Let me tall ya about it:
In exactly one week will be my two year anniversary with SlideShare. How many slide presentations have I made in those two years? Exactly two, up to now. SlideShare is a well known traffic generator with a very active community. So why don’t I have dozens of presentations uploaded? Truthfully, it was kind of a pain to create the two SlideShares I have now. I don’t care for stock images so I had to create images separately. I rarely ever use PowerPoint so that’s a chore in itself. Then the editing, adding text, metadata… well, you get it. That was why I got so excited to find a cartoon creation tool that does a lot of the work for us. The program is super easy to use; I created ten slides in about half an hour. And I’m slow!
Cartoon Story Maker
The fine-art world knows very little about the cartoon world. ~Robert Crumb
While researching cartoon creation tools for blog content, I stumbled across Cartoon Story Maker. Cartoon Story Maker is a downloadable desktop program for Windows. I doesn’t look like it works for Mac – sorry. Cartoon Story Maker is a free program designed for schools and educators and neither I nor Hot Blog Tips has any affiliation or relationship with the program or site owner. I just thought it worth sharing. 🙂 I wish Cartoon Story Maker had the option to save the slides in an image format but it only saves to HTML.
The HTML workaround
I know, I said easy and here I am saying you need extra step to make it work. I still think it’s far easier than creating images from scratch, at least when cartoons will do the trick. Anyway, I saved the cartoon I created (in HTML) to my hard drive. Then I opened the cartoon up with a browser and took a screenshot of each slide (I use SnagIt but any desktop capture program should work). I saved each screen share (slide) as a .JPG. Within just a couple of minutes I had my 10 slides ready to insert into PowerPoint.
Using PowerPoint As Little As Possible
Like I mentioned, I rarely use PowerPoint so the less I have to mess with, the better. I have no desire to master PowerPoint. To create my SlideShare, I just had to open a new document, insert a couple of images, create a simple hyperlink for my logo, and repeat ten times. Super easy.
Note: You’ll notice I covered the Cartoon Story Maker navigation controls with my logo because they wouldn’t work in SlideShare and SlideShare has their own. I could have easily cropped off that entire part of the image and I wouldn’t have had to worry about any of that. I didn’t crop out the bottom because I wanted the Languages Online logo so show. I like to give credit where credit is due but you can decide how you want to design your own SlideShare slides.
Your Thoughts?
Do you use SlideShare? What are your favorite SlideShare creation tools? Do you use cartoons for blog images? I’d love your ideas, comments and feedback in the comment section below.
About Brian D. Hawkins
Looks like very interesting tool. I have to admit that I haven’t use it yet, just checked the website. I was doing it previously with premium software, which was more for corporate presentations.
Premium cartoon software Kaloyan? That sounds pretty cool if you care to share the name of the program.
Hey Brian,
I am definitely going to use this. I will confess that I signed up for Slideshare years ago myself and I had some older presentations up but I was sharing information that I’m no longer associated with so I deleted them all and started fresh.
I’m ahead of you because I already have 4 done but you’re right! The reasons I did drag my feet too is because everyone is creating them with really cool graphics and I’m so cautious about the graphics I use and I didn’t want them to be boring. I finally found a decent site that will let you use their graphics for free without having to acknowledge them which I certainly don’t mind doing but it’s hard in a presentation like this.
I do use PowerPoint but it’s very time consuming to put these together. At least with this program it looks kind of fun to use. I will definitely be playing around with this program since I do have a PC so thank you for finding this gem.
Wish me luck!
~Adrienne
Thanks Adrienne, I just found you on SlideShare and followed. 🙂 We’re even now because I just uploaded number four earlier today. I didn’t use the Cartoon program for this latest one, I actually created each slide individually in Paint.net – all 30 slides. It took hours! That’s exactly why I love these cool little time savers.
What’s the free graphics site? I used Canva for the background image I used today. It cost me a buck but that’s reasonable. I like free though.
Oh cool, thanks Brian. You can tell I’m not all up on how to use that one. Just getting reacquainted ya know. I didn’t do one of my last few posts but will for my next one.
Ah, the site is free images dot com. Check it out and they are more photos but they’re decent for the SlideShare presentation.
Enjoy your week.
~Adrienne
Hi Brian,
This is such a cool tool, I’m thinking of incorporating in a marketing presentation. Great post!
Nice Janine, I hope it works well for you.
Nice and very important post
Using social media networks in internet marketing is a great way of advertising your business. Not only Facebook , twitter , and Google plus but there are also many other social networks on which we can market our business. One such popular social network is ‘Slide share’. It is a great social media where we can collect save and share information according to our interest and likes.
We can share any form of data like images, documents, ppt’s etc. The best way to share is using slides . The cartoon creation tool above mentioned is very good and easy to use. I am definitely gonna use it and see the results after sharing it on Slide share. I would like to come back and post my experiences with this tool.
Thank you for sharing.
Thanks Sagar, I do disagree, however, that social media is a great way to advertise. Think of social media as a way to strengthen your brand with stronger connections, a better reputation and the influence you EARN will help your business grow. Just my two cents. 😉
Waaow Brain this tool seems interesting which I can use for my corporate marketing presentation.
Thanks Alex, it looks like you and Janine have similar ideas going on. 🙂