26, 2008, where my friend and visual thinking expert Dave Gray of xPlane shows you the visual fundamentals you need to know to start illustrating your ideas. One of the fundamental communication skills everyone needs to have is the ability to turn thoughts into sketches. But where do you go to learn how to do that?

It's 2008! went back to the office for a rewrite and added more powerful visuals. Practice makes perfect, right? Not really. What about imperfect practice? If you practice badly, your performance will likely reflect your bad practices.

Vary the visuals If you've got several speakers in an 8-hour day of training, break up the visual monotony by interspersing video, image-based slides, props, flip charts and other visual interest. During a session with a client the other day, we talked about the delivery of his company's new employee orientation. He was looking for ways to make his message more clear and to keep his diverse audience's attention through a day-long training.

Easy access to fresh videos and pictures can make your presentation more visually unique and compelling than sticking to the over-used, cliched, packaged stock images and clip art built into standard software. Yes, you can design a PowerPoint presentation without using PowerPoint. And you don't need Keynote or OpenOffice, either.

Create Presentations for the Post-Template Visual Era . Author Ellen Finkelstein and I were collaborating on a PowerPoint presentation design and script the other day. Ellen was in Iowa. I was in Michigan.

Use visualization techniques. We delineate our thoughts visually and your audience needs to “see” what they “hear.” Here are some guidelines to follow: 1.Necessity - is this visual aid going to enhance the audience’s understanding 2.Clarity – to help people understand 3.Simplicity – PowerPoint with words – no more than five words per line and five lines per slide. This is what every great speaker wants! Did you know that great speakers are often nervous with butterflies in their stomach before giving a presentation? And there are many actors/actresses who can not speak

Find various ways (stories, demonstrations, quotes, analogies, visuals, jokes, examples) to illustrate your message. Remember Pareto’s Principle? Where 80% of the results comes from 20% of your effort. Or 80% of your revenue generated by 20% of your customers.

And yes, visuals -- with "big pictures and big type and few words and scary thoughts and startling insights" all throughout the workshop, not just for ten minutes. How much you use PowerPoint depends on what you're trying to achieve with your audience, and how you integrate visuals with the rest of your presentation. I would say that there's no such thing as what's right "most of the time" regarding how long the PowerPoint portion of your presentation should be. Seth Godin recently posted his Nine steps to Powerpoint magic . Some of his "steps, not rules" are cheeky, like

One of the types of visuals that I review in my workshops is the Venn diagram. The Venn diagram makes these distinctions visually clear for your audience. These diagrams were created in 1881 by John Venn as a way to represent relationships in the branch of mathematics known as set theory. The basic Venn diagram used in presentations shows two partially overlapping shapes, usually circles or ovals, and text to show what belongs to only one shape and what is common to both shapes.

design PowerPoint in such a way that if I experience a visual technical meltdown on stage, I can usually can continue talking somewhat coherently. Too many times, we over-focus on correcting the visual elements of a presentation -- PowerPoint, props, costumes, lighting, and other things-we-see. I recorded only the spoken part of my presentation the other day. Not for posterity. Not for posting online.