It’s been a pretty slow day at the office today. Spent most of the morning working on collateral for the Double Tree in Skokie, IL. They’ve got some sort of big presentation coming up next week, so I’ve been putting together a PowerPoint template for them to use that ties into all the other pieces we’ve done so far for them. After 5 minutes of working on it, I remembered why I don’t use PowerPoint for anything.

It’s absolutely terrible for doing anything beyond simple presentations. The system for creating master slides (templates) isn’t very versatile and poorly implemented. It’s inability to properly display vector graphics is maddening—and for the record, Windows Metafiles (WMF and EMF) do not count. And the damn grid doesn’t let me align my text frames to my background images (which look wretched because they need to be rasterized to display). I’m guessing the grid can probably be turned off, I just haven’t been able to find that ‘feature.’

Considering this is what the majority of the business world supposedly uses for their presentations, I’d think Microsoft would put the time in to allow for the creation of professional-looking presentations beyond their stock templates.

The newest version of PowerPoint is supposed to fix some of the templating issues, but other than that I’m sure it’s going to continue being worthless for a couple more versions.

In other news, tonight is State night, but with any luck I’ll get to spend some more time polishing up the new theme/design for the blog. It’s getting close and looking quite sharp.

Ah, what a great weekend. Spent the majority of it visiting with friends that came to Chicago from Bowling Green, Ohio. Overall, much food was consumed, much drink was drank, and good times were had by all. I had some photos to post from the weekend, but for whatever reason my cell phone isn’t letting me email them to myself.

Not much else to comment on. Been busy at work lately with a number of projects. One of the more interesting ones has been a video for Sienna, a condo-community being built in Evanston, IL. We started back in September with a rather haphazard video shoot in Evanston, and now, after two months working on it (among all the other projects going on of course), we’re almost finished with it. The editing is finished and now I’m just doing the final color correction and preparing it for use in their sales center. I’m fairly happy with the direction it ended up taking, but equally glad to be getting it off my plate and moving on to other projects.

We’ve also been busy devising new packaging concepts for a client that makes products for the health and beauty industry. Of the twelve initial concepts that we presented, one of mine was chosen to be used for the product line. Although I’m sure the original concept will be destroyed by the monstrous amounts of copy and logos we’ll eventually have to squeeze onto the boxes, I’m still pretty excited.

Also, be sure to check back as the week progresses. Over the past couple days I’ve been focusing on finishing the new theme/design for my blog and should be getting it online soon.