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.

Tweak Your Slides: the Workshop

I am off to conduct my favorite workshop, Tweak Your Slides for Educators. In an effort to continuously improve my own design, I’ve updated the presentation, added a few more examples, and revised my ten principles a bit.

I noticed today that this presentation has been viewed over 900 times. Neato! I am super glad the ideas that sparked my design obsession are helping others.

Gladwell on Jobs: An inventor? Maybe. A tweaker? Definitely.

What was Jobs' real genius? Invention or Tweaking?

I ran across this article by Malcolm Gladwell on Steve Jobs by way of following Nancy Duarte’s tweets. As should be evident by now, I take the concept of tweaking very seriously, despite it’s generational colloquial use, which references users of the drug crystal meth. I began Tweak Your Slides by providing a definition of my use of the term, which applied first to slides and learning materials, but which has expanded to every aspect of my life. I look for opportunities to tweak, to take what is and make it better, to adjust it methodically to perfection, or as near as I’ll ever get to that.

This month's fine adjustments: The six-day workout week and a 1200 calorie diet.

I will admit, that while I admired Steve Jobs as a presenter, important figure of the computer age, and complex man, I did not feel the same level of adoration that reduced many to tears upon learning of his death. I believe I’d resisted the cult of Steve primarily because of my contentious nature–I can’t stand what’s expected or predictable. However, Gladwell’s impeccable storytelling (check out his talks on TED), has caused me to reexamine what I can learn from this tweaker, this editor not inventor, a man whose real genius may have stemmed from his dissatisfaction with mediocrity and half-assed attempts at greatness. Gladwell  provides readers with more insight into how the term applies to Jobs by including the work of economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr, who examine the reasons why the industrial revolution began in England:

One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. Why not France, or Germany? Many reasons have been offered. Britain had plentiful supplies of coal, for instance. It had a good patent system in place. It had relatively high labor costs, which encouraged the search for labor-saving innovations. In an article published earlier this year, however, the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr focus on a different explanation: the role of Britain’s human-capital advantage—in particular, on a group they call “tweakers.” They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work.

…

Such men, the economists argue, provided the “micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.”

So, it was the tweakers that might have made the difference and given England the competitive advantage. It was human-capital, not environment or wealth that spurred humanity’s move into the modern age. The kind of ingenuity that saw potential in the already existing genius of man and tweaked it, distilled, tinkered with, adjusted, and manipulated to perfection.  Gladwell asserts that this ability to make micro-revisions to macro-ideas is what sets Jobs apart from his contemporaries. It also seems this tweak-centered thinking was peppered with Jobs’ impatience and and abrasive, no nonsense approach. Jobs demanded perfection, but often did so in caustic ways. His genius was such though, that others were willing to navigate the turbulent sea of Jobs’ moods, knowing he would only steer them to apotheosis. Check the article out on The New Yorker. My favorite anecdote? Jobs refusing his oxygen mask on the grounds that he “hated the design” and making the pulmonologist present him with five different masks to choose from. Even at the end of his life, Jobs remained deeply principled and passionate. I can only hope to do the same at the end of my life.