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The current requirements to wear masks in public places shows that you can still smile without revealing your mouth. Do it when posing for a picture with a mask, and without one!
Me and my (disguised) daughter in Paris
In art, smiling with your eyes is taken to another level entirely though…
I needed a chart today that showed how things are in a deadlock, everyone is waiting for each other, and as a result, nothing happens. I added this new design to the SlideMagic library for you to use.
Unless you are a politician, powerful CEO, or another controversial person, most interviewers for podcast, video interviews, TV interviews, conference panels probably want you to shine on stage. She is likely a media pro, you are not appearing on screen every day.
A good interviewer has a little chat with you before the show, gets a quick ideas of the interesting points you can share with the audience, and then will proceed to give you the best possible setup question to tell your story.
In this friendly environment, you can patiently wait for the question to finish, and deliver the punch line that you might have practiced before (practice it a lot in order to be spontaneous). No need to jump in early, deviate from the question, or be surprised because you did not see the question coming and need to think about the answer after you started answering the question.
In some sales or investor pitches, the role of this friendly interviewer might be the person you convinced of your story, and now needs to sell it to her superiors. Help her out if you can.
Here is an interesting article about how our mind works. The brain is constantly predicting impressions to save energy. It has a number of layers. A higher layer creates a prediction based o a lower layer. The lower layer can report inconsistencies to the layer above, in case we can go a level deeper.
This is probably the same mechanism that intuition uses, as long as we observe something that is in lie with our prediction, we maintain low energy mode, if things start moving apart, we add brain power.
Remember that this is how an audience will be looking at you when presenting.
It is very tricky to fit paragraph text into a circle. Line breaks are never smooth, especially when you have long words. My approach is to use a larger circle, but fit the text inside an imaginary square that just fits inside the circle.
For math geeks, the ratio between the side of the square and the diameter of the circle is the square root of 2. I had to use this proportion recently to fix a web site layout.
Obviously very short headings fit perfectly well inside a circle.
(Yes, yes, circles will come to SlideMagic)
President Macron of France changed the blue color of the French flag. He made the blue darker again, after it was set to be the same blue as that of the European Union flag back in the 1970s. (Then president Giscard d’Estaing thought the different shades of blue clashed during photo ops).
I agree with Macron, the darker blue looks better, flags have a history, and i don’t think the two shades of blue clash at all. When doing design work, pay attention to flags. They have very specific colors (like logos), and very specific aspect ratios.
This is a tricky thing to do: create a layout of seemingly random elements that look good together. I need to deal with this now for the new venture I am setting up
It is a process of constant iteration. Put one type of elements, put another. Add text and titles. They shift the weight of the page, so everything has to move around again, different screen aspect ratio, another shuffle. Repeat, repeat.
Subconsciously, your brain is scanning for anomalies in the unwritten rules of a layout. You don’t know what they are, but you see it when you break them. For example, including one angle in the path above that is “sharp” (i.e., smaller than 90 degrees, would stand out.
Architects have to deal with this a lot, or painters laying out the “random” elements of a still life painting.
In the end, we are all artists.
I just went through a live on-screen application demo, some things I learned, some things I knew already.
I wasa bit worried about Unsplash after the Getty acquisition, and the current home page of my favorite photo site confirms some of these worries, 50% of the space above the fold is devoted to promoting iStock (scroll down and they take another chunk at the bottom of the page). I think the genie is out of the bottle when it comes to free, open source images. And this page actually shows that there is no quality difference at all between images for which you pay, and images that are free. Unsplash has a responsibility to all the photographers that made their images available under a certain expectation of the spirit of the site. Hopefully it can find a suitable business model that will work for everyone. If Unsplash does not succeed, a new Unsplash will emerge somewhere.
This is the approach I take when making drastic changes to computer code, a presentation, or a spreadsheet. When you decide to turn a big piece of work upside down, you can’t simply tear up the whole thing. Instead, you change things carefully, constantly monitoring whether the program keeps functioning, and/or the spreadsheet still produces more or less the same answer. When it does, take the old stuff out bit by bit.
This is the only way to manage mistakes. If you changed 5 things and see that all of a sudden your average price per bottle is way off, you cannot tell which of the five is the culprit.
What if all of a sudden your boss, customer, or user wants an intermediate new version of the model. If you are mid-way in some major rewrite, you cannot produce it quickly.
Or, maybe you discover halfway through that the 2nd change of the 5 you pushed through actually does not make sense. Unwinding everything is hard.