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Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
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The opening keynote at the Presentation Summit 2011 was kick-started by Nigel Holmes. Nigel came from England 30 years ago and is an amazing graphic designer. He showed his information art from the times when digital graphic design was not the norm.
Nigel spoke about the difference between “simplify” and “clarify”. As an example, he showed the subway map of Tokyo. Apparently, there exists a complicated-looking detailed map for the city residents. On the other hand, there is a much simpler map for tourists created by Richard Saul Wurman. This map only encompasses what travelers need to know. Look at these maps in the slide figures below. You can click on all these slides to view larger representations.
Nigel also talked about the power of a smile. He gave examples of the redesign of US currency and a fantasy party arranged by the folks at National Geographic for the world population. Apparently, humor was not the norm in both examples! Nigel said that it was easier to connect with your audience when you smile. And he made us all smile with an anecdote about a person who could tie 14 cherry knots using just his tongue.
His next topic was hot dogs, and he mentioned eating competitions. Participants gobble huge amounts of every type of food from asparagus to sausages. One of these “eaters” weighs only 105 pounds. Fame came to a Japanese eater who consumed 53 and a half hot dogs in just 12 minutes! So how did he accomplish this feat? He actually trains people on how you can eat faster than you can count! Apparently, someday the Olympics may have an eating competition.
Nigel then discussed helium, and the rift between balloon artists, also known as twisters. He then said how he was more impressed with the lifting power of helium rather than its presentation prowess.
Nigel Holmes moved to America in 1978 to work for Time Magazine. He became graphics director and stayed there for 16 years. Despite academic criticism, he remains committed to the power of pictures and humor to help people understand otherwise abstract numbers and difficult scientific concepts, whether in print or in presentations.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.
Filed Under:
Events
Tagged as: Events, Nigel Holmes, PowerPoint, Presentation Summit
SmartArt is a great option that lets you quickly create editable diagrams that also work as bulleted list alternatives. You have already learned how to convert your bulleted list to a SmartArt graphic — but once you do that, you’ll discover that it is neither easy nor intuitive to edit, add, or delete text that comprised your original bulleted list. Fortunately, you can get the bulleted list back within the convenient Text Pane of the SmartArt graphic — any edits you make in the Text Pane also show immediately in your SmartArt graphic.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Graphics, PowerPoint 2011, SmartArt, Tutorials
Do you want to add a sound track to your PowerPoint presentation so that it plays across slides — so that when you move from one slide to another, the music continues playing without any interruption? A soothing background music score playing across your presentation slides can be a good move, as far is its not distracting your audience. Of course, if a live speaker is spearheading the presentation — then it goes without question that you don’t want to add a sound that spans across slides.
Learn how to loop a sound clip across slides in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Music, PowerPoint 2010, Sounds, Tutorials
The aphorism, “Don’t raise the bridge, lower the water,” has applications from the soaring heights of architectural design to the quotidian task of presentation graphics; the common denominator in both being the importance of thinking outside the box.
In a paper (links to a PDF) called Thinking More Effectively about Deliberate Innovation, Christopher M. Barlow, PhD, a member of The Co-Creativity Institute, said that the familiar phrase forced me to a new perspective: creativity is not a change in the problem, it is a change in us, a change in our thinking that makes the already possible solutions obvious.
Mr. Barlow identified the problem in the aphorism as how to get the boats past the bridge, and then went on to say, If I ask you to design a lift bridge, and you begin describing the building of a dam and lock to lower the water level, I have to wonder about your sanity or intelligence…When some of the alternatives [are] made obvious by the new viewpoint are better than the best of the old ideas, we call it creativity.
Image: Bigstock
He summarized the creative process as Not out of the box thinking, better box thinking!
An example of better box thinking in the usually boxy world of architecture comes from the recently opened International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong, a 108-story, 1,588-foot building that is now the fourth-tallest tower in the world.
Because tall buildings tend to sway in the wind, architects—like Paul Katz of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates who designed the ICC—seek innovative ways to mitigate the risk.
According to the Wall Street Journal story about the tower:
Most skyscrapers utilize pendulums or dampers, designed to transfer the motion of the building to mitigation devices. These can be enormous. Taipei 101, the world’s second-tallest building, sports a massive 660-ton steel ball, suspended from the 92nd floor that swings in full view of visitors…Mr. Katz designed the entire ICC to provide wind buffers. Instead of meeting in corners, the sides join in recessed notches. Its scaled surface—which gives the building a dragon appearance beloved by Chinese—also breaks up wind force. “It’s like the opposite of an aircraft’s wing,” Mr. Katz explains. “It breaks up lift.”
For presenters—who usually think within the strict confines of outbound corporate marketing boxes—better box thinking involves consideration of the audience. In most of today’s unilateral and overloaded business presentations, thinking about the audience all too often goes missing in action.
A client of mine, let’s call him Jason, who is a marketing manager for a Silicon Valley telecommunications company, was assigned to develop his company’s slide show for a new product launch. One of the slides Jason created was a network diagram in which all the labels were crammed into small boxes (pun may or may not be intended), each box containing two- and three-line captions. Readers of Presenting to Win will recall that word-wrap makes it harder for the audience to read than one-liners. When I suggested that Jason trim the labels to one-liners, he asked, “Should I make the text smaller or the boxes larger?”
I replied, “Don’t raise the bridge, lower the water!”
Jason smiled in recognition that it was more important to make the slide easy for the audience to read than for him to create.
That’s better box thinking.
Jerry Weissman is among the world’s foremost corporate presentations coaches. His private client list reads like a who’s who of the world’s best companies, including the top brass at Yahoo!, Intel, Intuit, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Netflix, and many others.Jerry founded Power Presentations, Ltd. in 1988. One of his earliest efforts was the Cisco Systems IPO roadshow. Following its successful launch, Don Valentine, of Sequoia Capital, and then chairman of Cisco’s Board of Directors, attributed “at least two to three dollars” of the offering price to Jerry’s coaching. That endorsement led to more than 500 other IPO roadshow presentations that have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in the stock market.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.
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Guest Posts
Tagged as: Guest Post, Jerry Weissman, Opinion, PowerPoint
If you want some music playing continuously without any interruption when you move from one slide to another, then you should first make sure that the music clip you are using is suitable for this purpose. A soft music clip that spans across your slides can make the flow between slides smooth, as long as the sound is not jarring or distracting for your audience. Also, if a presenter is going to speak along with the slides — then it goes without question that you don’t want to add a sound that spans across slides. Not only will this make the audience inattentive, but the speaker will be at a distinct disadvantage too. Yet, if you are showing a bunch of successive slides that include pictures — and no speaker is accompanying the slides — then adding a music clip to span across slides may be a good idea — here’s how you go about doing this task in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
Learn how to loop a sound clip across slides in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Music, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Sounds, Tutorials
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