It's not a secret that Apple's Keynote excels in the visual communication space. In fact, this invaluable tool can be used for much more than your typical business presentation. You can extend Keynote beyond the boardroom to inspire the imagination. Keynote has an alter-ego that takes many forms. From a conceptual storyboard to a loose light table, Keynote's slide canvas can be the rough draft to your next masterpiece. Apple's Pro, Nancy Eaton, zooms into Tal Yardin's method to the madness.

Pre-visualizing with Keynote

Designing with multimedia often means trying out “what if” scenarios, and it can be a challenge to organize and rearrange multiple media assets without hampering the creative process. But Yarden recently discovered a new and somewhat unexpected tool to help streamline this process: Keynote, the presentation software in Apple’s iWork suite.

Keynote is typically associated with business presentations, but according to Yarden, it’s also the perfect tool to help organize ideas and try out different visual scenarios on the fly.

“I'm a big fan of Keynote for its simplicity and clarity,” Yarden says. “I don't think a lot of people use it in this kind of creative setting, but it’s really a great pre-visualization tool. I'm always working rapidly with many different images, and dealing with clutter on my desktop is an issue for me. Photoshop has ten or so different floating palettes that I'm always trying to make room for, or I’m trying to see behind the image I'm working on.”

In contrast, he says, Keynote simplifies things with a single palette. “It’s very easy to work with, like most of Apple's interfaces. I can use a master Keynote slide to drag and drop images into any one of the screens, and move them around just to see how they look.”

Keynote’s palette also gives Yarden an easy way to add music using iTunes. “With Keynote I can very quickly get a sense of how something is going to work with music—much more quickly, at that stage, than if I went into Final Cut Studio,” he notes. “It’s a very easy, flexible tool. In a complicated production, it helps me a great deal to do things like this.”

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