Kickstarter is a unique method for great ideas to receive funding through an ‘all or nothing’ funding method where projects must be fully funded through donations or no money changes hands.

Take a minute to read over the project and watch the short 5 minute movie.

This project will support an outreach event and will help with hop growing costs at a community based commercial hopyard-located in Wisconsin. The goal of this project is to cover some operating costs and the cost of hosting our next farm event where we use education to demonstrate to the community about sustainable farming methods and to share with others the economic opportunity presented by growing hops as a high demand local crop for small brewers. In 2009 Simple Earth Hops secured a USDA grant to recoup the cost of building our hopyard, but support for outreach events and some growing expenses is still need.

If you would, please see what you can do at http://hops.me/6up.

The Nativity story is a classic which needs to be updated to our day of computers, the Internet and social networks.

Thanks to Steve at SHIFT for sending this along.

1. Don’t bore the audience with tons of words on each PowerPoint presentation slide.
   1. The slides are not your notes for your presentation.
   2. Keep your slides and the presentation script separate.
2. Make the slides interesting.
   1. Use no more than 10 words per slide.
   2. Use funny graphics if possible.
3. Don’t use technical stuff.
   1. Try to ammuse the audience not bore!
4. Use a story to make the presentation.
   • What you want the audience to take away from the speech.
   • Overall philosophy.
   • The story keeps you focused which you can continue to come back to.
5. Don’t go into too much detail.
6. Make sure to include pauses for them to take in the slide then talk.
7. Make the presentation informal, ask questions, engage the audience.

Recently, a client asked me to redesign a catalog cover using some pretty fancy printing processes. The layout and design was nothing new but I needed to be able to print a photo on the cover which did not knock-out the metallic ink fill behind the greyscale photo. I found this video which does a nice job explaining how to tweak InDesign trapping settings to do this.