Breaking Designer’s Block: Tweak Your Resume Update

It’s been a quiet few weeks on TYS, in no small part due to the new bane of my existence, the Tweak Your Resume deck. I will be debuting this deck on Slideshare next week, and it’s been quite the creative challenge. I am working on combining two slideshows, one on professionalism and another on some visual resume lessons from Slideshare decks and student decks. I am not sure if it is the combination of messages, the struggle I’ve had nailing down a theme that works, or my blending of photography and iconography, but this deck has given me some serious designer’s block! I’ve made my way out of it, but only after finally nailing down a strong cover image.

I still have to eliminate the dreaded Venn Diagram (I have been banned by my superteacher partner in crime, Alex Rister from using it ever again), and I’m still working on a strong visualization for the 12 million folks unemployed in the US, but I am finally happy with the direction the deck is moving in and am excited to share it with readers and colleagues.

My first version of the unemployment rate. I think it’s a bit weak and have a few more ideas I’m trying. What do you think?

Simple Design: Ideally, One Idea Per Slide

The SIMPLE design series covers my six principles for effective visual design. The first piece in this series covered the concept of simplicity in design, with a focus on a very basic truth–simple isn’t easy; it takes work. In this installment, I’ll cover the next letter in this acronym, “I,” which stands for…

Ideally, One Idea Per Slide

Years of slideument conditioning has led all of us (including me as you’ll soon see) to see our slides as a document, something that is only really complete when filled with content (text, image, clip art, chart, random animated gif). This habit means that we’ve managed to keep our slides low in number, but high in noise (and conversely, low in signal).  According to Garr Reynolds, “[p]rojected slides should be as visual as possible and support our point quickly, efficiently (good signal-to-noise ratio), and powerfully. The verbal content, the verbal proof, evidence, and appeal/emotion comes mostly from our spoken word” (Source). So, in a live situation, it’s the presenter and not the slides who must carry the weight of the signal or content. Creating a content-heavy slide places the focus on the visual aid (in the worst way possible), can cause cognitive dissonance and confusion, and can damage a speaker’s credibility. As an educator, I felt the need to fill slides with as much content as possible, especially in courses I felt less than solid in or that required more lecture focus than composition and writing, particularly Latin American Humanities:

What’s wrong with this slide? Well, even when I presented information by only showing one bullet at a time, my students first had no tangible concept to attach to ideas like “universal constructivism”, and second, as John Medina discusses in his must-read Brain Rules, the mind cannot multi-task, which is exactly what we ask audiences to do when we create slideuments. Our audience must read our slides AND listen to us, which they just cannot do. According to Medina, “[r]esearch shows your error rate goes up 50% and it takes you twice as long to do things” (Source) when the myth of multi-tasking is in play. Further, as Nancy Duarte asserts in Slide:ology, slides, like billboards are “glance media”, which means that your audience should be able to process your visual story quickly and then return to listening to your awesome content.

The situation becomes even more complex when we are asked as presenters to provide our slides for publication or when we use our slides as study guides for our students. How do we keep our slides cinematic AND also communicate dense amounts of content? Reynolds has a few suggestions, including the most obvious and useful one–create a set of display slides and create a separate document with complete notes (Source). I find that doing this gives students the opportunity to use their critical thinking skills and decide what is really important or note worthy.  I want to share one of my most important design epiphanies that helped me find a good balance between content and design. Keeping this idea in mind has helped me move towards truly SIMPLE Design: An Extra Slide Costs Nothing!

So, instead of placing every bit of information about Joaquin Torres-Garcia and Universal Constructivism on one slide, I can break the information up over many slides.

 

Have you faced the challenge of creating cinematic slides that are also content-rich? What are your great ideas for moving away from the slideument? 

Slideshare of the Day: Fix your broken Slideshare presentations

 

Over the past few days, the subject of what does or doesn’t work on Slideshare has come up. One of my online students faced a problem many users who upload custom presentations to Slideshade–the viewer function works very well, as long as there’s nothing too “crazy” going on in the slides. Through some trial and error (and hair pulling frustration), I found a quick fix for any and all Slideshare display problems. Today’s Slideshare of the day covers how to implement this quick fix.

Simple Design: Why Simple Isn’t Easy

The Simple Design series will cover the basics of strong presentation design. The first part in the series is an introduction to the concept of simplicity in design and what that truly means when it comes to creating strong visual aids.

Often, when I consult with students, teachers, and professionals on presentation design, the subject of simplicity comes up. The idea that something complex should at the same time be simple can be a road block for novice presentation designers, particularly because we are so conditioned through misuse of presentation software to fill up every available inch of presentation “real estate” with bullets, clip art, non-sensical diagrams, doo dads, fire animations, wingdings, company logos, word art, and any other number of PowerPoint distractions. Imagine if Abraham Lincoln had used PowerPoint? What would we actually remember about The Gettysburg Address.

Simplicity is a powerful element to creating strong visual aids. Further, simplicity is something we crave, something we are now primed to seek out as we are driven to seek out meaning. Simplicity is the key to meaning; it allows your audience to move past noise directly to signal. But, simplicity isn’t simple or easy. John Madea, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, understands the power of simplicity first hand; in fact, he wrote the book on it. In his 2007 TED talk, “Designing for Simplicity”, Madea dissects the intersection of simplicity and complexity; simplicity is complexity, but it’s complexity at its most elegant and meaningful.

For Madea, simplicity is a part of the human experience; it’s about living life with more joy and less pain. But, simplicity isn’t simple, which is where design comes in. Design is the intersection of art and technology, the simple presentation of the infinitely complex human experience. At its best, design is about simplicity because design is about focusing on the meaningful. In a world of death-by-PowerPoint, this idea of simple design is even more important in the creation of visual aids and slideshows. Why? Because at the core, slides are a form of information design, the use of design elements to communicate, persuade, or inform.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/petervanlancker/6017183490/sizes/l/in/photostream/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gdsdigital/4475725767/sizes/l/in/photostream/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/normanbleventhalmapcenter/2674855383/sizes/l/in/photostream/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/x1brett/2088959372/sizes/o/in/photostream/

However, when we choose a template and create a seemingly endless repetition of title, bullets, clip art, incongruous transition/animation, we make content more important than the visual presentation or design of that content. So, what’s the solution? Well, you guessed it–it’s time to make presentation design SIMPLE. The six simple design elements are:

The first lesson in the Simple Design series is “simplicity takes work.” Before jumping right into designing slides, we must first prepare ourselves for the design mindset, and that means defining what we mean by work.

When it comes to slide design, one of the first and very honest things I tell students and teachers alike is that paring your work down, resisting the urge to jump right into a template, and being ingenious with the tools presentation software provides you with takes much more work than the opposite. To work towards simplicity, begin by considering three areas.

Firstly, it’s important to analyze the context of the presentation and whether or not slides are truly necessary to communicating your message (yes, they are expected, but are they necessary?). A set of slides, if it’s only decoration, can quickly become a distraction for your audience and can cause them to focus less on what you have to communicate and more on what is happening behind or next to you.

Secondly, if you’ve determined that slides are necessary, you should then create a framework for the presentation by developing a storyboard of your content and organization. One of the most consistent pieces of advice given by professionals like Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds, and Steve Cherches is go analog! Get away from that computer (believe me, you’ll spend plenty of time on the computer), use your visual thinking skills, and draw your ideas out. Drawing out your presentation can help free you from the restriction that can come from only relying the imagery you search for (whether it is stock photography or creative commons images/iconography). Drawing and storyboarding also helps you see connection you might miss via the linear layout of a slideshow.

Finally, it’s important to set your slides up for design.

This means beginning with a blank slate, so that you can resist the urge to conform your ideas to a template, as opposed to building a “look for your ideas”; turning on grids and rulers (would you build a house without a way to measure your dimensions?), so you can make precise placement a priority; and familiarizing yourself with your presentation software’s advanced tools such as cropping and image editing, font or typography, shapes, objects, and visual effects, so you can polish your individual elements and overall design.

Whether you use Keynote, PowerPoint, Prezi, GoogleDocs, or Slide Rocket, it’s important to begin with a blank canvas. The biggest detriment to original simplicity is the pre-made template.

Any good presentation software includes features that assist you in designing. Designers make deliberate decisions and consider alignment and hierarchy above all. Using grids, rulers, and getting a “bird’s eye view” of your slides will help you move towards simple design.

Finally, explore your software’s advanced features. Keynote and PowerPoint both allow users to edit and enhance images, for instance, which can help you mold an existing image to fit your original theme.

Once you’ve set your slides up for design, it’s time to move on to the I in SIMPLE Design. Stay tuned for the next installment in this series, in which I’ll cover the glance media rule and its connection to slide design.

Tweak Your Slides Debut: What I Carry

Slideshare.net has recently launched a content sharing partnership with LinkedIn’s Influencer program, which allows LinkedIn users to gain insight from the top thought leaders in the world today (across a variety of disciplines).

Click to learn more about LinkedIn’s influencers.

One of the topics covered by LinkedIn is “The Things I Carry: My Everyday Tools for Success.” In conjunction with the LinkedIn series, Slideshare is running a special trend based on the same topic. They’ve called on Slideshare users to share their everyday tools for success, and I’ve taken up the call. Here are the things I carry (note: a cat is not a thing, but daily moments with my friend, Juana, makes for a happy Chiara):

So, what are your tools for success? What do you need to be a successful you?

Appropriation in Design: How thin is the line?

Being a designer is being a pirate–you sail the proverbial seas of creativity, see some sweet design booty, plunder it, and make it your own. But, while the “be a pirate” philosophy encourages us to be influenced and inspired by the approaches of others (what better way to prove a design works than to see iterations of it and variations on its approach in other places/mediums), appropriation can very quickly lead to plagiarism. I want to clarify that I am not accusing anyone of plagiarism in this post, merely citing examples of appropriation that are useful in discussing the real difference and line between being inspired by a design and iterating your own, and mimicking or copying someone’s design without attention to the design’s intent or purpose. So, what is the difference between appropriation and plagiarism? Is there a way to clearly define what is acceptable inspiration and what is design piracy?

Botero is one of art’s most famous appropriators. This is his “Monalisa”, featuring his unique perspective on an existing motif.

Paisley ( Some rights reserved by BrianJamesPhotography)

Botero Monalisa ( Some rights reserved by Micah & Erin)

Picture Frame ( Some rights reserved by eriwst)

…

According to William Denttrel in his 2005 article for the Design Observer Group, “In the world of design… there seems to be an implicit understanding that any original work can and will evolve into the work of others, eventually working its way into our broader visual culture” (Source). But,  when the derivation is essentially the same as the original, Denttrel’s ultimate point is that this is both “[sad] and wrong”.  Essence here is defined as the core of the composed design. Denttrel is comparing two images of the motif “bird in hand”. One is a stock image used by magazine STEP. The other is one in a series of photographs by artist Victor Schrager. Schrager’s well-known work has been exhibited in museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, and it’s been published both in magazine and book form. Yes, you may copy type, color, tonality, but composition and intent are different. As curators of art and creators of art (yes, I afford presentation design the same status as other forms of design), shouldn’t we respect the rights of originators? Shouldn’t we look for opportunities to praise appropriation as opposed to mimicry?

Jason Carne defines the difference as follows:

“An artist’s style is not something that is instantly achieved, it’s something that takes years upon years of practice and experimentation to settle into….Hijacking someones personal motifs far exceeds that of simple idea theft, because you’re not just taking a design – you’re taking years of hard work away from someone for your own personal short-term gains.” (Source)

I believe we’ve reached a similar (though entirely different…arghh!) impasse in presentation design.  What makes appropriation more problematic in this field is the fact that as presentation designers, we are supposed to iterate from what we observe others doing. There’s only so many ways to convey a concept using Keynote or PowerPoint right? It is as important in presentation design to clearly define the line and also respect the creative efforts of others, especially in a medium that we’ve been conditioned to use in a peculiar way–choose your pre-made template and fill it in with your information. The problem with doing this with a set of slides is that mimicking type, color, and layout choices coupled with mimicking organization, tone, approach, and content (in the case I am featuring below, the only real change was to phrasing/wording) can cross the appropriation line and move straight into plagiarism.

Recently, on Slideshare, this debate has come to the surface due to some perceived similarities between the work of one designer, SlideComet and another Illiya, aka The Presentation Designer. Both Alex Rister  and slide superstar Eugene discussed the similarities between the decks, and I do believe in this case, that Illiya’s concerns were warranted and his response legitimate. He also provides a useful solution. As he put it:

“[W]hat I will continue to do is work on improving my own unique style, take inspiration certainly but I will always strive to keep things fresh and original. This is what I would urge others to do. There will always be the similar fonts, and colour schemes but what you can’t follow is personality and style.” (Source)

However, reader, I do want to point out that there are more problematic examples of appropriation found on Slideshare and that it’s high time that presentation designers have a dialogue about this subject. When a work copies the essence of a designer’s original, we’ve moved beyond using similar tools in different ways. Check out the following example I found while perusing Slideshare. You can see the original first and then the derivative. The derivative changes only a few of the words used and employs the same type, color choices, and layout decisions. To me, this definitely dilutes the message of the derivative. The fact that the derivative was featured as a top presentation of the day further complicates the situation. I actually would never have seen the deck or recognized it had Slideshare not featured it.

“10 Ways to Be a Marketing Genius Like Lady Gaga” vs. “10 Ways Librarians Can Be a Marketing Genius Like Lady Gaga”

This is the original deck by Jesse Dee.

This is the derivative by Gwyneth Jones.

What do you think? Does this cross the line between appropriation and plagiarism?

Slideshare of the Day: Storytelling

Yesterday, Alex Rister shared one of decks we now use in the online iteration of Professional Communication and Presentation, and today I’d like to pass that knowledge along. “Storytelling: Using the Most Powerful Information Delivery Tool” lays down a few basic principles and ideas about this very sticky method of communication. Storytelling is a cornerstone of the human experience. What a statistic cannot communicate alone, a story can bring to life. The deck begins by explaining the difference between report, whose purpose is to inform, and story, whose purpose is to entertain. A presentation happily lives in the middle of these two and can really help bridge the divide between informing and entertaining. But, it’s the use of story IN the presentation (and not just the slapping of a story in at the beginning or end of a speech) that really makes it so powerful.

As Nancy Duarte discusses below and Alex reiterates in the deck, we should work to layer story into an informative or persuasive speech as one layers a cake (a little info, a little story, repeat).

The deck goes on to explain what makes an effective story (conflict, characters, details, clear theme) as well as comparing story structure to presentation structure. In terms of design, Alex follows the SIMPLE method by keeping her theme unified (one typeface, Ostrich Sans, used in two weights; two contrasting colors used for emphasis, a repeated use of shape), focusing on one idea per slide, and applying the picture superiority effect consistently.

 

 

Do you incorporate story into your presentations? What types of stories do you find resonate with your audiences? Do personal stories work best?

Slideshare of the Day: Start-up of You

This week in Professional Communication and Presentation, we’ve been discussing the visual resume project. A visual resume can be a great addition to your online portfolio. As wel learned during yesterday’s mini-discussion, it can also be an amazing way to blend the print resume with the digital form, as Victor Petit does in his QR code visual resume:

QR CODE – Content-rich Resume from Victor petit on Vimeo.

But, before one can develop an amazing and unique approach to the visual resume (one benefit to the rise in this approach is the plethora of good examples out there, but a detriment is that it’s now a bit more difficult to set oneself apart), one must know what one wants to convey to the target audience of the visual resume, whether it is a client, company, or collaborator. Students often struggle the most with this aspect of resume building due to anxiety over perceived or actual inexperience. However, young people are not alone in this–all of us must deal with the anxiety of knowing just who and what we are as professionals. I am lucky enough to have a career that is also my bliss, but that doesn’t mean that just like my students, I don’t struggle with finding my place as a professional.

This is where Top Presentation of the Day, Start-up of You by Co-founder and Chairman of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman comes in. Having just uploaded a successful 110-slide presentation, I had to check out this mega deck–I am happy I did. I haven’t made enough use of LinkedIn, and after perusing this immersive deck, I don’t know why. This summary of the book Start-up of You poses a very simple idea–that all of us need to think like entrepreneurs–not just those who function in that same role. Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha firmly believe that our success as professionals depends on recapturing and maximizing entrepreneurship–of our own careers. I have added the book to my Nook list of reads, and you should too. But in the meantime, if you haven’t already, check out the excellent deck below:

Debuting on Tweak Your Slides: Real Delivery

Today, I am proud to share with you the first in a monthly series of Slideshare.net deck debuts. The first (as I’ve noticed quite a few slide design decks but not too many presentation delivery decks) is Real Delivery. I’ll be breaking down the pieces to this acronym (Readiness, Engagement, Authenticity, Lasting Impression), but for now, check out the deck below. Happy Friday!

Tweaks of the week: pushing design beyond images and embracing the acronym

Last week was incredibly productive although exhausting. Some of this exhaustion is self-induced: I’ve hit an incredible creative streak and I want to let this tweak take me to places previously unexplored. I finally feel like I am designing, as opposed to just scratching the surface of presentation design. I happy to report that I’ve made significant strides with several major projects:

1. Revamped part one of the Storytelling as a Presentation Tool deck (still working on a new title)

One way I’ve begun pushing my design is to rely less on images and text as the primary means of conveying ideas.

• Added a diagram of Freytag’s pyramid and Syd Field’s paradigm.
• A diagram of the hero’s cycle is next

2. Completely overhauled the delivery lesson. It’s new title (an agonizing process, choosing this name) is REAL Delivery. Many of my mentors and sources of inspiration use the acronym as a way to help audiences remember key ideas. So, after some painstaking work with Alex Rister, I landed on REAL delivery in a flash of tweak inspiration. REAL delivery is:

Readiness

Engagement

Authenticity

Lasting Impression

Real Delivery is the deck that will likely take the longest as I look for ways to combine Garr Reynolds’ Naked Presenter with Nancy Duarte, Malcolm Gladwell, and Nick Morgan

3. Finally, and most exhaustively, I revised my entire visual design lesson and reduced the material from nine tips to 6 basic principles I coin SIMPLE Design:

Simplicity takes work

Ideally, one idea per slide

Make unity a priority

Pictures are superior

Lose the signal, lose the audience

Eliminate fluff

In Simple Design, I’ll cover the basics of presentation design as well as revealing some important lessons I’ve learned along the way.

Incidentally, this deck saw the death of the Venn diagram as a permitted diagram in my decks. I really need to find a new visualization….

These decks are still a few weeks away from show ready, and I’d like to spend a bit of time blogging about aspects of each that warrant further expansion beyond the visual medium. 2013 is the year of the tweak!