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?

Tweak Your Speech: Rhetoric and Star Trek

This week in Professional Communication and Presentation, we discussed the basics of rhetoric and persuasion. I don’t really fall too far from the rhetorical tree Aristotle and Cicero developed hundreds of years ago (with the exception of including Kenneth Burke’s concept of identification), partly because my class is only a month long and the three part structure of Aristotle’s appeals works well in this time frame, and partly because I want to impart on my students a very important truth: For the ancients, oration was a skill and art form that surpassed others–communication had immediate impact on the lives of Greek and Roman citizens, they tended to a presentation ecosystem before we’d heard of such a thing.

This cultivation of strong speech continued through much of human history–imagine Martin Luther King writing up his “I Have a Dream” speech and sending it by mail (much less impacting that way, no?). In recent times though, the study of oration has been diluted, to the point that we devote little time to considering how we structure our messages or how our audience will process and carry on our message. We devote even less time to studying the mechanism of persuasion and analysis of how others structure a successful message. However, in order to really practice and engage in persuasion, we must first understand how it works.

I will share with you a metaphor that helped me understand how rhetoric and the means of persuasion (ethos or credibility, pathos or emotion, and logos or logic) work. An argument is like the Starship Enterprise, flagship of the United Federation of Planets. The Enterprise is THE ship on which to serve. Its reputation is stellar, its technology state of the art, and its crew stalwart and brave.  Your persuasive message is the Enterprise–it is a well-oiled machine, ready to take on any adversary, set to explore the dimensions of the human universe.

But, the Enterprise would be nothing without three figures (the original series would not be what it is without the interplay between these three)– Leonard “Bones” McCoy, chief medical officer; Spock of Vulcan, first officer, and James T. Kirk, captain. It is the dynamic between these three individuals that drives the show, provides the excitement, drama, and relevance. Without Bones, Kirk, and Spock, the Enterprise would be a wasteland of red-shirted crewment, doomed to die during the next away mission. In the same way, your presentation cannot function without the seamless interplay between ethos, pathos, and logos.

Bones: Ethos or the credibility appeal

Bones is the moral and ethical compass of this trio. He often protests Spock’s logic-driven decisions and tempers Kirk’s instinct-driven responses. Like Bones, ethos is all about authority. It is how your audience judges you. An audience should be able to determine if a speaker is trustworthy and reputable, knowledgeable, authoritative, and empathetic. A strong presenter develops ethos both through internal sources and external sources. Your external credibility illustrates knowledge and trustworthiness; internal credibility helps illustrate authority, reputation, and common ground or empathy.

External sources of credibility include experts, case studies, information from media sources, and data.

 

Internal credibility includes personal experience (want to know about skydiving? ask a skydiver.), shared values with your audience, reputation, and demeanor or behavior during a presentation.

 

Spock: Logos or the logical appeal

Spock, half Vulcan, half human, made the decision as a child to embrace logic and repress emotion. His decisions are based on precise calculations, the data available, and analysis of a situation. Like Spock, logos is all about logic and evidence. It is your way of fulfilling your audience’s need for factual evidence that is presented in a way that makes sense. Logos is “the proof in the pudding”. It stimulates your audience’s need to see in order to believe. Logos is about a clear and understandable message, and a specific evidence that your audience can connect to and understand.

Kirk: Pathos or the emotional appeal

Captain James T. Kirk, the leader of the Enterprise is a cunning, assertive, and passionate man, who often throws caution to the wind and does what seems irrational and rash. In the end though, Kirk’s actions, which turn out to be a blend of instinct, experience, and duty save the Enterprise (whether it is from a fierce Romulan commander or a super-computer bent on world domination). Like Kirk, pathos or emotion must be balanced by ethics and logic. Pathos is potentially the most ethically dangerous of the three appeals–humans are emotional creatures whose emotions can be manipulated and toyed with. However, pathos is also necessary. Your audience may see the logic of your message and may also see you as an authority in your field, but without that emotional core, they’ll ignore your message like they ignore most messages telling them to do this or not do that.

So, tend to each one of these appeals, devote time to developing the logic of your message, use emotion to humanize your logic, and show your audience you are worth listening to. You will surely go where no one has gone before!

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:

Slideshare of the Year….I mean the Day

 

If you read this blog, you know of my undying admiration and affection for my superteacher best friend, the very talented Alex Rister. This month, Alex debuted her brand new visual design lesson for her class and also featured shots from this deck on her blog. Well, today, her latest Slideshare offering went live. Check out an “Introduction to Slide Design.” This deck has also become an integral part of our latest faculty development endeavor, The Presentation Revolution.

September’s 20-minute slide slam

Each month Alex teaches, she challenges students to take a bulleted slide and revise it to a set of bullet-free visual stories. I previously blogged about that here.

This month, I decided to try my hand at a few new images/strategies. In working with one student, who wanted to display the idea, “Cats are the most popular pet” by showing an image of the earth and a pie chart, I came up with the idea of making the earth itself the pie chart. Since Cody Higgins had already chosen to create this for his slide slam, I decided to go with a different option. However, just as an exercise, I chose to recreate Cody’s excellent slide using the percentage of households that own cats and households that own dogs.

The students also work on creating grids; the last slide, just for fun is a ninja grid.

 

Images: Anna Fischer, thedalogs, Angelo González, squacco

Try a 10 or 20 minute tweak challenge to brush up or practice those design skills. Design is a skill that must be cultivated daily. Grow your design!

 

Love the Visual Resume–Seriously!

Today’s deck comes from my favorite superteacher, Alex Rister. The visual resume began as a fun side project for me and then became a mission–help my students create a more dynamic picture of their qualities as professionals online. In teaching the visual resume, I draw inspiration from the success of others, namely David Crandall and Alex Rister. Both of these individuals have successful visual resumes.

1. She uses story to convey her unique perspective

Alex tells audiences the story of how she found her calling as communications guru and public speaking teacher. Instead of just starting with “I was born…” she begins with a bigger idea–innovation, and then illustrates how she is part of this new age of innovation.

2. She designs unified visuals

Alex uses color, type, shape, and alignment to create something that is uniquely hers. Alex’s use of pink against the vintage images is classy yet whimsical. Her choice of Komika Axis speaks to her personality–this is Alex’s signature typeface.

3. Her visual resume does more than what any traditional resume can do

Alex uses this medium to highlight not only her extensive leadership and teaching experience and professional work as an educator, but also as a means of sharing her ideas on communication, work, and the world at large.

Check out Alex Rister’s visual resume, as well as her other amazing deck (which is a required reading in our Professional Communication and Presentation course), Seven Deadly Sins of Visual Design.

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!

5 Simple Tweaks for PechaKucha Presenters

This Friday, I attended PechaKucha Night Orlando Volume 5. If you are not already aware (and you are if you’ve heard me speak for more than five minutes or taken my class), I love PechaKucha! I look forward to the PechaKucha day in my class each month. My students work diligently over two weeks to put together a presentation many run from. They work to find a topic outside of their standard realm of experience, let go of their dependency on bullet-riddled outlines disguised as slideshows, actually devote sufficient time to preparation and rehearsal, and then…most of the time…magic happens! So, I was stoked for PK Night. These presenters shared amazing ideas–from the hilarious Mark Baratelli of The Daily City and Patrick Greene of Urban ReThink to the inspirational and adorably geeky father and son team Ian and Adam Cole and superteacher Amy Selikoff, who uses energy, empowerment, and engagement to get 7th graders fired up about civics. I couldn’t help but be slightly disappointed though, not by a lack of interesting ideas, but by the appearance of a few old school presentation design practices. Presenters used pixelated images, pre-made templates, bullets, and a bit more noise than signal at times. I believe the habits stem from slide anxiety. A PK is a beast of a presentation, primarily because it is difficult for us to let go, to get over our lizard brains. Some of it is really just lack of experience with this medium, with its true possibilities.

The PK was the brainchild of two designers, Astrid Kline and Mark Dytham. The envisioned a presentation that featured 20 images–20 images that reinforce and enhance the presenter’s message, 20 images that cement the speaker’s message in the minds of the audience. Sometimes we see what others do and get what Duarte calls slide envy. But, in my experience, the best PKs are the ones that blend highly impacting images with a bit of relevant typography in the service of advancing the speaker’s main point and engaging the audience to understanding and internalization. Above all, the best PK slides are simple and call little attention to themselves.

Lessons to apply:

Use high quality images

So, what’s my beef with pixelated images? Well, they frankly suck. A pixelated image is a really great thumbnail, but it will make for an instant credibility killer when stretched to the size of a slide.

Not sure what size to look for? The size of a slide is 1024 x 768, so look for images that are this size.

Compfight.com, a great resource for Flickr lovers lets users know just how big an image is. We’ll cover what to do when you have several smaller pictures you’d like to display.

Don’t use a template

If you’ve used the same template before, chances are millions of other PowerPoint and Keynote users have chosen the same template.

Would you choose or purchase a prepackaged outfit you’d seen a thousand people were before simply because it was classified as “professional” or “trendy” or “whimsical” or “classic”? No, probably not. Then, why use a template? Get out of sheep street. Ditch the template.

Create one of your own by selecting core colors, layouts, image types, and or big ideas, as this excellent example by Empowered Presentation does.

Use grids to organize images

The collage look only looks good, well, in an actual collage. Designers know that people need grids and some sense of alignment to process information quickly and effortlessly. Think of your images as fitting into the jigsaw puzzle that is a rectangular 1024 x 768 slide. Fit them together by combining vertical and horizontal images, using cropping or masking tools, and aligning images along a clear grid. I am currently revising my visual resume, and this is a slide I am thinking of incorporating. It allows me to display many sides of my home island of Puerto Rico in a seamless and beautiful way.

Don’t use bullets

Seriously. Bullets kills. It has been proven that people remember information when it is presented in both textual and visual ways.

From my first deck on developing a persuasive speech.

Using bullets alone only hits one of these, which means your audience is likely to retain less information. Couple this with the fact that we have been killed for years by bullet-riddled slides; when we see them, we expect something boring, dry, forgettable, and frankly we assume the presenter is pretty much useless.

Much better!

Keep it simple

I advise my students to stay away from too much animation and completely forget about wacky animations like anvil, fire, sparkle, orbital, and typewriter and useless transitions like cube, page flip, doorway, blinds, and random. If you don’t need it to convey your message. Don’t use it. If transitions and animations aren’t absolutely necessary to your delivery, and if you can’t use them without wanting to constantly turn around and check on your slides, don’t use them. Keep your slides simple. No one will be as impressed by 72 frenetic and distracting animations as they will by a confident, carefully crafted, and polished message that is supported by impacting images.

This deck was created by superstudent, Ben Greger. Ben paired this masterful deck with a simple and moving story about how photography can change one's perspective.

Tweak of the Day: The SOTU Visualized

As I gear up for slide design day in class, I peruse slideshare.net for examples of the elements of design: contrast, hierarchy, proximity, unity, flow, and whitespace. Here is Obama’s recent SOTU address visualized. Give this rich deck a moment to load!

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.