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Prepare and choose your visuals so they work for and not against you

Visuals can provide you with powerful support in your speeches and presentations … if you let them.

If you allow it, visuals are a wonderful way of keeping attention, because they add another element of variety and change.

If that attention, however, is aimed more at how you are dealing with an object or if it is more on the object itself than on your message, then it has failed in its duty. If the PowerPoint slides are more interesting in themselves than what you are saying about them, then they have failed in their duty.

These visuals have to be used to support, not detract from, you and what you are saying.

You need to prepare, for this to happen. Think about how you will use them in terms of your own physical presence and stage design. It is you and your message that the attention needs to be aimed at.

Practise how you will handle your objects, how you will display them so that the process is seamless and amplifies your message – at all times. Turn off the screen if you want the attention to be on you. Keep the slides simple if you want people to listen to what you say rather then read what is written. Design your presentation so that the visual aids are just that – aids – and they can be a powerful source of attention and engagement.

If you allow it, visuals can also work as a powerful multiplier of the impact of the words you use. Your audience’s brains are tuned in to pictures and images. So an image will multiply the point and the message that the words deliver (“a picture paints a thousand words”), and will reinforce what your audience is hearing as they look.  

Keep the slides simple with as little text as possible to allow the images to do their work.

You will certainly lose engagement if your audience thinks you are treating them as stupid – needing you to read to them something they can read for themselves.  

You just need to remember that the image needs to support the message of your words, so choose it wisely. 

Choose, too, where and when in your presentation to use visuals so they will create their most impact and support.

Choose them, too, so that your audience relates to them, so that they support your credibility and support your authenticity and support your brand.

Visuals really can do all of that – build credibility, authenticity and brand, build engagement and maintain audience attention. If you plan, prepare and strategize their use they are powerful allies in your presentations.

© Bronwyn Ritchie … If you want to include this article in your publication, please do, but please include the following information with it: Bronwyn Ritchie is a professional librarian, writer, award-winning speaker and trainer. She is a certified corporate trainer and speech contest judge with POWERtalk, a certified World Class Speaking coach, and has had 30 years experience speaking to audiences and training in public speaking. Get her 30 speaking tips FREE and boost your public speaking mastery over 30 weeks. Join now or go to http://www.30speakingtips.com

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Visual communication – how to create and use charts for successful executive presentations

Say It With Charts: The Executive’s Guide to Visual Communication

Gene Zelazny

Look to this comprehensive presentation encyclopedia for information on: how to prepare different types of charts – pie, bar, column, line, or dot – and when to use each; hands-on recommendations on lettering size, color choice, appropriate chart types, and more; and, techniques for producing dramatic e-Visuals using animation, scanned images, sound, video, and links to pertinent websites.

‘Say It With Charts, 4th Edition”, shows you how to put your message in visual form and translate information and ideas into persuasive, powerful charts, visuals, and multimedia presentations – holding your audience’s attention as you communicate exactly what you want, with no confusion.

http://bit.ly/UUyGxS
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Audio Visual Presentations

Even the best messages can be ruined by a bad presentation. To get your information across effectively and to generate the right response from your audience, you need to know how to use audiovisual technology to your advantage.

Interested in how to improve your presentation? Read on for some audiovisual presentation dos and don’ts. => http://bit.ly/x1XXQu

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Tell Powerful Stories with Pictures: A National Geographic Photographer Shares Tips for Speakers (WEBINAR)

with Dick Durrance

A speech or presentation is in part a visual experience for the audience. Some speakers avoid using A/V equipment, but many others find that adding a visual component helps their audience focus and learn.
It’s common advice today, for those who use media like PowerPoint or slides, that visuals should be *visual*—use more images on screen and fewer words.
But how do you select—or create—the best images? If you want to use photos, come learn from Dick Durrance, one of the world’s top photographers who now uses that background to add impact as a professional speaker.
Dick will show us what to look for in a picture—and how to take our own—to add power and depth to our message.

To illustrate his points, Dick will use more than 75 pictures created for National Geographic assignments, global advertising campaigns, the world’s great golf courses, and the national parks. He’ll show you how to better create or select photographs for your use.

The old adage is true: the right image instantly communicates much more than 1000 words. As a wordsmith, you carefully choose the right word to express your thoughts. In the same way, you want the images you use in your presentations, blogs, websites, ezines and other materials to perfectly complement your words.
The photos need to be *great* to accompany your stories and points—not just snapshots. You want images that enthrall your audience. Pictures you take yourself can be exactly what helps express your unique point or story, if they are done well.
However, you’re not a professional photographer. You need simple techniques to take excellent photos, without lugging around a heavy, expensive camera, full-sized tripod, and other burdensome equipment. You need to know how to take a great picture that doesn’t involve endless messing with F-stops and other technical issues. Fortunately, today’s digital cameras now take care of what used to be technical challenges.
Dick Durrance, professional speaker and former National Geographic staff photographer, will show you how to harness the power of the graphic elements in your pictures—light, line, shape, color, and texture—to better tell the story you are trying to share with your audiences without having to rely on sophisticated technical skills.

Hall of Fame speaker Ian Percy once wrote, “When your life flashes before your eyes, it’s pictures not words that flash by. Our life stories are always told in pictures.”
In this webinar, you will learn how to:
• Be clear in your mind on the story you’re trying to tell in the picture. You will see how to frame, crop, and use the basic graphic elements in the picture to lead the viewer’s eye to the most important point you are trying to make with the picture.
• Select the light (sunrise, bright midday, foggy, dusk, shadows) you need to set the tone for your picture
• Use color to evoke emotion and texture to add depth to a picture
• Shift the angle or perspective to create a much more dramatic and intriguing image
• Compose pictures that contain all of the elements that are essential to your story
• Be aware of what shapes draw one’s eye into the image

More information => http://bit.ly/j9Xa5R

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Top Ten Mistakes – Visual Aids

Love this article.

If you are up against entrenched insistence on death by PowerPoint, this could be a good place to start the conversion.  (Especially if the insistence is your own!!)

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Tip: You and your visuals

Using visuals of any sort in a presentation has to be as unobtrusive as possible.

The first step here is being prepared.

If you can practice beforehand, do so.

Organise physical objects so that you can reach them when they are needed, without having to search, and without having to fumble. This may mean arranging them in the order in which they will be presented. It may mean practising the presentation so that you know automatically where to reach for something. This can apply to objects you want to display, the remote control for projecting equipment, the pens for flip charts or overhead projectors or a whiteboard, or to slides or overhead transparencies.

During these practice sessions, work out how you will move around the visual supports and equipment. Where will you place the objects you want to pick up – on a table, or another piece of furniture? Where will this, or the equipment, be so that you can move around it and communicate most easily with your audience – in front of you, beside or behind you? Always consider the least distracting way of accessing your material and the greatest ease of movement.

If you are using projection equipment, visualise its placement. Think about how you will work with the laptop or the overhead projector – standing beside, or behind? Do you want your silhouette projected on the screen as well as your visuals? Walking in front of the screen will also obscure them.

If you cannot organise the positioning of your equipment, then try to become familiar with it before the presentation and then visualise how you will use it best.

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How to include pictures in presentations

I’ve just discovered this article at Microsoft Office. What a treasure trove they have there.

This one, by Robert Lane and Andre Vlcek is called Speaking Visually: Eight Roles Pictures Play in Presentation.

Including pictures in presentations is a simple and powerful way of expanding your expressive potential as a speaker. Pictures communicate at levels beyond the descriptive possibilities of words and bathe the brain in much desired visual stimulation. At the same time, not all pictures are created equally. Choosing the right images, and using them in the right ways, can greatly impact your effectiveness.

… and there are some powerful examples.  This one under the heading “Getting Attention”.

Eight Roles Pictures Play in Presentation

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Let Me Illustrate My Point:Illuminating Your Presentations with Simple Drawings

Even if you’re severely artistically challenged, you can add content and excitement to your presentations by creating wonderful, memorable cartoons in real time. Anyone can do it and Mike will show you how.

Why create your own cartoons instead of using clip art? Because you can make them appear as your audience watches. You can customize them specifically to your audience’s industry or application and you can draw them in response to audience input and feedback. You will stand out as not showing overused “bean” people or other clip art some audiences consider hokey. The result: an audience that is engaged, informed and entertained.

Mike will walk you through some simple images and have you draw along with him real-time. He’ll show you easy-to-draw people (not stick figures) and how to adjust their facial expressions to match the emotion you want to convey. You’ll draw as he demonstrates so you walk away with new tools to integrate your drawings into keynotes, trainings, facilitations, and even webinars.

In this webinar you’ll learn how to:

  • visually represent concepts such as leadership, cutomer-centric, diversity, and empowerment
  • integrate industry jargon, keywords, and cliches to make your points visually
  • use visual humor to surprise and delight your audiences
  • apply these cartoons to sales, marketing, production, HR, customer service, finance
  • enhance your audience’s problem-solving skills by helping them change perspective — literally!
  • draw simple cartoons to help people/groups communicate better with each other
  • utilize these techniques to break down rigid thinking and bad assumptions
  • access a $100 tool for you to draw on your PowerPoint slides

Special note: To view this webinar, you’ll need to be in front of an Internet-connected computer. You don’t need anything else but a pad and pencil to draw along with Mike.

More information?  Click here

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Give your audience something to flip over

Give Participants Something to Flip Over

Let me start off by saying that I do NOT like toys or other distractions in training. I’m NOT one to provide little widgets to keep participants’ hands occupied or provide cutesy pens or such trinkets. I’ve always viewed them as distractions that shouldn’t be necessary if your training is engaging and relevant. I recently “discovered” a technique that simultaneously:

  • Provides motivational, upbeat phrases for participants
  • Reinforces key concepts
  • Ensures that everyone is paying attention and following along
  • Allows the instructor to tell whether each participant grasps the concept

http://bit.ly/9qWIw5

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Unforgettable Presentations: Using Prezi to Create Stand-Out Speeches

with Angelie Agarwal

At conferences, conventions and management/sales meetings, speaker after speaker shows PowerPoint or Keynote slides to illustrate their points. No matter how beautiful the backgrounds or images, they are pretty much same old/same old. Even the professional speakers’ visuals don’t stand out that much from the rest.

But there’s a new presentation tool in town and it’s blowing away the tried-and-true old slides. In fact, it’s a favorite tool of TED presenters who have entranced their audiences.

What is it? It’s Prezi — a new tool for creating presentation visuals that can lead you to a whole new way of thinking about your talks. It can help create better narratives and more persuasive presentations — what every professional presenter craves.

Angelie Agarwal, chief evangelist for Prezi, will show us how to integrate this new tool into our presentations to stand out among the other speakers on the program — or our competition. This special webinar will discuss how professional speakers, trainers and consultants can use this tool to create truly unforgettable presentations.

You’ll learn:
• how Prezi is very different from digital slide programs
• how you can use this tool to cement your uniqueness
• how Prezi helps you become a more persuasive presenter
• how to get started with the basics
• tips and tricks for advanced speakers on presenting in Prezi

Get more information here …

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What not to do with your PowerPoint

the team at m62 make some good points …

Presenters are beginning to realise that their presentations don’t have to be boring, and it is inspiring to see that people are moving away from bullet points to more engaging visuals. Audiences are now demanding more, and presenters are rising to meet this.

Unfortunately however, a large number of presenters feel that the small improvements they have made to their slides are sufficient, failing to realise that there is so much more that can be done with them. And so we see the same mistakes made time and time again – without the presenters realising that they’re doing wrong.

and the article goes on to list 7 major mistakes made in powerpoint presentations and how to avoid them.

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What now … Death by Flickr Musak?

This great post from Olivia Mitchell

Are your slides ‘Visual Musak’?

I saw very few bullet-point presentations at the SXSW conference. Yay! But I did see a disturbing trend – the overuse of flickr photos and other interesting images. These photos sometimes feature stunning photography, they’re quirky and interesting. The problem is …

…. http://bit.ly/beAIHa

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Is Twitter a Presenter’s Nightmare or a Dream Come True?

with Cliff Atkinson

Armed with laptops and smartphones, audiences are no longer sitting quietly while speakers are talking — instead they’re using Twitter and other tools to create a backchannel where they chat with one another, make comments about your presentation and broadcast their thoughts to people all over the world.
If audiences are happy, the backchannel can spread your ideas far and wide, create buzz about your ideas, and keep a conversation going long after you leave the podium. But if audiences are unhappy, the backchannel can criticize your ideas and delivery, disrupt your talk, and even derail your presentation completely. So is the backchannel yet another thing to fear when you give your next presentation? Or a great opportunity to really know what your audience is thinking?

Cliff Atkinson, author of The Backchannel: How Audiences are Using Twitter and Social Media and Changing Presentations Forever, will share his research and ideas for making the backchannel work for you.
You will learn:
• How audiences are changing the power dynamic of presentations
• Why you need a Twitter account and how to use it
• How to make your presentation Twitter-friendly
• How to avoid backchannel disasters
• How to extend your message farther than previously possible
• How to use Twitter feedback to adjust or fine-tune your ideas

Click here for all the details …

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Using Computer Presentation Programs effectively

People are tired of worn-out power point presentations!

Does this mean we should jettison the technology and go back to the “stone age”, as one person put it, in giving our presentations?

No more than we should ban television because of the likes of Jerry Springer and Temptation Island.

The medium itself is not to blame, it is how that medium is used that falls short. Too often, presenters rely solely on their software to provide every bit of their presentation’s creativity. The problem with this approach is that the entertainment value of PowerPoint and other programs, leaves a lot to be desired.

When a speaker decides to use it as a crutch, instead of as an enhancement tool, it can give a presenter a false sense of security about a bad presentation. I’ve sat through many a bad presentation where the insecure presenter just hides behind a barrage of screen activity as a gratuitous gimmick rather than having good illustrations and attention-getting visual element to add in making their points. So how should this medium be best used?

Obviously, there are millions of reasons for a presentation, and therefore, millions of effective and creative ways to deliver it. Creativity can take several forms, from the spontaneous quip to the extravagant special effects of a Hollywood blockbuster. Keep in mind, though, that a crummy movie with very impressive special effects is still a crummy movie, and the same rule applies to presentations. Things that may work well in some presentations will not do so in others, but here are some general guidelines for successful use of electronic slides.

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Free PowerPoint Twitter tools

Here is a site where you can download tools to add twitter to your presentations …

Ever wanted to make presentations a more interactive, Web 2.0 experience?
The PowerPoint Twitter Tools prototypes are now available.
Get ahead of the backchannel! Put in feedback slides at regular intervals throughout your presentation, so you’re not the only one who doesn’t know what’s going on!
Tempted, but worried about what people might say? No problem – the tools include the ability to include a moderated feed

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Powerpoint alternatives – from Browsers to Blogs

PowerPoint Alternatives – From Browsers to Blogs, Part II
In Part I of PowerPoint Alternatives, I talked about presenters who use HTML to display the visual portion of their presentation. Now that blogs are popular, some speakers are using blogs as presentation tools, including Steven Cohen of Library Stuff fame. Here’s a presentation he created in a blog last February and his post on the Note that he used Blogger, a tool that is free and can get you up and running with a blog in just a few minutes. Downsides of using a blog instead of PowerPoint include a busier screen that you would find on most PowerPoint presentations. Also, a blog entry is not going to fill the screen the way a PowerPoint slide will, so it could be more difficult for the audience to read. From the presenter’s standpoint, getting the slides in the proper order is cumbersome; you need to tweak the dates and times so as to get the blogs to display in the proper order, then remove the date from the blog template, since in this context, it’s irrelevant.As with HTML, the advantages of using a blog are greatest when you be presenting using a live Internet connection. You can include the links you want to visit in the blog/web page, and easily link out to web sites. The blog also makes a great “take-away.”

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PowerPoint Presentation Skills Tips for Effective Presenting

How often have you switched off (even for a few seconds) when attending yet another PowerPoint Presentation at work?

Our experience is that this probably happens more than 9 times out of 10.

So that’s about 90% of PowerPoint presentations where the lack of PowerPoint presentation skills actually undermines the very presentations PowerPoint is supposed to enhance.

So why do people continue down this road to presentation anesthesia?  And can we divert at least some of them to a more enlightened, creative approach?

Here are seven PowerPoint presentation skills tips to help you on your way.

http://www.presentation-skills.biz/presentation-delivery/powerpoint-presentation-skills-tips-for-effective-presenting.htm

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Reconsidering PowerPoint

From David Feith at the Wall Street Journal

Speaking Truth to PowerPoint

Dunkin’ Donuts insists that “America runs on Dunkin’.” Actually, America runs on PowerPoint. Slide, by slide, by slide.

But maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe—while we reconsider how we bank, manufacture cars, emit carbon and visit the doctor—we should also rethink how we PowerPoint. Maybe cutting the cord is change you can believe in.

Read more …>

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Funny Presentation Training – how many errors can you find?

This is a video produced by a presentation training company as an example of how NOT to make a PowerPoint presentation.

http://bit.ly/RBpg9W

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Resolution of pictures in powerpoint

What Size Pictures Should I Use?

Those of us who include a lot of pictures in slide shows (hopefully everyone in the near future) need to think about the resolution of those pictures. Resolution, in a digital image context, is basically synonymous with quality. The higher your picture’s resolution, the higher its quality—in other words, the better it will look when printed or displayed. A high-resolution picture looks crisp and clear. A very low-resolution picture might look fuzzy or blurred.  … more

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Can colour-blind people see your slides?

 Vischeck, checks your slides (or other visual work) to make sure that color-blind people can actually see it. From the website:

Many pictures, documents and web pages are hard for color blind people to read because the people who designed them didn’t think about the problem. Vischeck lets them check their work for color blind visibility. It is also interesting to anyone who is just plain curious about what the world looks like if you’re color blind.

One in 20 people have some form of color blindness, and the problem is most acute with shades of red and green, so think of this as a way of ensuring that your audience has a fighting chance to pay attention to your slides.

 
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How to improve your slides with the rule of thirds

Designing attractive slide visuals does not need to be a painful task. You don’t need to hire a design firm. You don’t need loads of expensive software.

You can design attractive visuals by following simple guidelines. One of these simple guidelines is the Rule of Thirds — a composition technique borrowed from photography and other visual arts that works wonderfully in PowerPoint.

In this article, you will learn:

* What is the Rule of Thirds?

* How do photographers use the Rule of Thirds?

* How can you apply the Rule of Thirds to Your PowerPoint slides?

Read on …

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DIY Stock Photograph

Have you run into a situation where you need a photo for a slide and you either can’t find one that works and looks just right on services such as iStockPhoto or for a shot like this, you can’t justify paying for a photo of some Sharpies?  You can try the Creative Commons route at flickr, but even then it’s a crap-shoot whether you’ll find something worthy of being included among your slides.

Well, a lot of us presenting slide design bloggers have suggested using your own photos in place of stock photos when you can.  Not only can it be cheaper, but you’re guaranteed to be the first to use that particular photo.

Read more as Mike provides some useful tips on creating the photos

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Presentation tools

Michael Hyatt has compiled a list of the tools he uses.  It is practical and very useful.

Read his blog post here.

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Audio Visual Presentations

 

Even the best messages can be ruined by a bad presentation. To get your information across effectively and to generate the right response from your audience, you need to know how to use audiovisual technology to your advantage.

Interested in how to improve your presentation? Read on for some audiovisual presentation dos and don’ts.

… more

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Using humor images and cartoons in presentations

Have you talked in front of many people? Have you wondered what to do in order to get your ideas across?

Any public speaker who has faced a crowd of listeners knows that humor has a great effect and brings out a point like nothing else. I have talked to many presenters and all of them say they have a number of jokes up their sleeve, as well as visual gags — CARTOONS.… more

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Audio Visual Presentations

Even the best messages can be ruined by a bad presentation. To get your information across effectively and to generate the right response from your audience, you need to know how to use audiovisual technology to your advantage.

Interested in how to improve your presentation? Read on for some audiovisual presentation dos and don’ts.