Posts Tagged ‘visual’

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

Present information visually

I’m all for displaying your information graphically, but people have to know where to draw the line. Here is an actual slide from a psychology lecture I attended:

Obviously when you are presented with something like this it confuses you even further. The key is simplicity. Especially if you are presenting in a second language, you don’t want a lot of cluttered information, but only key concepts and white space to reinforce the message. If you are making a graph to show your audience, try dissecting it into as many pieces as possible, remember the post-it? Use those smaller pieces in independent slides, and if you want to show the relation between them you can then zoom out and show how they are connected. There is a very good video I came across about displaying information visually by Dan Roam, author of the book The back of the napkin. I’m still reading the book ~~(sorry Dan)~~ (but I’m already sure I will add it to the resources of the web page when I’m done. Done reading the book and it’s great! check it out in the Resources section of the web page.

The Way of the Whiteboard: Persuading with Pictures – Dan Roam

Until next time,

Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.