Visual Storytelling - T. Benjamin Larsen's Blog

The making of a presentation (part 3)

This is part 3 of «the making of 'Cultivating Creativity'», a presentation I entered in SlideShare.com’s «World’s Best Presentation Contest».

Going graphic

While the text-problem needed fixing I was also working on the graphic elements. My initial idea was to use a character where the head and hands floated freely in the air.

Original doodles in the background, first serious draft in the front

The head would be as generic as possible to avoid provoking anyone. (Similar to what I used in my Electing #44 video). Unfortunately, just like with my initial text-experiments I found the design didn't work particularly well. It just seemed too bland and didn't deliver anything the viewer would be bothered to spend time on. Needless to say it wound up in the giant archive beneath my desk.

These early problems got me to rethink the whole presentation. While I was stilled convinced the basic idea was sound it clearly needed some fine-tuning to reach its full potential. My first step was to cut down on the number of slides, particularly for the "feed"-segment. I decided to use the five strongest words and leave it at that. I'm a huge follower of the short-is-sweet-school (although reading this blog you might find that hard to believe). Keeping it short would also increase my chances of getting people to read through the whole deck. To further streamline my presentation for the purpose of the competition, I decided to combine the large words and artwork in the same slide. (If this was to be a live presentation I probably wouldn't have done this). Next step: Designing the slides.