Frequent updates about all things presentations since 2008. Subscribe to never miss a post.
Slate created a beautiful map showing the complexities of the friendships in the Middle East:
Go to the original here and click on each of the smileys for additional information. The message of this chart is clear: it is complicated. The same information can be displayed simpler by focusing on the just the green relationships. The following pattern emerges, highlighting among other things why it is so difficult to get Israel and Hamas to communicate.
Images are much better than words to amplify a message, but sometimes they can be too distracting. If people are staring in awe at this stunning photograph you found, they might just forget for a second about the message you are showing/talking about.
Twitter is keen to find ways to become more accessible to a broader audience, beyond the tech-savvy early adopters. The answer so far: images. Images grab the attention better than obscure hashtags and @ reply’s, and - sneakily - provides a way around the 140 character limit on a Tweet.
The results, lots of poor visuals. This large headshot is an attention grabber, but I am not sure whether Twitter users will take the time to read through the dense bullet points.
Most presentation design projects can be split up in components, you can even have different people work on the individual bits. Two components go hand in hand though: convincing/reminding the audience of the problem, and presenting your solution. The way you portray the problem should guide the way you show the solution. In fact, the best way to show the solution is the highlight the problem.
Business presentation design requirers a combination of skills:
I was trained in 1 and 3, got 5 through the years, taught myself 2 (clean, good enough, but not at the level of a master illustrator), and trying my best at 4.
Many professional designers in the market will lack 1, 3, and 5: but they will still do fabulous work on presentations that have less hard core business content.
Many corporate executives lack 2, 3, and 4. They also will have trouble with number 5: being able to look at their story from a true outside perspective.
It is in tiny font, it has a light grey font, nobody can read it!
Perfect.
If the legal department insists on using footnotes, then they should be designed in such a way that someone who stands with her nose against the screen can read them. If you want to read them, you can, if you do not want to, you do not have to.
Most appliances comes with a user manual and a quick starter guide. The manual resembles most business presentations today, the quick starter guide is what you should aim to design.
Manual:
Quick starter guide:
Many bullet point heavy presentations are in fact speeches. You read and correct every paragraph over and over again and after hours and hours of work you see that you got it exactly right this is what you want to say!
Congratulations, you have arrived at the starting point of your presentation design project, not its end.
Whenever I need to send out a version of a presentation, I tend to do it in the morning after I had a chance to glance over things one more time, making small corrections here and there. Sending a deck straight after a big design push leaves errors that can easily be fixed by a well-rested mind. Story flow design in particular gets a bit hazy when you are in the trenches to turn out one slide after another.
Continuing my post from yesterday about interpreting feedback and deciding who to ignore, and who to believe.
In very short presentations (15 minutes) you can get away with a small glitch in your story flow. Your audience will get the whole picture fairly quickly, even if there was a slide bump in the way you told the story. You like to tell the story this way, the test audience liked it the other way, so be it.
A big red flag though will come from the sort of (content, substance) questions people ask.
Questions are important indicators of whether the audience got your message, or not.