Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn has written one of my new favorite books and produced two decks that have absolutely inspired me as we move into the second half of the new year. The Start Up of You explains how an entrepreneurial spirit and approach can help all professionals (even us teachers) grow and develop.

His second deck, “The Three Secrets of Highly Successful Graduates”, is a must share (and view) from teachers to students. It’s also inspired me to add a few bits of Hoffman insight to my latest deck, “Tweak Your Resume”. Check out the deck below:

Tweak Your Resume Preview

I felt Hoffman’s discussion of what competitive advantage means fit right in with why a visual resume is so useful.

What are your assets, aspirations, and how do those fit in with what your industry wants and needs?

Finally, here is draft two of my unemployment slide. What do you think, Margaret?

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?

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? 

The process of proposing, organizing, and launching the Liberal Studies round table initiative has been a learning experience and a real privilege. In the past few weeks, I’ve been able to collaborate with amazing English department folks, including the very talented “Team Unicorn”, a group of composition teachers who’ve embraced the cinematic approach to creating slides. Check out one example of a deck used in this group’s English composition online course:

I am pleased to say that the English department worked for the past month to plan and organize our session, and we were ready for our debut today. The presentations went smoothly and we had an awesome turn out. The first hour was devoted to a series of presentations on the topic of teaching personas (defining persona, applying persona to a collaborative online team of teachers, and using the student’s experience to mold the teacher’s persona). The rest of the workshop was devoted to discussion. I’d like to see stronger discussion in the future, and this I think is where my presence would have been best used.

I chose not to present in this workshop (except for providing our attendees with an agenda of the session). I think at this point, people expect me to present, but I wanted to give the floor to some of the English folks who don’t often get heard but have incredible ideas. Instead, I functioned as facilitator. One of my tasks was to create a basic set of slides to serve as welcome, transition, and closing visuals. As you can see, my obsession with The Noun Project continues:

Our welcome slide sets the tone for the session–connect, discover, collaborate.

Our agenda moved from a presentation on the concept of personas to specific examples/applications.

Overall, I found the discussion of personas to be interesting and I know Alex and I gleaned some insights about how we can further work to create a positive relationship with our students. What’s your opinion on teacher personas online? Is it something you think about as an educator? What is your teaching persona?

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.

In his presentation, Jesse lays down the five biggest mistakes PowerPoint users make and provides some fixes for these problems. Jesse Dee’s 5 mistakes are:

1. Too much information, or what Garr Reynolds refers to as a slideument.
2. Not enough visuals, or text-driven visuals decrease retention, not increase it.
3. Horrible quality, or in a age of abundance and design, audiences no longer respond to clip art and comic sans.
4. Visual vomit, or once you have visuals, you must design them for maximum effectiveness.
5. Lack of prep, or the number one reason why users rely on bullets and templates is because of a lack of content development and rehearsal time.

Because of its popularity and in your face honesty about the misuse of PowerPoint by individuals and corporations alike, the presentation often faces a bit of resistance and backlash. Today, a response to Jesse Dee’s presentation was posted on Slideshare:

The presentation, by design firm Stinson Design, calls attention to several of Dee’s suggestions that Stinson Design believes just won’t work for corporate presenters. The deck makes a distinction between corporate and conference presenters based on the level of control one type of presenter has than another does not. Conference presenters, according to the deck ”have control on their content and can decide to present minimal amounts of data” (Source). In contrast, corporate presenters are limited because they must present dense amounts of information and data. The distinction is unclear to me because as a conference attendee, I’ve seen conference presenters display dense amounts of information and data (unfortunately, mostly using bullet points and poorly designed data display), and as a presenter, I was restricted by time, audience type, and subject matter. As someone who has watched four years of “corporate” business pitches, I’ve also seen dense data and complex financial information be presented in a cinematic way that still shows the investor that the presenter is knowledgeable and able to communicate the complex using simplicity.

In the deck, several challenges corporate presenters face in using the cinematic method of presentation design are brought to light. However, instead of looking at these challenges as reasons to abandon the universal principles of design used by 21st century presenters, let’s look at some of these challenges as opportunities. In every instance, presenting well is a challenge; it’s all about being up to the challenge!

Challenge #1: Cutting content is not always possible because corporate presenters have A LOT  of information to communicate

Jesse Dee provides a reasonable solution for this. Use one slide for each piece of content, data, and information. Stinson believes that the amount of information that needs to be presented makes this solution impossible. However, as instructional designers and teachers have learned, the working memory is a finite container (Source). It’s working memory that we are addressing when presenting information to others, and that part of our minds can only retain so much information before information begins to flow over the top of that container and out of our minds. As Julie Dirksen points out, “You can keep handing material to your learners, but you can’t make them carry it around” (Source). So, we must focus as presenters on what’s really necessary; we must be ruthless editors and only include what’s necessary on a set of slides. Similarly, we must understand that slides are not always necessary. A few days ago, I shared this tongue in cheek example of a PowerPoint version of The Gettysburg Address. The idea Lincoln was communicating was complex, controversial, and challenging. He uses ingenuity, the brevity of words, and pathos to communicate this complex idea to his audience in a way that has resonated for hundreds of years.

But, this doesn’t mean that we are sacrificing information for design, not at all. Your audiences can easily (actually much more easily than on a slide) read through dense amounts of information on a document (and that document can be designed for maximum readability, flow, and retention) that you hand out as an accompaniment to your slides, which are not meant to be containers of your information, but an enhancement of your content. This is not a “luxury” as the deck claims. It is simply good old-fashioned troubleshooting. It also helps keep the presentation of content relevant to the audience. Despite what we tell ourselves, our audiences don’t want all of the information on a slide (even if they are conditioned to this). Subconsciously, the mind wants to be able to easily and clearly make sense of information. This is best accomplished by breaking up dense information into smaller chunks.

Challenge #2: It’s easier for a conference presenter to find imagery than a corporate presenter because corporate presenters need niche-specific images

I want to address this challenge very simply. It is not easy to find strong imagery–for anyone. The process of finding and choosing strong images requires time, ingenuity, and at times metaphorical thinking. I sometimes spend hours looking for one image, only to have to revise my approach because I am restricted to commercially-available images only (which is the same challenge corporate presenters face). On this blog, I’ve shared several ways to search through compfight.com, which is one of the best resources for free images available to corporate folks. Another option is the use of commercially-available iconography, such as those found on The Noun Project.

Challenge #3: Custom fonts are great but they are not so great for sharing a presentation with others. Similarly, standard fonts are not really that bad as long as the material is clear/readable

I have to agree with the creators of the deck that a standard font is not really THAT bad when it comes to design, and if one has to use a font like Arial, that’s at least better than using comic sans or herculenum. However, what makes a standard font problematic is that just like standard stock imagery, your audience is desensitized to it. This is not to say that I believe one must use a custom font (many of which are free), but using a typeface that connects to your audience, message, and theme can help set your message apart from others in your audience’s mind. Presentation designer Christin Upshaw puts the choice of font quite well:

“[U]sing just a basic font that EVERYONE has (Arial, Tahoma, etc.) is absolutely the right course of action. That doesn’t mean your presentation has to have bad design, it just means the font can’t be something you purchased. You can still make it look great.”

So, what do you do if your client does not have a font installed on his or her computer? If the license allows distribution, give them the font. Even better, export your work as a pdf (which is how many Slideshare users, including Stinson Design, upload their work) and distribute a static, unchanging, and well-designed file to your attendees.

Challenge #4: PowerPoint is still most often used, so it’s the best way to create your work and distribute it to others

Yes, PowerPoint is still the standard, but what’s awesome about tools like Slide Rocket, Google Docs, and Keynote is that files can be converted to PowerPoint (Keynote actually opens PowerPoint files..something I doubt Microsoft will ever add to PowerPoint) and shared with your audience. Neat, right?

So, what’s your take on the corporate vs. conference style of presenting? Are these really unsurmountable challenges?

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.

Today in Professional Communication and Presentation, Alex led her students and me through an awesome exercise (and not just for the first day of class). Alex asked us to come up with three presentation/communication goals for this month’s class. She shared her goals with the class and also with her readers on Creating Communication. The students’ goals inspired me to choose three goals for the month of April. Here goes!

Goal #1: Launch an educator round table

Two months ago, our Director of Liberal Studies and superwoman, Dr. Kim Murray, sent around a newsletter featuring some of our faculty’s current projects and work. Liberal Studies is a large school that houses six different departments, including mine, the English department. Our faculty don’t get much of a chance to collaborate with those outside of our immediate departments, though, unless we take the initiative to reach across departments. In the brief newsletter, I learned that our faculty were doing amazing things both in and out of the classroom. This inspired me to bring the idea of collaboration between the departments to  faculty and management. After a bit of planning and meeting, the first round table discussion is set to take place this month, with the English department being the first to take the reins in terms of choosing, presenting, and discussing our first topic, creating a teaching persona. I am taking a supporting and facilitating role in this initiative and I’m really enjoying the hustle of marketing, scheduling, and organizing this project.

Goal #2: Don’t let the lizard brain sabotage me

While I’ve conquered and defeated the public-speaking/presenting lizard brain, I definitely feel much anxiety in other situations in which I feel either out of control or as if there’s a more perceived sense of judgment involved. The biggest one for me has to be the job interview. I believe that twice in the past, my nervousness, insecurity, and lack of polish during interviews have sabotaged my chances. I’ll be interviewing this Wednesday and am using a combination of Amy Cuddy’s power pose and in-depth audience analysis/prep to help me quiet the lizard within.

Goal #3: Post the simple design series on Tweak Your Slides

Blogging is my bane but also my love. I am great at keeping up a schedule with teaching, gyming, and socializing, but I cannot seem to get the rhythm of the blog down. So, my challenge for this month is to post a six-part article series on design. I won’t put a specific date on this, but I will say, look for a brief introduction to the acronym SIMPLE in the next few days.

Do you set goals each day, week, or month? What are your goals for April?

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?

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?