Designing a presentation

So, your research turned out to be a huge success and you are now looking for a perfect delivery. I want to let you know upfront that this post is not about PowerPoint slide design, maybe a little, but I will probably dedicate multiple posts to slide design in the future.

The design stage of my presentation creation process talks about utilizing different mediums to later present your findings. I will be trying to give an overview over a couple of media, tools and techniques to help you deliver your presentation.

Maybe you decided up front what kind of presentation you want to do. Maybe you changed your mind a couple of times as your research progressed. That's all very good and now you should decide what you are definitely going to use and start designing to it.

With "designing" I am not saying to fire up PowerPoint and start punching in bullet points. Again, as with the very first stage of the process, don't do anything stupid, and with "stupid" I mean using PowerPoint without any thoughts and planning.

Here are some suggestions you can adopt in designing a presentation:

1. Outline your presentation. You may already have a rough outline from your preparation and refined it during your research. Now you decide on the structure or outline your presentation will have. You can either go with pen and paper or finally turn on your computer and start a word processing program like MS Word or a simple text editor. All these programs have basic outlining tools and you should use them.
2. Decide on the medium of your presentation. PowerPoint is perfectly fine, but there are also other options. You might even split the presentation into parts and use different tools for your presentation. Here are some suggestions:
1. Presentation software like MS PowerPoint, Keynote from Apple, Prezi or others.
2. A demo can be very effective, if you want to show your audience a feature. This could either be a planned navigation through the internet, or a specific website; a demonstration of a software program or a video that you created can also be very effective. You can also show off a tangible good if it is appropriate.
3. A whiteboard, flip-chart and similar can be very helpful, if your presentation requires quick improvisations or interaction with an audience
3. Storyboard your presentation. Jot down what you like to display, it can be a lot of work, but it will help you to design your presentation later on. Especially when it comes to Presentation Software, it is easier to implement something that is already drawn up, than to create it in PowerPoint.
4. Script your presentation. Write down what you want to say like a speech. It will help you rehearse and create prompts like notecards. The script will be the place where your bullet points appear, not your PowerPoint.
5. Design your presentation. A presentation is about you and what you have to say. You can and should use tools to help you visualize your ideas for the audience. This is where I could go on for hours and I thought about it. I will exploit this in further posts about slide design in particular. The bottom line I try to tell everybody is: Text is not visual. Pictures definitely are and graphs can be visual if they are created the right way. Just consider this for now: If you want to talk about an elephant sitting in a tree - for some strange reason - how would you do it? Would you put the sentence: "The grey elephant with a big green spot on his head was sitting in an elm tree" on a slide? Try this just for fun. Then read the sentence and record your time. Once when reading it out loud and once reading it for yourself. Next, imagine you could draw an elephant with a green spot on a tree. Now put this picture on a slide. You want the audience to realize that there is an elephant with a green spot sitting in a tree. What is more effective and retentive? The text on the slide, while reading it out loud to the audience? Or just the picture and you reading the text off your script or notecards, if you need the prompts? I hope you see my point. We can all read faster than we speak and once I see text on a slide, I read it and when the presenter gets to the last word on the slide, I am already asleep. Visuals should be used carefully and accordingly, so your audience will have a real visual aid to your presentation.

There is so much to add to designing a presentation, and I will cover it in future posts. Until then, think about some new ideas you may have gained and try to apply them. I promise it won't hurt and if you do it right, as always, you will save time in the long run.

Comment, if you like to add thoughts and share if you value the information. Until next week, have a good one.