Presentations are only as good as the idea, visuals and delivery. Some visual thinkers challenged me to write a very short presentation about the power of visual thinking during these tough economic times. Tags: Design Strategy Video presentation receipt tape story storyboard visual thinkin So I whipped out our presentation map and got to work. First, I considered my audience.

always encourage foreign designers and other creatives to spend time in Japan if they can. For creatives, the design lessons and inspirations are everywhere. For many foreign creatives who come here — designers, photographers, architects, artists, writers, etc. — The massive city of Tokyo is but one aspect of Like many foreign nationals in Japan, I love living here and can't imagine living anywhere else. I

Most people do not really think about design and designers, let alone think of themselves as designers. But what, if anything, can regular people — teachers, students, business people of all types — learn from designers and from thinking like a designer? Can medical doctors, scientists, researchers, and engineers, and other specialists in technical fields benefit in anyway by learning how a graphic designer or interaction designer thinks? And what of more specialized professions? Is there something designers, either through their training or experience, know

Yes, you can design a PowerPoint presentation without using PowerPoint. With speedy internet access, you can design a presentation "in the cloud". What are Presentation Design Cloud Apps? When you access any of these three (currently free) online apps, you can design a presentation "in the cloud". (That's And you don't need Keynote or OpenOffice, either. Think Google Docs Presentations .

As I mentioned before, I'm in the beginning stages of writing and designing another book, this one called Presentation Zen Design. For many of us, there is a hole in our education when it comes to communicating visually, and knowledge of even the basics of graphic design is missing for most people. This book intends to do its small part to help fix this problem by focusing on concrete graphic design principles and techniques This book is a deeper exploration of the Design section of PZ (chapters 5-7). The underlying guiding principles are the same --

There’s been a tremendous amount of interest in them, but as they were designed to complement Chris’s talk – they only tell half the story. The audience member has to read the words on the slide and listen to the presenter at the same time, leading to overloading of the language areas whilst leaving the visual cortex with very little to do: The visual cortex is involved in reading the words At last, we have some scientifically rigorous evidence to show that slides full of bullet-points don’t work. The research is the work of Chris Atherton

This is not a cast- in- concrete rule and will depend on the ’shape’ of the visual content that you add. Now that you have the assertion worked out, the next step is to add visual evidence. Expressing an idea visually as well as verbally makes it more likely that the audience will understand it and remember it. It’s called the Assertion-Evidence Format and it was developed by Professor Michael Alley (I’ve mentioned it previously but somehow never devoted a whole post to it). BTW, if you’ve downloaded and read my Presentation Planning

You may not have heard of Bill Buxton yet, but the Canadian designer and computer scientist is well known in the field of human–computer interaction. Bill wrote a good book in 2007 called Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. are applicable to presentation design as well. Currently he is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. A lot of the things he talks about in his book (e.g.,

They may be cleverly planned or happen unwittingly during the production of the visual. The chart below shows a correctly scaled trend and six ways the visual image changes by expanding or contracting the grid layout. Tags: Book Reviews Design Strategy charts data grid trend truth visual imag There are few of us who, at at one time or another, have either exaggerated or shaded the truth by either bragging or playing down a story. What we say may not be an untruth, but we want to emphasize one fact to a certain party, and a different fact to another.

This is related to insuring good nutrition and it also leads to a visually appealing display. In Japan, lessons about the art of presentation are everywhere, sometimes in very unexpected places indeed. Balance, harmony, simplicity If we open our eyes and are willing to think differently, we can see that there are presentation and design lessons all around us, even in something like a beautifully prepared traditional Japanese meal. Like a designer, a preparer of washoku A few years ago, on a late Autumn afternoon, I was walking with a friend along Tetsugaku no Michi (Philosopher's Road) in the city of Kyoto.