J
check out http://www.competitions.org surf around and you'll find presentation layouts.

don't do boards. this is for studio right? organize your thoughts, present your ideas. you could show all of your process sketches first, then your design, all in a linear fashion or do something completely different. presentation boards suck and really are only for competitions and those that don't know any better. if this is for studio your critics will spend 90% of their time critquing your board and presentation techniques.

Boards are indeed outdated. I do everything in powerpoint. That way, you can present everything you want without having to try to jam everything on a board.

i agree with beta and ridge. during a presentation it is (or should) be about the project not how pretty your color scheme or font type is. take a look at your project, ask yourself what the main focus is and take it from there. it's an oportunity to make the presentation part of the design, part of the scheme of the project. make it an object as well as information to be processed. and have fun with it

powerpoints are certainly a lot easier than doing boards, as is pinning up tons of stuff, from process to the final piece.

BUT you should practice making boards. 90% of the boards I've seen at firms and on competition entries are terrible. It takes a lot of time to make them look nice, and you need to pracitce.

So make sure you spend the appropriate time on the project (personally, this is advice I wish I had heard, as I never did boards), but at least try to have some nice printed material to back up a ppp.

i wouldn't say that power point can complpetely replace a board presentation, you just can't go back and forth quick enough in it sometimes, and you miss out.

ok, the skill of making nice boards should be practice as it can be usefull in the near future.

Next step: what program should i start off with? I've heard on previous post that you can make boards on Photoshop, illustrator aswell as indesign. Any suggestions?

use illustrator for the layout, text and any lines you may have, then import any jazzy imagery you may have from psd's and mask them in illustrator however you wish.

pen + paper, lead + paper - people come on...as a critic how am i supposed to tear up your designs or crunple them into little balls if they are on a monitor. oh, wait, monitor - window, monitor out window....yeah that works.

as far as boards are concerned, i do believe it is a healthy exercise to go through, though outdated. in my experience, the near limitless capacity of computers can result in too much information... powerpoint is easy and doesn't force you to cram everything on one or two boards but that is also its problem. sometimes it is a good thing to have to sort out what is most pertinent to getting your design ideas across... and sometimes you only realize what was important in its absence...

as far as layout is concerned, indesign works the best in my opinion. i love illustrator and too often try to put everything in it. if you are using a lot of images, you get huge files and move around a lot slower. indesign will allow you to maintain all you linework as vector, mask images and play around with graphic linework and text. of course i still use illustrator to generate a lot of my artwork, and also stubbornly refuse to totally forsake it for indesign.

all in all, i probably end up using not one but a combination of all the apps you named and then some in putting together any presentation.

Please tell me, that illustrator is only used to ensemble the final images made in photoshop? I tried doing photoshop stuff in illustrator like coloring elevations or coloring an urban map, let alone making a simple layout, but it was nightmare. Thanks for a martial art class I took 5 years ago; I managed to control myself from not breaking the friggin computer. And those illustrator tutorial books don’t help either. I don’t need to know how to draw a damn butterfly.

no, illustrator offers up a lot more than simply assembling presentation boards. but, like i said, i end up using a combination of apps. use photoshop if you are looking to alter raster images (changing color modes, cropping an image to size, editing an image to remove or add some feature, et al). use illustrator if you want to do vector artwork (i like to use it to overlay linework, color, et al on top of a raster image like an aerial, or assemble mix of raster images, like adding people....). use indesign to bring it all together... of course these are simply my working preferences. you simply need to determine what works for you

Photoshop : made for editing bitmaps (like jpegs and tiffs), these are made up of pixels (the pixel count, as in 1600x1200, is the resolution), when you alter the image, you alter the pixels

important note: you cannot freely scale bitmap images to be larger without losing detail or gaining artifacts

Illustrator : made up of vectors, which are a mathematical representation, it can 'link' or 'contain'(which is called 'bound') bitmaps, but you cannot edit them. Vectors, due to the fact that they are calculated lines and fills, can be scaled in any direction, larger or smaller, without losing any quality. This is what autocad uses (and any other drafting program).

Important note: if you are using vectors, like plans/sections/elevations, you will want to print from Illustrator to keep the lines looking crisp (at smaller print sizes, it's less of an issue).
For example, logos are always made as vectors (that's lines, with fills in between - all math), so that you can scale them to any size, be it a billboard or a business card.

Indesign: is a layout program, so you can bring both in (although you can bring vectors into PS, and bitmaps into Illustrator, you'll lose either quality or editability - that a word?).
It's made for moving several images around, vectors around, overlapping, etc., and putting text around it. Think magazine layouts, where you want text wraps and titles, and other stuff like that.

Conclusion:

PS - horrible for boards, as the program really bogs down with tons of stuff, the text editor is sooooo slow, you'll eventually give up
IL - is great for layouts, but does not have a lot of flexibility when it comes to text layouts and multipage layouts
InD - great for speed, but is overkill for a lot of basic, single boards.

I use PS and Ill for every board, and have used Freehand for multipage layouts (like portfolios or multipage PDFs), but will switch to Indesign soon.

i loved doing boards. that was one of my favorite parts of projects, and i think it is a very important tool in demonstrating that you know how to concisely illustrate and present your thoughts, granted the term "boards" can be interpreted a lot of ways, you dont have to do something on a really big piece of paper, sometimes nicely mounted smaller images are really quite appropriate and successful.

i also throw in that i am in the thumbs down group on powerpoint, unless it is accented with some sort of paper also. p.p. is great for ushering your presentation, but it does seem really frustrating to critique a project when you are only allowed to read drawings one image at a time.