A Coffee Date With Adam Smith

The 301 prof was not a big fan of big writing assignments, but he liked to mix things up. For different classes he would identify different media for students to use, and for ours he decided on Adobe Slack. There was a practice assignment, then a presentation assignment.

I hated Slack. I simply can’t believe a design-minded company like Adobe was pushing anything with such obscenely hamstrung design elements. I wound up designing all the slides on gimp and then just importing those as my backgrounds. I like the way it turned out, and I will acknowledge that Slack’s modular approach saved me. My submission was all set, then I watched a few others and realized I’d omitted some points. I was able to design a new slide, record new audio, and drop both seamlessly into the middle. So it wasn’t all bad.

I’m gonna gloat here just a bit. Having mentioned other student submissions, those submissions were generally crap. I’ll concede an advantage, I’ve been playing with page layouts for longer than most of my “peers” have been alive. That said, the vast majority of student slide presentations at both PCC and CSUCI were utter crap. Either screens full of text or images absent style. This was supposed to be the online generation, born with digital facility, but these people used PowerPoint like they were afraid of it. My presentations kicked some serious ass compared to what these kids were coming up with.