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Posts Tagged ‘Design’

Popular Vote winner for ZEQUENZ Design Contest “360 Creative Life” announced 10 Best Designs also concluded
Çѹ·Õè 22 µØÅÒ¤Á 2553 14:40 ¹. The winner in the Popular Vote prize category of ZEQUENZ Design Contest 360 Creative Life has been announced following one-month online voting through www.360creativelife.com, at which voters from more than 57 countries across Asia Pacific cast their vote in September.

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HGTV ‘Design Star’: Emily or Michael FTW? Vote!
Can Emily Henderson and Michael Moeller bring themselves to destroy each other?The former teammates go head-to-head on the Season 5 finale of HGTV’s “Design Star,” airing Sunday, Aug. 22 at 10 p.m. ET/PT.The fifth season was tougher than ever, thanks to a new format that challenged the contestants up for elimination to tape a presentation of their designs so they can be judged on their hosting …

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dctc.edu Contact: Admissions@dctc.edu or toll-free 1-877-YES-DCTC Marketing is a vast field with room for multitudes of professions. Experts estimate that more than one-third of all Americans have marketing activities in their positions. Dakota County Technical College (DCTC) has a variety of Marketing and Sales Programs to help launch your career or business: Business Marketing: This program provides skills delivered in the Marketing Communications Specialist certificate along with photography, management, budgeting and accounting, business communications, strategic planning and presentation skills. These degrees can be completed online or in the classroom. Marketing Communications Specialist: This program delivers knowledge of all general marketing concepts including publicity, marketing communications writing, promotional marketing, budgeting, scheduling, advertising, and e-marketing concepts along with business communications, strategic planning and presentation skills. This certificate can be completed online or in the classroom. Marketing Event Specialist: A marketing event specialist certificate uses knowledge in the areas of publicity, marketing communications writing, promotional marketing, budgeting, scheduling, advertising, and event planning to promote activities involving an event, such as a grand opening, open house, conference, trade show, and social event. These events are designed to bring a product, service, company, or concept to the attention of the …

F3 Technologies Updates Website With New Design and Information to Reflect Wider Sales Efforts
ALPHARETTA, GA–(Marketwire – 07/22/10) – F3 Technologies, Inc. (Pinksheets: FTCH – News ) has given its website its largest overhaul in three years, with updated colors, layouts and information reflecting continuing progress in developing the markets for its innovative online software services. The site, http://www.f3technologies.com , now provides continuous updates …

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PublicSpeakingSkills.com says tell your boss it takes more than issuing you a laptop and a copy of PowerPoint to help you create presentations that audiences will actually listen to!

School inherits CAVIT graphic design equipment from Florence HS
SAN TAN VALLEY — The Central Arizona Valley Institute of Technology Governing Board gave away its graphic design equipment April 7 during a meeting at new Poston Butte High School, part of the Florence Unified School District.

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element14 celebrates Earth Day by sponsoring The Power of One Solar Car as design engineers work to minimise climate …
22 April 2010, London element14, the new online technology resource and collaborative community for electronic design engineers, in recognition of Earth Day, announces its sponsorship of The Power of One Solar Car Project. element14 recognises that design engineers are the key in helping to create future technology that will prevent further damage to the Earths precious resources, and The Power…

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As part of the presentation skills training services our company provides, we ask participants to send copies of recent PowerPoint files they have created for our review and editing. Hence, we see literally thousands of slides each year. Very few do an acceptable job of aiding Knowledge Transfer.

In fact, in the 10 years we have been in business, we have seen a slow and steady degradation in the quality of on-screen visuals from all industries. No sector seems to be immune. As PowerPoint has grown to dominate the boardroom, ballroom, and even the classroom, its overall contribution to the persuasive arts has been continually diminished by its increasing misapplication.

Now before you start thinking that this is just one more rant against another evil product from Microsoft, hear this: Our firm not only believes that PowerPoint is a wonderful piece of software, we claim that, overall, it can serve the purposes of true knowledge transfer better than any other visual presentation tool available. And we don’t blame the poor souls who create most of the incomprehensi we see – most businesspeople are simply issued a laptop and a copy of PowerPoint and ordered to go forth and multiply the company’s revenues, with little or no thought to training them how best do so.

The real culprits here are found not in the field, but rather back in the main office, from whence, being at least once removed from the actually application of their misdeeds, THEY can comfortably issue edicts of what one shall and shall not do with the design and construction of presentation slides. If you’ve ever been subject to edicts handed down from the Department of Presentation Regulations, you know what we mean.

So when we see a slew of equally bad slides from different people in the same organization, we’re fairly certain that the company has a slew of workers in a Presentation Regulations Department working feverishly to hamstring any attempt by an employee to make their slides understandable, much less compelling.

Our first such encounter with THEM was while training a large consumer products company in Pittsburgh, where class participants presented us with slides that for the most part looked like full-page Excel spreadsheets copied and condensed to (barely) fit within the projectable borders. Can you imagine how much fun it is to try to read 8 pt. Arial font that’s been compressed lengthwise by, say, 20 percent?

Halfway into explaining why its best to not go much below 20 pt. type when projecting images at the current maximum resolution of 96 dpi, one student raised her hand to explain that they had to use very small type to get all the information they were expected to deliver in the maximum of 8 slides THEY allowed. In other words, Regulations had ordered a limit to the number of slides – not the number of minutes (a perfectly acceptable limit) one had to present.

When we redo a client’s presentation to conform to the rules of comprehension, we often take 10 slides and turn them into, say, 24 – all for the purpose of being able to deliver the presentation less ambiguously, in less time. With properly designed visuals, there is usually an inverse relationship between the number of slides and the time it takes to deliver. Know this: keeping your presentations short is almost always a good thing. Few people ever complain that the presenter simply didn’t drone on long enough.

After numerous inquires by both letter and phone, we discovered that the 8-slide maximum was part of a larger policy that, among other constraints, limited middle-managers to the number of slides they could present based on their company grade level. So managers in the 50-65 level could deliver 8 slides, 70-85’s were allowed 12, 90’s and above could have as many as 20. No mention of the harshness of the penalties for any transgression, but evidently nobody was willing to go head-to-head with the company’s Prohibitor General. Amazingly, a few letters later we learned that the source of most of these dictates had actually left the company four years prior, but her successor was unwilling to mess with corporate policy.

And that, it seems, is how many of these immensely damaging protocols come from – people long removed from accountability, who together form that great entity THEY, by whom all things are denied.

Only after we were given the opportunity to present one of the redone presentations to an open-minded senior VP was the policy changed – but not without his using up some of his political capital to make it happen. (He has since left the company, too.)

Although we also believe that for purposes of branding, or, say, when an executive needs to get similar information on different topics from different direct reports, having consistency in presentation design throughout the company can be a good thing. Our argument is with those who command consistency over quality – and quality in presentation design is all about one thing: do the slides add to the process of knowledge transfer? For the most part we see slides that work diligently against knowledge transfer because they must first conform to protocols that only THEY can dream up. And to change policy, you first need to achieve the impossible: finding THEM.

As consultants we often work as agents of change within organizations, and sometimes that means stirring things up here and there. We believe that in large organizations its often more productive to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, so we urge participants in our classes to stand up to THEM, and create slides that persuade rather than simply conform. As often as not, THEY never discover the difference until its too late and the culture’s already changed!

In order to get your audience to buy in to your message, you must prepare and deliver it in a way consistent with adult learning theory. That means you must understand the limits to how much information an audience member can absorb at one time, and what form that information must take in order to first attract, and then keep, their attention.

Of the literally thousands of slides our firm receives for review and revision each year, almost all share the same basic problem: Too Much Information! TMI leads directly to too little retention. And to make matters worse, when your presentation kicks off with a bunch of TMI slides, you gear them up to retain even less.

Too much, too soon, keys the audience’s brains to brace for overload. That jumps starts their natural defense mechanisms into action. Rather than allow you to control their information uptake, overloaded audiences begin to pick and choose what information they will absorb, based on the parts of your message they view as meaningful to them. You, of course, never know what they have rejected or ignored.

The rules of proper presentation design that we preach all exist to ensure that neither you nor your audience suffers from the effects of trying to deal with too much information at any one time. Because when both the presenter and the listeners are overwhelmed, information transfer stutters and stops, and nobody has any fun.

Fred Pryor, often billed as ‘the father of the one-day seminar’, and a considered expert on adult learning, was fond of saying, “Training is selling, and selling is training”. That is, if you’re doing it right, you never lose sight of the fact that while training adults, you must be constantly checking your audience for buy-in. In the same way, to sell effectively, you want others to reach conclusions ‘on their own’; the best way to do this is to lead them to the conclusion you want by ‘educating’ them as to what course provides their best solution.

PowerPoint is a really marvelous tool for creating this training/selling environment, because when used properly, the presenter can lead the audience down the desired path one step at a time. Just as a good trial attorney “builds” his case by laying out the facts one on top of the other, a good presenter can use the tools of proper presentation design to win the case every time.

But like many customers who become overwhelmed when presented with too many choices, audience members can reach overloaded when presented with too much information to decipher, and end up choosing not to “buy” any of it. Most presenters assume that the audience willingly awaits their escort through the intricacies of a complicated slide, when in fact, that’s the last thing they do!

As computer-based presentations have become the norm, audiences are being overwhelmed with productions that seem to use every feature and font that the presenter can find. You may think your presentation skills are great and the audience is with you as they politely nod their heads and smile, but beware: the emperor believed that only a “fool” couldn’t see his beautiful new clothes!

Few corporate audience members are willing to stand up and declare that they really can’t see anything they understand in your presentation. In fact, those polite smiles are often masking the fact that most people would rather avoid the controversy of taking you to task. Sadly, some even smile to hide the fact that they don’t have a clue what you’re trying to say, but believe it their fault – obviously all those smiling, nodding heads must understand you, and they’re the only dumb ones in the group!

If you couldn’t follow the last slide show you sat through, much less stay awake, it might just be that you were an audience to a typical TMI presentation. But you might want to ask yourself if your own presentation designs might use a little help, too

The following comprise the rules of presentation visual design that, if heeded, will almost always assure that your audiences will be able to follow your ideas every step of the way. Of course, you must keep in mind that visual design is only one-third of the package required for a successful presentation, the other two being content and delivery.

Like a fine dining experience that requires equal parts food, service and atmosphere to really work, the visual design part of the presentation process is every bit as necessary as the others to achieve the desired result – in this case, true knowledge transfer.

So without further ado:

7. Maintain paragraph integrity.

First, all 1st Level Paragraph text must be the same size in every slide. Likewise, all 2nd Level Paragraph text must be smaller and of a different color. Lastly, don’t go beyond the 3rd Level, and this text should not be smaller than 20 points.

If all information of the same importance is of the same size throughout your presentation, your audience won’t be raising question marks as to just how important this information is with each click of the slide. Take this concept one step further by ensuring that all material of the same nature is the same color. If, for instance, you use a lot of numbers in your bullet points, make them all one color, different from the text. Once your audience recognizes this pattern, they’ll spend less time digging through the text to find their figures.

6. No boring fonts.

Rarely is there a need to use more than two different fonts in any presentation. However, there is a HUGE need to use any two fonts other than the PowerPoint defaults Times New Roman and Arial!

The problem is that because everybody else uses these two fonts 99% of the time, if yours is the fifth presentation your audience is seeing that day, pretty soon all the text starts to look the same, and you lose much of your meaning and impact. We often hear from clients who have to sit through presentations themselves that after a while, they can’t remember which vendor said what – it all becomes a big blur. Make sure you’re not part of the blur.

5. Use proper builds.

Without a sense of good design, which in most cases means simply showing restraint, animations can quickly overwhelm an otherwise well laid-out presentation. The trick then is to introduce concepts one at a time in a way that doesn’t draw more attention than the concepts themselves.

Builds are essential elements in turning slides that would otherwise have TMI into ones that audiences can follow; but like other elements of good design, a proper build should never announce itself. Rather, a well animated presentation should simply appear to “happen”, without a clue as to why it seems so easy to follow.

4. Be colorful – Light on dark.

Watch much black-and-white television these days? Although black-and-white works as an art form in many ways, humans tend to like color. Even old-guard newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal finally concluded that to avoid losing readers to more modern media, they had to go to color.

While humans can discern a dozen or so shades of gray, they can see millions of different colors. We’ve evolved to use our sense of color to survive – help your audiences survive your presentation by not blinding them with black on white.

3. Less is More.

This rule is central to good presentation design, but absolutely essential for graphs or charts. We often see pie charts come across our review desk with over a dozen slices, many so small they need to be annotated with lines and arrows far from the graph itself.

Do you really think anyone will remember all 25 competing products in your market and their percentage share? Might be good information for a handout, but in a presentation few people can absorb more than six elements in any graph. You make your point much more effectively when you limit your displayed data to the stuff the audience is likely to remember. Less information becomes more retention of the stuff you really want them to go home with.

2. One concept per visual.

Here’s another really common problem we see in the majority of business presentations, and the solution flows from rule number 3.

When more than one concept appear at the same time, your audience not only tries to figure out the concepts, they also try to determine which one deserves most of their attention, how the two or more are related, whether one is the “right” one or the “good” one, and so on and so forth – all having nothing to do with your actual message itself. This extra time and effort acts as a drag on presentation flow, and explains why a 45-slide presentation, properly broken down into one concept per, takes less time to present than the same information packed into 15.

1. Favor Right-Brain information.

We humans have evolved with two different ways to deal with stimuli from the outside world so that we can react to it in the way most likely to keep us alive.

Our right brain reacts to input such as colors, graphics, shapes and patterns instantly, without stopping to process the information first. Our left brain kicks in when presented with speech, text or numbers; however with this kind of information we first pause to analyze it before storing or reacting to it. We have filters on the left side on the brain, and not everything gets through.

If you want your ideas to strike fast and be readily absorbed, then every time you can, figure out how to turn your left-brain type data into shapely and colorful right-brain images.