whether anyone will mistake this for a comment on technical nostalgia…

The Implementation

All it takes is a slide projector and slides! Foils can be created with PowerPoint and then copied together onto a single page, preferably digitally, e.g. with InDesign. The result is then printed onto foil, or printed normally, copied onto foil and applied to the slide…

Objection

Professional critic Mr. K. (not related to Bertolt Brecht , and not a professional critic either, but employed at a lending library) doubts the feasibility:

• Printing such fine structures would hardly be possible.
• Slide and foil could not be placed close enough together to project both reasonably sharp onto the wall.

One more reason to give it a try…