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!

The Golden Circle: Simon Sinek’s Start with Why

Each first day of class, I share Simon Sinek’s TEDxPugetSound talk with students as a starting point for a discussion of what it actually takes to persuade, convince, or resonate with an audience.

In his talk and his book Start With Why, Sinek proposes that great leaders–Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, the Wright Brothers–all communicate with a purpose, they communicate (think and act) from the inside out. Most of us, Sinek believes, communicate from the outside in. It is a clear sense of why–a mission, a purpose, a calling, a big idea–that allows great leaders to gain followers, to inspire others to take on their ideas and act on them. In preparation for my first day of class in two weeks, I’ve prepared a brief introduction to Sinek’s The Golden Circle.

Do you Start with Why? What is the Why that drives your decisions?

First draft of Your Speech is Toxic is done!

Phew!  I’ve been working on this epic deck for months (probably 3 or so). I first had the idea to create a deck about this basic idea:

Everyone says, “I am a great communicator” or “I have great communication skills” but from my experience as a student, friend, teacher, mentor, and presenter, most of us are really not very good at communicating.

This belief was reinforced for me after a rather terrible interview I had for a faculty development position. I am convinced that it was this interview that cemented in the hiring manager’s mind that I was enthusiastic and clearly passionate about teaching, but I really had no clue how to manage or lead others. I tried to rectify this in my thank you letter and in the proposal for a new faculty orientation we were asked to submit, but my efforts at rectifying a failed communication situation were little compared to that impression I’d made.

I was involved with an epic Nancy Duarte experience this month and last. Alex Rister and I were privileged enough to speak to Nancy (who just turned 50–check out the amazing deals in the Duarte shop. If I could afford that workshop and a flight to California, I’d be there in a heartbeat) three times, the final time for an hour via Skype with some amazing superstudents. Instead of writing my experience (you can read Alex’s here, here, and here), I’ve decided to incorporate a few lessons I’ve learned from Nancy, my fairy godmother of presentations, in this latest deck, “Your Speech is Toxic”. I would go as far as saying this deck would not have been possible had I not run across Slide:ology while perusing the “PowerPoint” section of the now sadly late Borders Books. Here is a shot of a portion in the Light Table view of Keynote. I still have some tweaking to do, but I can’t wait to share this with others!