Experimenting with "real" textures

While I am getting a bit tired of stock images (first only the cliche ones, and now actually almost every image that is not real), I find new inspiration in textures of real-world materials (there are lots of these on stock image sites). See the ad below for the folding bike (via Ads of the World).

Do not forget to compress your images before saving. High-resolution textures can consume a lot of disk space on your computer and as an email attachment.

"Healthcare Napkins" wins SlideShare 2009 Best Presentation Contest

Dan Roam has won SlideShare's 2009 Best Presentation Contest with a napkin-style presentation about the U.S. healthcare reform plans. A good choice I think. The bar is rising. The idea of how to make beautiful presentations using large and stunning images has spread. Next challenge: how to use visual communication to get incredibly complex subject matters across. Congratulations Dan.

Healthcare Napkins All

View more documents from Dan Roam.

A related post: my review of Dan Roam's book: The Back of the Napkin.

Book review - Yes! 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive

The book Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive is the "sequel" to Influence (earlier review here). Building on the approach of Influence, the book discusses 50 techniques to influence people's behavior. A psychological science experiment is the basis for each technique: the results are discussed and general lessons are drawn out.

As both books are similar, so is my review. The research case examples are great, the generic lessons are sometimes a bit dry. It could have been left up to the reader how to use the findings. There is a lot of overlap with techniques presented in the first book, if you do not have tim to read both, I would recommend reading Influence, since it takes you through the process of thinking about psychology in a more fundamental way when trying to persuade others.

Reading this book once again confirms the potential for visual communication. A lot of these psychological experiments involve people allocated in groups (test group, control group) and various changes in the experiment. Putting the outcomes in simple tables or graphs would have made it much easier to understand the outcome. Now, the reader is left to plough through the text and construct the visual picture in his/her head. Some of the 50 techniques in the book are more powerful than others, some are more relevant to the field of presentations than others. A few here:

• Create a bond with a group. "The majority of people who stay in this hotel room re-use their towels"
• Create scarcity: "If operators are busy, try calling again"
• Very relevant for presentations: watch out for data that can backfire. "22 million single women did not vote". "Hmmm, that's a lot, maybe I shouldn't either?"
• Create 2 extreme options around the desired outcome: people usually buy the middle-priced wine bottles in a restaurant. (Useful when presenting strategic options to your Board)
• Big threats don't work, people block them out. "Smoking kills". You need to complement the threat and provide an easy, step-by-step action plan to solve the problem.
• Hand-written post-it notes as a message really work. Thing about adding that personal touch to your presentation slides (by using selective hand-writing fonts for example)
• Get people to write down a goal at the beginning or the end of the presentation, it dramatically increases the probability that they will act
• Ask people whether they would be willing to do something later on. If they respond, they are actually more likely to do it themselves in the future.

Just a few teasers to get a sense of the sort of things discussed. If you are interested in psychological techniques to influence people, but Influence and Yes! are recommended books.

The author Robert Cialdini has a site with some more information.

Disclosure: links to Amazon in this review are affiliate links and I earn a small commission on purchases made through them.

If you need arrows to point at what's really important...

...on your slide, you might as well re-design the entire slide just around that message.

This image of kites with red arrows highlighting random elements of a city landscape reminded me of dense bullet point slides with last-minute arrows added to make sure that the audience does not forget to get the point...

Details on this art installation here on the Core 77 design blog. See one of my earlier posts on a similar subject.

Leonard Cohen building up audience participation

Songwriter / poet Leonard Cohen gave a concert in Tel Aviv a few days ago. In "Tower of Song" he kept the audience craving for The Answer (to all mysteries of life) for almost 2 minutes. The audience got really excited, the backing vocals had to work hard... Listen to the entire song, or skip through to 6:00. No, no spoiler here. The video below is not the Tel Aviv concert, but a different performance in the same tour.

The presentation lesson. Many communication philosophies such as Barbera Minto's Pyramid Principle (used by McKinsey) advocate to present your conclusion first, then provide backup and logic. Very efficient, at every single point in time, the audience knows the key message of the presentation. Sometimes humor, suspense, drama and good story telling might actually do a better job in getting a message across though. Highly structured presentations are not always the most memorable ones.

Filling charaters with an image (redux)

This ad (via Ads of the World) reminded me of an earlier post showing that you can also achieve this effect in PowerPoint (2007). It only works with huge, huge characters. The ones I used in my original post are actually not big enough.

Screen bean nostalgia...

A number of good things have happened in presentation design over the past few years. Yesterday, I came across one of these screen beans that used to feature prominently in many corporate presentations in the 1990s. I am very glad people are not using them anymore. (But I must admit that deep in my heart there is a bit of screen bean nostalgia...).

There is a modern reincarnation of the screen bean character though. A small cartoon with a text balloon placed on the border of a slide. He/she often makes a side comment that adds to the overall message. Garr Reynolds uses them very successfully, Google explains the technology behind the Chrome browser using comic characters, just to name a few.

Farewell my friend Mr. Screen Bean...

Visualizing 1 in 8,000

Bar and column charts are my favorite data visualization tools. I do not like pie charts, although they are in theory the best way to highlight relative proportions. Both of these graphs break down when you try to visualize very small proportions. In these cases I fall back on a technique that simply repeats the number of objects on a slide as done in the example below:

Note that especially for small proportions, it is very hard to internalize what things mean. "A 1.3% chance? That's seems OK. What, 1 in 76? That's a lot!." Tap "1/x" on your calculator to translate a probability into a "1 in" number. For example: 2% translates into 1/0.02=50, 1 in 50.

More information on the issue of maternal death here.

Next up: designing presentations to be viewed on mobile devices?

The mobile phone screen is becoming a mainstream outlet for content. Services such as SlideShare have become so popular to share presentations (=ideas) to mass audiences that presentation designers have begun to adjust their style to suit this type of viewers. What happens if you add these two trends up?

Swiss Miss pointed me towards a new iPhone app: iStoryTime, enabling kids to flick through narrated children's stories. (The same target segment as Story Bird). Animoto allows you to create beautiful animated videos on your iPhone, it is just another example of a visual language that is suitable for the small screen.

Squinting to read a blog RSS on your phone, scrolling left/right and up/down to understand the big picture of a web site, maybe there is another future for presentations here: the ideal format to spread an idea on a mobile device through a series of clicks.

The constraints are simple: a small screen, and no presenter is present to explain things. I wish we had these constraints in PC PowerPoint:

• "I better make sure these slides are clutter free and can easily be read from a distance"
• "I better make sure that people really, really understand what I am trying to say here; I won't be there to explain it"

That would do a lot of good to many presentations that are written as we speak.

Consistent shadow and gradient directions

When using drop shadows and gradients, pick an imaginary source of light to guide in which direction you want to put your shadows and/or gradients. And then: use them consistently on the slide and possibly throughout your presentation. Now that we are on the subject. I am not a big fan of these effects in general. In the example above, I emphasized them on purpose to illustrate the point of direction. Normally, I would use very subtle drop shadows only small chart elements that really need to stand out (example). Gradients, I use only to simulate a 3D effect.

Don't be a bleary-eyed presenter

Fred Wilson got it so right in a recent blog post: postponing the preparation of your presentation slides to the very last minute and showing up exhausted to the meeting does not pay off. Books such as Brain Rules provide scientific evidence that an exhausted brain is perfectly able to survive (i.e., run away from tigers that chase you), but not really good at coming up with great ideas anymore.

Get organized, finish the work in advance.

And if you are running out of time (these things happen), make the trade-off what would contribute most to a successful meeting:

1. Fine tuning those bullet points or re-shuffling the deck one more time
2. Showing up well-rested, energized and able to handle the most difficult questions confidently

Your call.

Chart concept - punching above our weight

OK, I admit, a previous chart concept on leverage might have been a bit hard to get for someone who forgot the physics of pulley systems that was discussed in highschool. This chart says the same thing, but simpler.