Food design tips applied to presentations

I was reading up on design on different blogs the other day, and came across an interesting article on food presentation: The Art of Styling a Dish. The interesting thing was that most of the concepts the author shared about food presentation, could as easily be applied to presentations.

I don’t know about you, but when I go to a restaurant that serves dishes with a nice presentation, I feel like the food tastes better for some reason. The same is true with information, it’s not the same to see information just thrown on a slide, like when I make sloppy joes at home, that when it’s carefully presented, taking care of structure, content and design; the brain feels information presented with good design “tastes” better, and consumes it more eagerly.

The article stated that when creating nice food design we had to keep in mind:

- The support

- The focal point

- Colors

- Flavors

- Textures

- Decoration

- The garnish

The support

For food it’s the type of dish you are going to use, for presentations it’s the type of visual aids. We have, for some time now, associated presentations to powerpoint, but you can use powerpoint, prezi, flipcharts or even props for a presentation. Decide which support helps you communicate your message better. The support you choose should enhance your message, not be the message. So even if you choose powerpoint, don’t use it to hold the whole of your presentation, but to expand or illustrate what you are saying.

The focal point

The main point on each dish, the most important thing on the plate, what you are there to eat; that’s the focal point. Same thing in presentations, when you say you are going to talk about the importance of renewable energies, for example, that is what people expect to hear about.

The audience should not have to dig up you main point, you have to lay it out in front of them. If you are presenting that information on your visual aids don’t clutter the slide, give main points their own slide and explain them in one word or sentence so that people can instantly understand.

Colors

Colors are a delicate matter when designing a dish, you don’t want to use too many or inappropriate colors. When deciding on what colors to choose for your presentation always keep it simple. Make sure you have good contrast between your background and font color and choose one power color to draw attention and which will always be the same throughout the presentation

Flavors and Textures

The great thing of a well-designed dish is the mix of flavors and textures; equally a great presentation will have a mix of tones and feelings. As we all know it’s bad to be monotone in a presentation, but this doesn’t only apply to boring tones, it applies to all. Try to combine energetic moments with more solemn ones. When you pump up the energy and show your passion people are impressed and will listen to you, but if you keep that up for the entire presentation they will soon bore of the tone (or believe you are on drugs); on the other hand, when you switch to a quieter, more serious tone, to tell a story for example people are drawn in to what you are saying. The trick is to combine these and other tones in your presentation so that the audience is always engaged.

Decoration

I love the example of decoration in food, because people don’t decorate a dish with clipart, do they? They use parsley, cherry tomatoes, a lemon slice… What do all of these things have in common? You can eat them. The decoration in your presentation has to be the information itself, something consumable. Don’t add pictures or clipart just for the sake of decoration, but format information to be well designed.

The article says: “the plate must have a balanced and clear appearance”. Think of this when designing your visuals.

The Garnish

That little extra that just gives the dish its character. How do you garnish your presentations? You can give a handout at the end, include a giveaway or even have a little competition. These details transform a simple presentation into an experience.

Until next time,

Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.

Thursday, 15 March 2012 08:01 Written by Byron Stanford 2 Comments

Present like Yoda you can

When we were in school we learned to fill up our exams until we were out of space; it was frowned upon to hand in an essay that didn’t fill up the whole page. Most of us learned the trick: To write more, studying the same, you had to learn how to say the same thing in 3 different ways. And this is how we got used to filling up all available empty space. Don’t kid yourselves, the education system has been training us for this, a lot of exams when you’re young ask you to fill in a gap or complete the blanks. By the time we graduate we are experts at filling up empty space.

But, as it turns out, filling up empty space is not a good thing. In presentations, whitespace helps us reinforce our message and design better slides (read my post on whitespace here). Now that we don’t have to answer exams or write 10 page essays, we find ourselves filling up whitespace compulsively. In presentations you can see it in the use of clipart (tiny image that doesn’t contribute anything to your message, but that makes its way into 70% of presentations, merely because we have empty space). The most effective approach, however, is to learn to use whitespace to our benefit.

One of Yoda’s lessons is: “You must unlearn what you have learned”. Totally true! After 18 years learning to fill up empty space, we have to unlearn what we have learned and start to appreciate it. Instead of slides like this:

Learn how to get rid of what you don’t need, keep only what is needed to communicate your message and make something like this:

Until next time,

Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.

Thursday, 17 February 2011 16:43 Written by Byron Stanford 3 Comments

May the Force be with your Presentations (Make better presentations with Garr Reynolds and George Lucas)

Garr Reynolds is a diehard Star Wars fan, when I was studying with him in Japan he talked a lot about lessons for presentations that could be taken from Lucas’ films. Far from seeming like a geek, I think almost everyone has watched Star Wars, and whether you like them or not, they have influenced 3 different generations. The first lesson I’ll leave you with is one that Garr talks about in his presentations:

Here’s a caption from the movie, where they are briefing the pilots on the attack plan on the Death Star; Garr draws a lot of attention to how visual this briefing is. There’s no text, just a graphic representation of what is being explained.

Compare, however, what this scene would look like if the presentation had been given using a typical PowerPoint template.

It’s not that PowerPoint is bad, it’s just that the way we use it isn’t the most effective. We should try to be more visual, like this leader of the rebel alliance, and like Garr Reynolds, who is also the leader of a rebel alliance, The Alliance against Death by PowerPoint.

May the force be with your presentations.

Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.

Source: http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2010/08/a-long-time-ago-before-death-by-powerpoint.html

Wednesday, 16 February 2011 16:27 Written by Byron Stanford 1 Comment

Showing Data Effectively

When you are making a presentation one of the things you almost always include is the data that supports your point. You want your audience to know that there is science behind what you are saying; there are numbers that prove it! Data is very commonly used and is good to give your message credibility, but it is, most of the time, used wrong. Numbers on a piece of paper are intangible and although we can get the rough idea of what they represent, in the end, they don’t mean that much to us. It just doesn’t resonate with us and after the presentation we are likely to forget it. So what good is data then? It isn’t, not in the way we conventionally present it at least. What taps into people’s brains and stays in their mind are relationships.

The best example is the “one out of ten” relationship, you’ve seen it so many times that you don’t even notice anymore; but think about it this way: What if I told you, “Nearly 1 billion people in the world don’t have access to safe water”? Wow! 1 billion, that’s a lot, right? Who knows what 1 billion people look like? You can’t really picture or grasp the gravity of the issue; instead if I say, “More than 1 out of 6 people in the world don’t have access to safe drinking water”. There you have it, instantly you have a mental image of how many people don’t have safe water.

Relationships between numbers are more important than the numbers themselves. You don’t need to show the exact number of units sold by your competitors, all you want to show is a graph that shows where, in relation to them, you stand.

Consider these examples:

Until next time,

Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.

Thursday, 02 September 2010 09:05 Written by Byron Stanford 0 Comments

Can Coco Chanel teach you how to make better slides?

If you still view your slides as a support for bulleted rivers of information, I recommend you start reading this blog from the beginning. On the other hand, if you have followed and now see your slides as something else, something you design, then this lesson can help you.

Now that we know that presentations have a lot to do with design, we can look for what designers have been saying for very long, but we never thought to apply to our businesses. I came across this quote the other day:

“Before you leave the house, take 1 thing off.”

-Coco Chanel

Think about it this way, before you settle on one slide, eliminate one element. We tend to overcrowd our slides with too much information, too many elements of decoration. When you are making your presentation, design your slides, don’t decorate them.

I’m sure you can think of other examples of quotes that can be applied to presentations.

Until next time,

Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.