Talk, Tweak, and Tip of the Day

Next month, I will be bending like an old willow and allowing my students to complete extra credit assignments in both my on campus and my online class. It’s not that I don’t believe students deserve the opportunity to earn more credit, but I find that much of the time, the person who is asking has not completed all the regular credit and is using the extra credit as a way to replace other required work. It’s also more work for me–let’s face it.

But, this idea has been swimming through my brain lately–how do I offer extra credit while making it not so much work for me, making it a relevant part of class and not an after thought, and give the students another chance to present in front of a group? Thus, “Talk, Tweak, or Tip of the Day” was born.

Then I realized…”Oh man..this is a really good idea for my blog…”

So, here we go. Here are today’s Talk, Tweak, AND Tip of the Day!

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Talk of the Day: Emiliano Salinas de Gortari, “A civil response to violence”

Salinas is the son of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, whose presidency was marked by controversy, graft, and corruption, what has become the status quo and common place for many Mexicans. Salinas speaks honestly and passionately about the current violent, deteriorating state of Mexico and his solution to the problem–more Gandhis, more people committed to non-violent resistance. Check out this first Spanish TED talk for a glimpse at what it truly takes to speak eloquently under pressure.

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Tweak(s) of the Day: buddcadell’s “What is Strategy?” and Lucy Spence’s “Designing for Bears”

What is Strategy?

I ran across Flickr user buddcadell’s images while looking for a good “strategy” picture. It was late last night, so I wasn’t feeling particularly conceptual, so I figured I’d search for the concept in compfight and work from those results to find a stronger visual metaphor. That’s when I saw this:

Click on the image to check out the entire deck, a series of Q & A responses to "What is Strategy?"

I can definitely see myself referencing this during our visual design talk in class. buddcadell is looking for more suggestions/ideas to draw. Time to start thinking conceptually again!

Designing for Bears

Lucy is a former user experience designer turned product manager. Her take on designing for a particular audience, and breaking down our own design fallacies features hand drawn images, awesome contrast, and a seamless narrative flow. LOVE!

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Tip of the Day: The Top Ten Best (and Worst) Communicators of 2011

While this is more of a end of year review than a tip, Kelly and Ben Decker of Decker Communications do impart some excellent lessons regarding presenting and public speaking by analyzing this years best and worst communicators.

Lesson from the Best: Be Human

A surprising best communicator to some (though not to me because I am consistently amazed by her) is #6, Lady Gaga. The Deckers commend her for her humanity and humility, something that seems to be missing from so many in the pop limelight.

Image by nellyfus

Lesson from the Worst: Too Many Communication Fails will Haunt You

On the worst list, not surprisingly, is Charlie Sheen, who had two very boisterous communications fails this year. At least tiger’s blood and winning were sort of in for a minute there…

Even the Banksy girl laments the loss of old school semi-normal Charlie

Who made your best and worst list this year?

It’s been too long–I truly missed you

It’s been a crazy few weeks, and readers can expect to see a barage of posts in the next few days as I finally get this new online class revamp process done with the help of superteacher Alex Rister:

1. Shortbread 8-ways: A review 

I’ll let you know which cookie I hoarded for myself, which I still haven’t eaten more than one of, which one was amazing, yet inexorably frustrating (like my non-racist, socialist ex-boyfriend), and which one I’ll be making again in the near future.

2. Professionalism Lessons from The Professional

After the most recent incident regarding communication and professionalism fails, I’ve decided to let Leon, the professional hitman from Luc Besson’s 1994 masterpiece take over on what it means to be a true professional.

3. Audience Needs Persona: the Faculty Persona

I’ve decided to start with faculty in developing my target audience/market personas; this is the group which it would seem I have the most in common, but whom I can’t seem to really convince to take the time to apply those visual design principles consistently.

One Cookie, Eight Variations

The holidays are a time when I relish baking and cooking amazing things for others more than I do the rest of the year. My love language always involves sugar, butter, and bacon, but at no time is this more evident than during the Christmas season. I generally revel in baking 17 different kinds of cookies for my friends, though that often leaves me feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and downright hateful. This year, in an attempt to stave off said hysteria, I am going simpler–at least in terms of my basic recipe. I will be using one recipe for shortbread cookies, creating 8 base batches of said recipe, and then tweaking each batch with sweet and savory additions. On the schedule are Russian tea cakes, chocolate dipped shortbread, rosemary shortbread, millionaire’s shortbread, cranberry and white chocolate shortbread, and thumbprint shortbread (shortbread buttons and lemon glazed shortbread are on the back burner..depends on how adventurous I feel).

Variation #1

I Pinterested these shortbread buttons from Nichole Ramirez--an awesome idea for a shower or just for fun!

 Variation #2

I'll represent the traditional Christmas-cranberry cookie with these shortbread bars from Robin Hood Flour.

 

Variation #3

I kept seeing pins for this variation featuring chocolate, caramel, and shortbread aka Millionaire's Shortbread, a Scottish treat. Thanks to Kayle Langford via Pinterest.

 

Variations #4-7

This is the recipe that started it all--one basic recipe, four different amazing variations. I made these last year, and I am back to try a few more varieties.

 

Variation #8

I am super curious about this savory treat--butter, rosemary...how could I go wrong? Found via Pinterest!

Universal Principle of Design: Personas

Nancy Duarte encourages presenters to think like designers in her book, Slide:ology (this book changed my entire pedagogy–I found it by accident and chose it over a traditional public speaking textbook for my class, and I have never made a better decision in my educational career). One concept that I thought was entirely the realm of content and that I emphasize as important in the content-development area of class is the creation of audience needs maps or personas, which Duarte discusses in Chapter 1 of Slide:ology.

Duarte's Presentation Ecosystem divides the presentation creation process into three key areas: content, visual story, and delivery.

Perusing through my go to text for design, Universal Principles of Design by Lidwell, Holden, and Butler, I ran across the principle of personas, a technique which designers employ to help them make decisions about how user-friendly a design’s features, functions, and aesthetic elements. This design principle indicates that it is best to create detailed profiles of typical user types, who then serve to represent a subgroup of users. This is preferable, in design, to creating something that is generally acceptable to everyone; that is, personas move us away from homogenized, one size fits all design. Personas at their best come in threes (which is awesome because I love threes), are detailed enough to include a name, photograph, description, and details about specific habits and behaviors. Designers even go so far as to role play with these personas, experiencing a product, service, site, or structure from the perspective of this representational user.

Persona created for RemindMe, RWhite*'s Participatory Design Study

According to UPD, using personas, “clarifies user needs and behaviors and is an effective means of creating empathy for the user perspective”. Students and teachers alike often resist this very useful design habit, believing that it is impossible or inappropriate to create generalizations about audience groups. I ask them to use Duarte’s seven questions about audience (which correspond with the types of questions designers might ask themselves about user personas) to create in depth visualizations of their target audiences.

Duarte's take on persona, the audience needs map. Download it, use it, love it.

To me, this act moves the speaker one step closer to shared meaning, empathy, Burke’s identification, and true Duarte-style resonance. The authors of UPD suggest that three primary and four secondary, concise and accessible personas be developed early on in the design process using interviews and market research. Combining these seven questions, the design purpose of personals, and some well-structured survey questions will help you design a presentation that truly meets your audience’s needs.

Note: In an effort to not only ask students and colleagues to do as I say but also do as I do, I’m in the process of creating audience personas for my typical audience: teachers and students. Check back for the results of this latest tweak tomorrow!  

Day one of Pinterest: Men’s Restroom Etiquette

Pinterest has rendered me a useless fool. I’ve spent half of my night reading recipes for shortbread and pizza monkey bread. In the midst of all this, I found this amusing visualization:

Source: 9gag.com via Elizabeth on Pinterest

Tweak of the day: Andrew Dlugan and SMN

Andrew Dlugan is the author of Six Minutes, one of my absolute must-read blogs on public speaking. One of my favorite posts by Dlugan is titled “Average Speakers Suck. Don’t be Average.” I dig this post because it employs one of Dlugan’s most powerful rhetorical tools, metaphor. Dlugan points out that unlike an average chocolate chip cookie, average height, and an average golfer, an average presentation sucks. In Dlugan’s bell curve of presentation skills, “The line between being an effective communicator and an ineffective communicator is not down the middle of the chart. It’s over to the right.” This average zone according to Dlugan, “is the Death by PowerPoint abyss. This is the 15 filler words per minute zone. This is the “What the heck is this speaker talking about?” zone.  In homage to Dlugan, I am sharing with you today’s image of the day, which comes from Flickr user, SMN. I’ve paired it with one of my favorite quotes from this excellent article.

Image: SMN via Flickr

Deck of the Day: Getting Unstuck: A primer

Today’s deck of the day comes from Adventure House. Check out this excellent presentation that not only illustrates excellent design, but also gives some great advice on how to get that creativity flowing and get unstuck!

Design Inspiration: The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Exhibition

From October 1 2011 – February 5 2012, The Getty Museum will feature gorgeous work from artists working in post WWII Los Angeles. This group sought out new techniques, forms of inspiration, subjects, and materials by drawing from the local surf and car cultures of the time. It’s the stark contrast, simplicity, and sleekness of works like Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas by Ed Ruscha that draws me to this exhibition.

Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1963, Ed Ruscha

Check out today’s bit of visual inspiration, courtesy of the Pacific Standard Time exhibition:

Gonna California, a conceptual record to accompany a conceptual display by Terry Allen. Listen to the track by clicking the record.

The 1970s also marked the beginning of women's groups like Womanhouse, a creative space for women at CalArts.

My next post in the Elements of Art series will cover shape and form; this painting, titled Up with in by Frederick Hammersley, is characteristic of his "Hunch" style and will surely show up in that post.

Frederick Eversley used a centrifuge to mold and ply resins and plastics into concave figures such as Untitled from 1970.

Early New Years Resolution: Tweak Nonfunctional Slides

I’m always looking for new projects to tweak. Ideally, I’d like to devote my time to non-education tweaks; I’d love to show that my abilities extend beyond lecture-based materials. But, those projects are hard to come by for someone who spends 23.5 hours a day working in education. I decided to take a look through my older decks (some a good six years old, from my days teaching English and humanities at Valencia College); I realized they were all in serious need of tweaking. Despite spending hours poring through material and searching for pictures, this is what I tortured my students with:

The ubiquitous title slide; the standard bullet-riddled overkill.

Pictures are clearly secondary here. The content is still most important--but what's the point of the slide during a lecture? Is it a note taking tool? A teleprompter?

I probably stopped paying attention by this point too.

To begin with, I started looking for a set of slides I’d created in Latin American humanities that I thought would be great to integrate into my class. The deck dealt with the elements and principles of art, which I briefly covered at the beginning of the course’s unit on visual art. The slides were meant to serve as a crash course in analyzing how a piece of art is constructed. Well, I looked for hours through my completely disorganized Mac, only to discover that the file was indeed gone. I admit that part of my desire to start with that deck was that it was a hundred times better than what you see above, so I thought my job would be easier. Slides or no, I think the elements of art is a good place to start, so the next few series of posts will feature the deck as it develops.  Definitions and descriptions come from the J. Paul Getty Museum‘s excellent education section.

The elements of art are: line, shape and form, color, texture, and space.

Let’s begin with line, the most basic structure of artistic expression.

Line is at its simplest the visualization of an objects trajectory through space. Line can create emotion, movement, and energy. Lines can also be grouped to create shapes, and to create perspective or the illusion of 3 dimensions on a 2 dimensional surface.

Monet in Sunset On the Seine in Winter uses horizontal lines to create a sense of depth and distance.

The use of vertical lines by Monet here indicates action, energy. Vertical lines are the domain of objects in motion. Note how horizontal lines here are used to give further depth to the landscape.

The intersection of horizontal and vertical lines creates shape.

Piet Mondrian is one of my favorites; his simple use of line creates structure and solidity combined with a vibrant energy.

Christina's World by Wyeth uses diagonal lines to create a sense of movement and to draw the eye to a particular focal point. The line of Christina's body, which is broken, unable to move on its own, indicates desire and longing.

Photographer Eugene Atget used curved lines to create an anthropomorphic composition in this photograph.

Consider line in your choice of images and your integration of text with these images. Consider images with horizontal lines to help indicate rest or repose; use images with vertical lines and vertical figures to convey action. Combine horizontal and vertical lines (and use clear grids) to create structure. Diagonal lines are lines in motion–use them to move your audience towards action, towards a conclusion. Curved lines are sensual and attractive. Use them to attract your audience to your core message.

Make it tiny, make it awesome.

Driving to work today, I noticed this billboard from FiatUSA:

FiatUSA's approach to selling these slick, little wonders is to focus on size as a positive attribute. Pretty ballsy in a land full of largess and excess.

The billboard reminded me of just how much I love small things. Perhaps it’s that I barely scratch the 5′ marker line on a height chart (I hit that when I was 16), but I am obsessed with small things. When choosing my last apartment, I purposely chose a 600 sq. ft. studio divided by one 3/4 wall.

My tiny bedroom; 250 sq. ft of my 600.

I drive a Honda Fit. I wear size 6 shoes. I love tiny cupcakes. I love tiny everything. So, I decided I’d pay homage to all things tiny with a review of tiny designs I love.

This tiny piece of deliciousness comes from a local bakery, The Blue Bird Bake Shop

Tiny Awesomeness #1: Stereographic Projections

Create your own tiny planet and practice your design know how by practicing photography and alignment.

I discovered tiny planets, or sterographic projections, while perusing through Flickr’s Creative Commons. Bob Kueppers creates these projections through the use of overlapping photos, a tripod, and a fisheye lens. Kueppers shares with us that we can actually create our own stereographic projections through the use of the Tiny Planets App, which works with the amazingness that is the Photosynth App for iPhone.

Tiny Awesomeness #2: Magnetic Thinking Putty

Who wants to buy me this for my desk?

Why putty you ask? How can putty be amazing? Well, this putty has millions of micron-sized magnets built into it. This coupled with the iron boron cube that comes with turns an ordinary 15 minutes of molding fun into a zillion hours of “snake charming” fun. You can even turn the putty into a magnet by “charging it.”

Tiny Awesomeness #3: Gary Chang’s 300 sq. ft. 24 Room Apartment

Gary Chang, a Hong Kong native, is used to living in tight quarters. He lived in a 3-room apartment with his family AND a tenant for most of his life. Now, he’s transformed that 300 sq. ft. space into a 24-room home complete with screening room, double bed, soaking tub, guest bed, fully equipped kitchen, and floor to ceiling windows that provide beautiful ambient light. This is Graham Hill’s dream of living small and simple come to life.

What draws you to a particular design? Size? Color? Shape?