I am loving how clear, simple, and expressive these visuals are. You can check out more from artist Ji Lee in his recently released book Word as Image.
Source: My Modern Met
Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
Word as Image
February 21st, 2012 | Jeff BrenmanDesign lesson from Fox News: Accurate charts matter
December 12th, 2011 | Jeff Brenman
This recent chart from Fox News is an example of how an inaccurately designed chart can be horribly misleading. Take a look at the relative position of the 8.6% for the month of November on the far right.
Charts should make trends in large sets of data more clear. Using them to mislead is wrong.
Source: FlowingData: Fox News still makes awesome charts
And also check out: FlowingData: Best pie chart ever
Slide design narcissism: Logo on every slide.
October 11th, 2011 | Jeff BrenmanStop putting your logo on every slide. Many companies think it’s necessary to stamp a logo on every slide because it builds “brand image” and looks more professional.
It doesn’t. In fact, a logo on every slide hurts the effectiveness of your presentation. Here’s why.
1. It’s distracting. – Great slides support your message, they don’t distract from it. Putting a big logo in the corner of every slide is wasting screen real estate with visual noise that doesn’t enhance your message.
2. Your audience knows who you are. – I’ve had clients tell me they “need” to include their logo on every slide so the audience doesn’t forget who they are. If you’re speaking to a room full of people and they suddenly don’t know who you are, you have a bigger problem on your hands…
3. It hurts your brand. – An ineffective, boring presentation that’s elaborately branded is worse for your brand than an engaging, memorable presentation with no branding at all. People remember presenters who can move them with a great story. Don’t let bad slides get in the way of that.
If you really want your logo in your presentation, keep it limited to the first and last slides. That way your audience can see what company you’re from at the start and then are reminded of it again at the very end after you’ve wowed them with a memorable presentation.
I love data visualization.
September 1st, 2010 | Jeff BrenmanMy friend and fellow blogger Harrison Brookie recently sent me this great TED talk by David McCandless. For those of us who love data visualization, it’s a real treat.
My favorite line in the talk is:
“There’s something almost magical about visual information. It’s effortless. It literally pours in. If you’re navigating a dense information jungle, coming across a beautiful visualization is a relief. It’s like coming across a clearing in the jungle.”
Source: TED Blog
Thoughts on iPad presentations
August 5th, 2010 | Jeff Brenman
iPad is a presentation game changer. Since its launch four months ago, Apple has sold roughly four million units and they’re only just now rolling out to international markets. iPad is a solid success and the harbinger of a major computing paradigm shift. It inspires us to imagine new ways to approach presentation design and rethink the role a presentation can play in business communications.
It’s all about interaction.
iPad is the killer tool for the one-to-one presentation. It can connect to a projector like a laptop, but it really excels as an interactive device. iPad transforms a normally passive activity into an engaging experience. The multitouch screen means your audience can hold your slides in their hands. They can flick and tap their way through your content. They can interact directly with your ideas.
In this new paradigm, a presentation can be approached as an interface rather than a slideshow. Buttons can replace bullet points. The slide order can change for each audience member like a “choose your own adventure” story.
There’s no “best way” to create an iPad presentation, but there are several new ideas forming as the technology is explored. Here are a few types of presentations iPad can make better.
• Improved sales meetings – Instead of sitting across a table with your laptop, let your client hold your slides as you deliver your pitch.
• Dynamic product catalogs – Instead of bland spreadsheets listing products, offer your client an interactive digital catalog. Clients can touch their way into each product category and interact with each product through rich media and vivid descriptions.
• Seamless kiosk presentations – Instead of a computer with a keyboard and mouse, let your guests touch their way through an interactive presentation. Think about how slick a row of mounted iPads would look in your trade show booth.
• Gorgeous design portfolios – Instead of flipping through cumbersome Photoshop and InDesign files on a laptop, let your client flick through a dynamic, interactive portfolio. They can even see live mockups of your site.
• Quick app prototypes – Instead of static wireframes, create an functional prototype of your app, all in only a few minutes. There’s a great video tutorial for this here.
What other ideas for iPad presentations are out there? Please share some of your ideas in the comments.
Other iPad presentation resources & tips
“If you want to understand what makes the iPad special, you cannot look at what it has, but what it doesn’t have. The iPad is so thin and light, it becomes the display, and the display becomes the application. No input devices. The device vanishes and turns into the application you are using. The technology is transparent.” – CC
An Empty Canvas – A beautifully written article from the folks at Cultured Code. The source of the quote above.
Web design for the ipad – Tips for designing websites optimized for iPad. Good ideas for presentation design too.
Tips for an iPad compatible Keynote – Tips for using Keynote on iPad
iPad App Prototyping – How to make an app prototype using Keynote on iPad.
Keynote for iPad – The Keynote app for iPad
Ice Breakers: A better way to Q&A
March 23rd, 2010 | Jeff Brenman
When I was a kid there were a lot of commercials for a board game called “Thin Ice”. The game was simple — one by one you piled marbles (penguins) onto a wet piece of stretched tissue paper (iceberg) until eventually the paper ripped and all the marbles fell through.
This game is exactly like the question and answer period after your presentations. When you ask for questions, nine times out of ten most people in your audience will just sit there, not saying anything, waiting for someone else to break the ice and ask the first question.
It’s a fact of audience psychology. People are shy.
So why not break the ice yourself? Instead of ending your presentation with the usual “Q&A” slide, end with a slide that lists three to five example questions people might want to ask.
Example questions make your audience feel more comfortable. You’re breaking the ice for them, so nobody has to worry about going first. And if you make the example questions simple, you eliminate the common audience fear of asking a “dumb question”.
Pre-prepared questions also enable you to have pre-prepared answers ready, making your Q&A look more like a continuation of your main presentation, and making you look more like a rockstar.
Memory ships.
July 8th, 2009 | Jeff Brenman
Pictures make presentations better. Here’s why.
A nautical metaphor.
Imagine a big wooden ship sailing into a stormy harbor. The waves crash as the sailors work to secure the ship against the dock. The more ropes the sailors can cast, the more securely the ship will weather the storm.
Think of the ideas in your presentation as ships docking in the stormy harbors of your audience’s minds. The more associations you can make with your ideas — the more ropes you can cast — the better they will be remembered.
The metaphor isn’t too far off from the actual biology of memory making. The more relationships you can associate with an idea, the more neural connections are formed and the more rooted it becomes in your memory. Most mnemonic devices play on this, getting you to associate additional objects or sounds with the thing you’re trying to remember.
Slides give you the opportunity to tap into parts of the brain words alone can’t reach — the picture parts.
Think of the visuals in your presentation as additional ropes to cast. It’s one thing to talk about your idea, it’s a better thing to show it.
Make a memory.
You can see this idea in action in the example slides below.
The slide on the left is a typical text-heavy presentation slide. It’s the speaker’s talking points in bulleted form. It contains everything the speaker is going to say, but doesn’t do much to make it more memorable. You could easily take this slide out and the presentation would be no worse without it — in fact, it may even be marginally better.
The slide on the right is the exact same content, but it uses a picture instead of words to relate the message. The speakers talking points have not changed, they’re just now being spoken instead of read. The audience has an extra trigger at their disposal, a visual cue, to make the content easier to remember.
Which slide resonates more with you?
It can feel risky to not include all of your content on a slide, to go with a visual instead, but your presentation is made stronger because of it. At the end of the day isn’t that the point?
