Off topic - amazing Rube Goldberg-style video

I have always dreamt of using a Rube Goldberg-style animation in a presentation (earlier post). Watch this video.

Creativity and chaos

A nice presentation from Jason Theodor on creativity and chaos (the click-click-click SlideShare type). I agree: creativity is everything but a linear process (example). Browse through this presentation:

1. Good content
2. Some original use of images, visuals, and fonts

Chaos and Creativity

Gaining the confidence to tell your story, your way

The more you practice, the more you rehearse, the more you get on top of your story. And the more comfortable you get with your material, the more confident you get in delivering it. Confidence goes beyond getting rid of fear of public speaking, confidence enters chart design and story telling as well.

• The confidence to get rid of "business school"-style structuring frameworks: let's talk about the market, let's talk about the competition, let's talk about the distinctiveness, etc. and only spend time on those issues that really matter for your particular story, in the order that best fit your specific situation
• The confidence to use personal stories and case examples to illustrate your point
• The confidence to make your charts more minimalist and more abstract
• The confidence to insert blank/black/white slides inside your presentation to have the audience just focus on you

It is a bit like the abstract painters of the last century: having the confidence to communicate emotions and ideas without relying on realistic techniques. For example Piet Mondriaan's Broadway Boogie Woogie painted in 1942-1943.

The pulse of a Jazz beat, and the energy of the New York traffic squeezing its way through the city's grid all captured in one painting without showing Jazz bars, Times Square neons, and/or New York traffic jams.

Iconic images

What a wonderful advertising campaign: if 4 pixels can tell a story, imagine what millions can. Here is one example, but there are lots more on Ads of the World (click the previous and/or next buttons).

I like using iconic images in presentations, an endless repertoire of visual shortcuts stored in the brain of almost any person on the planet.

Chart concept - shark!

Some might consider it a cliché, but I found it still useful: the school of fish swimming in formation to create the illusion of being a shark. For when you need to visualize how many smaller/weaker entities can work together to become very strong as a group.

An image like this can easily be created by searching for "fish silhouette" or "shark silhouette" in a stock photo site. Resize the small fish, paste them over the shark's silhouette, and off you go.

Inspired by a scene from the movie Finding Nemo:

Adapt your "presentation interface" to every presentation setting

This presentation that I found today on SlideShare is not about about presentations, but about application design for the iPad. Still, it deserves a mention on this blog because of the fundamental philosophy of the designer: each user interface deserves its own kind of design approach: the iPad is not an iPhone, is not an iPod.

Stanford CS193P - Designing for iPad

View more presentations from Evan Doll.

The same is true for presentations, different audiences, different settings, require a completely different presentation (earlier post): cosy meeting room, big audience keynote, SlideShare document for online viewing, one-on-one with a venture capitalist, etc.

I think iPad-like user interfaces (like the one Tom Cruise uses in the movie Minority Report) could turn the world of presentation design upside down. Early thoughts here.

Obama infographic and picking the right metric

The infographic below released by the Obama administration (here) is a good example of using the full arsenal visual techniques to make your point stand out.

• Use fat columns to make the trend stick out (much better than a thin line, earlier post here)
• Use recognizable, contrasting colors
• Pick a metric that is favorable (monthly job loss)

On the Fast Company site, Prof. Charles Franklin put out a second graph depicting exactly the same data, but using a different metric, cumulative job loss:

The formating of the graph is a bit improvised, but it shows the power of picking the right metric. Someone speed-reading a newspaper first notices the sea of blue, and a trend that does not seem to reverse.

Fast Company seems to have taken down the story, so I had to source Franklin graph from Google chache. Thank you Ellen Daehnick for pointing me to this.

How to report the news

Late again in discovering an amusing video (1.3 million people saw it before I did over the last 3 weeks). Charlie Brooker is making fun of your typical TV journalist video report.

Some presentation lessons:

• Professional journalists rigorously stick to the focus-on-one-message-only rule. The introduction summarizes the message, the question already contains the answer (the message), and the wrap up repeats the message. I am all for clear messages, but sometimes you run the risk of insulting the audience with over-simplification. I am not a big fan of the "tell what you will tell them, tell them, tell what you just told them" structure.
• See how the background visuals are actually distracting: you switch off mentally, go in remote control TV mode, and start paying attention to "what street in London is this?", "where is that accent from?", you hardly notice that some of the interviewees are speaking Gobbledygook.Your visuals should be good, but not claiming all the attention (earlier post).
• Videos can be great at conveying messages in a short time frame. This "boring" video took 1:59, but see what a different approach can do in 1:30 here.

Thank you Joe Mako

In defense of clichés (sort of)

I came across two interesting links about clichés last week.

1. Seth Godin: point to a cliché and do the exact opposite (blog post). From a presentation perspective the most interesting tip is the "secret weapon" he points to: a book full of clichés: Dictionary of Cliches (affiliate link)
2. Nikki Smith-Morgan pointed me to this wonderful list of 101 cliché images.

I now realize that I have been reinventing the wheel over the past few years. I am guilty of using many of visual concepts, and even have posted many of them on this blog. I agree that some of the images are really worn out (#1 example the handshake), but not all 100 other images are equally bad in my opinion.

Especially in everyday corporate presentations, getting people to use images instead of bullet points is a huge win, even if the images that are picked are somewhat obvious. It is the beginning of a path moving away from bullet points. I was there 5 years ago, but every day more and more people join the movement. Clichés are a good way to start.
A cliché is a visual shortcut that can prove useful in corporate presentations when used wisely. "Wisely" means picking a beautiful image. (Yesterday I was guilty of a tunnel with light at the end for example).

Obviously, the big keynote address is a different story from tomorrow's management review meeting.

Overlaps (redux)

Another technical post today, giving another approach to creating Venn-like diagrams without the color limitations of semi-transparent shapes (older post here).

• Draw an extra shape exactly the same size as the others, in the color you want
• Ctrl-X it away and paste it back in as a PNG (paste special, PNG)
• Crop excess bits away
• Overlay them

Blog visitor AdamV provided a link to this Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 feature that will make it very easy to combine, intersect and subtract shapes.

Immerse yourself in photography

As a child I already loved flicking through magazines, just to look at pictures. The Internet makes it so much easier to absorb vast quantities of visuals. Simple add a huge amount of photography-focussed RSS feeds to your Google Reader and hold down your finger on arrow-down, only to lift it when an image instantly touches you.

Not that I am hunting for images to use in presentations, often they are not right, often they have copy right restrictions. But still, immersing yourself in images improves your slide design skills. It is a bit like the best way to learn a language: surrounding yourself with it (maybe Hebrew is the exception to the rule though).

The most interesting images are often not the most professional ones. Stunning sun sets, volcano eruptions, can be beautiful but do not touch you on an emotional level.

I recently added the RSS feed for ffffound to my Google Reader: a community image book marking site with a large readership. Images are picked by random users (most of them with a good eye for photography), as a result you get a frequently updated image stream full of surprises. As an example, here is an image I found today on the site:

Yay!Everyday is another example of image highlighting site, worth following.

The sort of animations we need in slideware: zooming

Most of the animations and slide transition effects currently available in PowerPoint do more damage than good to a presentation (an earlier post on the subject). The video below is guilty of some of these mistakes, but it also contains some effects that would be very useful to have in PowerPoint 2010 (preview in an earlier post):

• Very slow moving zoom
• Extreme image zooming
• Image blurring
• Zooming inside data charts

See how often I used the word "zoom" here. In the current version of PowerPoint you cannot control zooming enough: effects are blunt. Either via devices like the iPad, or via a breakthrough by software innovators like Prezi, or via improvements in Microsoft's/Apple's slideware, eventually we will get to advanced zooming capabilities in presentation software.

Video credit: Dan Meyer's 2009 Annual Report from Dan Meyer on Vimeo. Found via Fubiz

Further reading: an excellent post by Garr Reynolds about slow zooming and photographer Ken Burns.

Picking the correct logo

Many investor and sales presentations include logo pages. Improve the quality of these slides significantly by not picking the first image that pops up in Google image search:

1. Visit the company's web site to see what the latest logo of the company in question is, logos get updated frequently
2. Set the Google image search options to large format
3. Pick a correct, huge logo
4. Paste it in your presentation, reduce to the correct size, hit compress images

Companies with a good PR department have high-resolution images of their logos on the web site. Use them.

Leave some room for your chart title

The space allocated to the slide title in a PowerPoint template is constantly under threat:

• Corporate graphics eating up valuable screen real estate (earlier post)
• Huge and bold fonts (earlier post)

Please give the title some space:

• It is virtually impossible to win the battle against dense bullet point charts in big corporates. However, giving people some space to write the conclusion in the title of the chart might be one of the easiest ways to overcome this problem: read the title, ignore the chart content. A similar effect to how Twitter is educating people to write more concise email subject lines.
• I find a title that runs on 2 lines hard to read: if you do not give people space they will simply add a line, and maybe even another one.

Turning any image into concrete

Here is a simple trick to turn any image into concrete. As an example I took an iPad and turned it into an iSlate, but it might actually work better with other images (you can turn portraits into statues for example).

To do this in PowerPoint without the help of advanced image manipulation software you need to add a shape on top of the target image, fill the shape with an image of a concrete texture (available on any stock image site) and make that shape with the concrete texture semi-transparent.

Lighter shades for bright colors

PowerPoint 2010 gives you the option of a spectrum of different shades of the same color. This is great to design charts with a consistent color scheme.

However, if your template contains colors that are highly saturated, the suggested lighter shades of your color will be too bright to use as neutral color nuances. Here is how you can fix it. (Click on the image for a larger picture.).

• Create a new base color by reducing the saturation (in laymen's speak: make it more grey). 

1. Open the color in your color template (format shape/fill/solid fill/color/more colors)
2. Switch the color model from RGB (red, green, blue) to HSL (hue, saturation, luminance).
3. Reduce the (S)aturation value, while keeping all other variables the same.

• Use a lighter shade of this new base color instead and save this as a new color in your color template.

If you are interested in learning more about color theory, you can browse through some earlier posts on the subject of color or go straight to this one.

Message arrived - nobody understood it

My attention was drawn to this Vodafone ad that uses the NATO alphabet to say C-O-M-M-U-N-I-C-A-T-E  C-L-E-A-R-L-Y. An excellent example of the difference between delivering a message (i.e., writing your bullet points on a slide) and getting someone else to understand/internalize what it says.

I am not sure yet how to use it yet, but this NATO alphabet is a good thing to remember when thinking about chart concepts.

Via Ads of the World.

The audience wants you to succeed

Fear of public speaking often stems from the speaker thinking that the audience's main objective is to criticize her performance. The opposite is true: the audience wants you to succeed. First of all because of selfish motivations; nobody wants to be bored.

But there is an emotional driver as well. People (in the audience) do not like to subject themselves to an embarrassing situation. Watching this movie clip from the film "About a boy" creates that exact feeling in your stomach (I cannot embed it for some reason).

The book "Confessions of a public speaker" has a great section on public speaking anxiety. Seth Godin thinks that fear of public speaking is the a prime example of our lizard brain at work.

Browsing for books about design

The Internet and the place I live (Israel) have cut me off of those great large book stores where you can browse endlessly for books you did not know you missed.

Presentation blogs (this one included) often talk about the same limited set of books about public speaking and presentation design. Here is a list of design books compiled by graphic designer Jason Santa Maria full of titles that look really interesting.

Found via SwissMiss. Image credit Google LIFE, an excellent source of images for non-commercial use.

The entire Jobs' iPad speech in 180s: passion

Presenting is not a casual discussion, it is a performance. When you are not passionate about what you are presenting yourself, do not expect your audience to be. This short video compilation of Steve Jobs' iPad launch speech shows how he packed his talk with enthusiasm. Something to learn from, but also to make you smile.