The making of a presentation (part 4)
Graphical refinements
As I had already went through several version of the presentation in my mind things were starting to click. A short doodling session gave birth to a whimsical looking character I decided to use instead of the generic 'loose appendixes' one.
Some of the different stages on the way to a finished slide
Quick drafts of the different slides came about within minutes and could begin to consider the finer points. One of these finer points was to refine the earlier idea of somehow separating the two main-segments. I decided to make the 'feed'-slides with a strong line and strong colours as they referred to the more active side of my inspiration-recipe. In contrast, the 'rest'-slides should have a calmer, softer more organic look. Water colours seemed to fit the bill and even the fonts were either painted or traced by hand to make them more humane in appearance.
Know
your audience is another mantra that it is wise
to adhere to. Unfortunately I had no way of
finding the key-demographics among
slideshare-users. I did however know a little
about the judges of the competition. I even
recalled reading Guy Kawasaki praising the 'art
of sucking up'. I decided to give it a shot. As
all the judges are also authors, I decided to
include imagery of these in the 'Read'-slide.
The judges should recognize their own work, but
it should not distract from the presentation as
a whole. Certainly too good an opportunity to be
missed. As I finished my illustrations I scanned
them into my Mac and combined them with the text
in Photoshop where I also performed some
additional touch-up. The hard (but fun) part was
over...
Stuff of interest
Quick links to interesting stuff found the last few days
Thought I’d just share a couple of finds from the web that some of you might find interesting. First out is Slideshare’s: World’s Best Presentation Contest. It should be interesting to anyone looking for inspiration on how to improve their presentation slides.
The other link I'd like to share is from Karen J. Lloyd's always interesting Storyboard Blog. Obviously geared towards making great storyboards her latest post deals with the fact that Animation Storyboards should «act out» any dialogue so that the animators have a picture of what the characters are saying even without the actual dialogue. If you’re not sure what I’m on about you only need to watch La Linea (again?).
The making of a presentation (part 1)
Finding creativity
For those of you who have yet to see the ‘Cultivating Creativity’ presentation, just scroll down to my last post. As a huge part of my blog-posts have been about Slideware Presentations I figured I had to participate. And if I was to participate, I wanted to do it right, meaning: adhering to my own ideas and philosophies about what makes a great presentation. As an oral presentation wouldn’t be possible I would have to use more text than I would normally do, but it had to be strong visually. First thing’s first though and the first challenge was to decide upon a topic for the presentation.
The very first physical piece of the presentation-puzzle
Some of the topics I considered were myself, Norway (my country), Visual Storytelling (surprise) and anything else that popped into my mind. In the end though I decided to go for a shallow but entertaining meta-presentation. (A presentation about itself.)
So
with this in mind I began doodling and
brainstorming on paper. While doing so however I
felt that the topic was perhaps too shallow.
While I felt fairly comfortable that I could
make a presentation interesting to watch, it
might be a hard sell to actually get anyone to
watch it in the first place. Yet, I didn’t have
any better idea, so I pushed on. When it
suddenly hit me: My search for creativity was
the answer. How often hadn’t I found myself in
search for the creative spark? How often hadn’t
I experienced the creative part of my brain
firing on all cylinders when laying in bed
waiting for Mr. Sandman to arrive? And even
better: I knew how to treat my brain to spark
the creative process in the first
place!
