Presentation Design for Smart People

1. Hello!: Hi, my name is MJ Truong. I'm an industrial designer and for some reason, I am uncommonly passionate about presentations. Now, you might be wondering what exactly leads someone to become passionate about presentations of all things. Well, in my case, I'm the head of a group called the Meyer Innovation Factory. We're a team of food loving designers and our mission is to create innovative products for Meyer, which is a global cookware company. So, as it were, giving presentations is a huge part of my job. I have to do it a lot. Somewhere along the way, I just became obsessed with the art of crafting a good presentation. My goal for this course is to teach you how to create an engaging, satisfying, and attractive presentation as quickly and with as little BS as possible. So, who's this course for? Well, this course is for smart people who want practical advice from concept all the way through to delivering, crafting your presentations to feel more impactful, less boring, and better designed. So, if you need to make a presentation for work, for school, if you need to do a pitch of any kind, maybe you have to do a TED-style conference presentation, this course has been designed for you. What's different about this course? Well, first of all, no BS. I get to the point. I'm not going to give you vague, meaningless advice like have a beginning, middle, and end. Another thing I'm not going to do in this course is just give you half of the right idea and leave you to figure out the rest, which is something I see a lot of other courses in this category doing. All right. I'm going to really take you through all the steps from beginning to end as best as I can. All right. Furthermore, I'm not going to spend half the course mocking around in PowerPoint or Keynote. There's just so much important stuff to tell you. So, I'm going to keep my technical tips really to the most useful. You're smart, I trust you to figure out the rest. All right. So, number two, what I think is really special and different about this course is that I cover the specifics of narrative structure, which in my opinion, this is the key to having an engaging and well thought out presentation. I give lots and lots of concrete examples of what I'm talking about from real excellent talks that you can find online and watch yourself. So, I developed this narrative arc approach using my own experiences in the business world, hours and hours of studying presentations on TED, YouTube, you name it, and also from studying story structure in the literature and film. So, I've really taken it seriously, the study of narrative structure, and how you can apply those learnings to a presentation design. The third point I have here, I'm a designer. So, I can give you specific insights about your visual slide design that people from other backgrounds can't necessarily give you. All right. So, without further ado, let's get into what you're going to be learning in this course. 2. Course Structure: So, the first part of this course is all dedicated to your presentation structure. Okay. So, the first thing I'm going to go over is how to plan and build your narrative arc. Then, I'm going to go over how you turn that general narrative arc into a more detailed story board and how that eventually becomes your final presentation. After that, I'm going to give you some tips on how you can plan your script, and finally, I'm going to go over some strategies for a smooth and dynamic delivery. The second part of this course is all dedicated to design. First, for those who want the easy way out, I'm going to cover templates, how to find them, how to look for good ones, that sort of thing. Then for those of you who want to actually go and design your own presentations, I'm going to go over first the visual hierarchy, meaning the big picture aesthetic planning of a presentation, and after that, I'm going to go into the nitty-gritty of slide design, so talking about fonts, colors, visuals, layouts, all that sort of stuff. Yeah, so that's basically the structure of the course. Part one is all about planning the content, and part two is all about executing the design. All right. So, without further ado, let's begin. 3. What is a Narrative Arc?: So, I'm going to begin part one by talking about the narrative arc. So, first off, what is a narrative arc? A narrative arc is basically a big picture outline of how your presentation is going to go. Okay. The reason I'm calling this a narrative arc, rather than simply a presentation structure, is because I want to encourage you to think about the structure of your presentation as though it were a story where everything you say is building upon the things you said before in order to reach a satisfying and logical conclusion. 4. Why do you need a Narrative Arc?: So why do you need a narrative arc? Well, I believe that using a planned narrative structure is if not the best, then one of the best ways of ensuring that you have an impactful presentation. Why would that be? Well, when you have no sense of a narrative arc for your presentation, I find that what happens is people craft a series of meandering concepts, things that they vaguely feel that they should include or cover at some point without having a meaningful overarching direction for their story. When presentations are unstructured like this, floating from one topic to the next, there are a few things that can happen. Number one, your audience will lose the thread of interest and they'll get bored. Number two, they won't know what to do with or what to think about what you're giving them. They will be just be like, "Hmm." Number three, it just makes it a lot harder for you to achieve the goal of your presentation. Okay, whatever that might be, and I mean, you need one. So, yes. Basically, identifying your narrative arc early on allows you to have control over the big picture, impact of your presentation right from the very start. This is extremely important, okay. How well you do this step is going to be what determines whether your presentation feels meaningful and coherent or scattered and aimless. So, please pay attention. 5. Three types of presentation: So, how do you identify your narrative arc? Well, I'm going to be talking about three different types of presentation. The way that you're going to identify what kind of narrative arc you want is by finding out what kind of presentation it is that you're making. So, let's begin. So, the three types of presentation I'm going to be talking on this course are: number one, Persuasive; number two, Narrative; and number three, Explanatory. Depending on which one you're going for, that's going to determine the underlying narrative arc that you're going to be crafting. So, if you're trying to convince the audience of something or if you're trying to get them to do something, then you're going to be making a persuasive presentation. So, for example, if you're trying to get your CEO to hire a social media team, that is going to be a persuasive presentation. Or if you're trying to convince the audience that everything they thought about child psychology is wrong, that is also a type of persuasive presentation. On the other hand, if you're rather trying to inspire, provoke thought, or entertain the audience, you're most likely going to be telling a story with a narrative presentation. Examples of this would include harrowing tales, journeys or adventures, and inspiring anecdotes. And finally, if you're trying to teach the audience something or share information with them without actually trying to convince them to do something or trying to convince them to change their minds about something, if you're just straight up trying to share info with them, that is going to be an explanatory presentation. So here, maybe you're trying to explain the science of color, or maybe you're a creative agency describing your work to try to get clients, or maybe you're in a business meeting and you have to share like a quarterly progress report. That would be an explanatory presentation, most likely. So, now that I've explained the three different types of presentation, hopefully, you kind of have a sense of which one you're going to need for your next project. In these next lessons, I'm going to break down the narrative arcs, the different narrative arcs that go along with each of these presentation types. So if you want to, you can go ahead and skip ahead to the one that applies to you. So, see you there. 6. Persuasive Presentations: In this lesson, I'm going to talk about persuasive presentations. How do you know if you have a persuasive presentation? If you're trying to pitch a product, propose action, if you want to change people's minds, or if you simply want to make an argument about something, this is going to be a persuasive presentation. In this lesson, I'm going to give examples of persuasive presentations, and then I'm going to break down the narrative arc. How a persuasive presentation is structured and how you can structure yours as well. Here's how a persuasive presentation is structured. First, you're going to set the stage. Second, you're going to explore the evidence. Third, you're going to propose your solution or make your argument. Fourth, you're going to discuss the execution, action items or next steps. I'm going to go over these in more detail, don't worry. For this set, the stage, stage. This is where you're going to want to introduce yourself, provide context, define the question, establish the problem, and hook your audience. This is where you're giving people a sense of what this is all about and what question you're trying to tackle or what problem you're trying to solve. In the next stage, in the explore evidence stage, this is where you build towards your solution with compelling evidence. Not necessarily giving away the solution right away but kind of building the path to get there with proof, with case studies, with whatever it might be. In the third stage, this is where you actually unveil your solution, and it's benefits, or your argument and it's key points. This is like the money section. This is what it's all about. Finally, in the execution stage this is the "so what" section. Here's where you outline your next steps or logistics, or show how your point has real-world relevance. Basically the outcomes and the conclusions. Here is a more simplified way of understanding a persuasive presentation structure. You start off by saying, "Hi, here's the situation. A good solution would do X, it would do Y, and it would do Z. Well, how great would that be?" And the next you say, "Well, as luck would have it, my solution does X, it does Y and it does Z. Because of A, B and C and that's how we planned it. How great would this be?" Then, finally here's how I make that happen. This essentially follows that persuasive presentation structure. The reason why this works is because, First, you're setting the stage. You're priming people for what they're about to learn and be convinced of, by giving them all the background info that they need, and familiarizing them with the situation. Then, you kind of start, it's like a mystery. You're giving them clues, where the climax of the mystery or the resolution of the mystery is your concept or what it is you're trying to propose. Then followed up by real concrete steps, in order to show how you're going to make that happen. I also want to note here, that there is an alternate version of this structure, where you can kind of make a little bit of a switch. This tends to be more applicable when you're making an argument rather than trying to solve a problem or trying to persuade someone to do something. It's slightly different. First, you set the stage, you say, "Hi. Here's the situation." Then you make your argument First. You say that I believe that blah, blah, blah. Then after that, you explore the evidence to prove your statement. Here's why blah, blah, blah, is true; A, B and C. Finally, you say and here's what it all means and what we can do about it. There are really similar but the order is different depending on when you want to make the reveal. Now that you know basically how a persuasive presentation is structured, I wanted to show you some concrete examples of how that actually works in real good talks that I have been studying and found online. The ones I list here, I'm actually going to break down to show you exactly how they work and the structure of what the speaker did in order to have a successful persuasive argument or presentation. Please, do go and watch these. I think they're really great examples of persuasive presentations. There's a ton that can be found on the web, but I wanted to give specific examples so that you could really see how it works, and I'm going to break it down with you. The First one I'm going to look at is called Let's simplify Legal Jargon! by Alan Siegel. He gave this presentation at a TED conference. Basically, what his argument is is that legal and bureaucratic jargon is out of control and it has this dramatic negative impact on our lives. That's how he sets the stage. After that, he goes on to explore the evidence. So, he says health care bills run 2000 pages long, small business loan seekers and war veterans face a blizzard of paperwork to get what they need and it's generally a nightmare, and he goes into the details of why bureaucratic and legal jargon is really causing huge problems. After that he goes on to propose his solution. He says, "Look, look at what we can do. We can bring plain English, and humanity back into these legal documents." He shows how he's actually done that with his company. He shows, a specific consumer credit agreement that they did. They show a cost of printing agreement that they did for IBM, and he shows how he dramatically reduced confusion when he helped the IRS with one of the standard letters that they send out. He really brings to life his solution with concrete examples. Finally, he has the call to action, the execution stage, which is let's all do this. Let's make this a priority for the country and in our lives and businesses. It's a short talk. It's maybe five minutes long but it's a really kind of clear example of how a persuasive presentation works. I'm going to move on to the next example, which is the Original iPad introduction done by Steve Jobs in 2010. If you watch this talk, what Steve does is he begins setting the stage by telling the story of the history of laptops. He goes back and he's talking about all these old laptops and brings it through time and to the present day and what we had then in 2010. Here is where he starts exploring the evidence. He says, "What's going on today in the world of tech?" Everyone is using laptops or smartphones, and he's asking here is there room for an in-between device? Well, what would it need to do? It would need to do X. It would need do Y. It would need to do Z. Then, he goes into the proposed, the solution step, which is look. Look what I've got. It does X, it does Y, it does Z better than anything else and it's this amazing solution. Then, here is where he does the product demo. So, that is the proposed solution stage. Finally, in the execution stage, this is kind of the nitty gritty, the details, this is where he talks about pricing and accessories. So next, I'm going to give another example just to show you that you can find it in basically any persuasive presentation. So, this one is called a kinder, gentler philosophy of success, and it's by a Alain de Botton and it was given at a TED conference as well. Alain begins by talking about, how he sometimes feels this like crushing pressure to succeed in his career, and this idea he has that he's not alone in that. And that's how he kind of begins the story. So, once he sets the stage, he then goes on to begin explaining his ideas about why this might be. So he talks about the ideas of snobbery, and comparing yourself to other people, and envy, and meritocracy, and he talks about how our perception of success also negatively affects our perception of failure. So, what he says is," Oh, wow! We live in a world where you got to pick yourself up by your bootstraps to succeed, you've got to work hard to succeed." But by contrast, that also means that if someone isn't successful, that must mean they didn't work hard, which is super harsh, and not necessarily true. That's what he's talking about. Those are kind of concepts he's using to build up his argument here. And what his ultimate proposal is here, is that you shouldn't judge someone by their class or their job alone. You should sympathize with other people's misfortune, and don't just call them a loser, see them as a full human being. That's basically what he's trying to get us to do, in this persuasive argument or presentation. Finally, in the call to action section of his presentation, he asks us, rethink what success means to you, and make sure that your conception of success is true to your own wishes, and don't cave to pressure from society, and also don't judge other people by society's standards necessarily. So he has a really good talk, and it also follows this basic structure that I've laid out here. So, I have another example from also TED, a woman named Stacy Smith gave a presentation about the data behind Hollywood's sexism. So, Stacy begins by expressing the importance of stories in our lives. Stories, films, movies, and also why representation matters. So, like why does it matter that women who are minorities are represented in film? That's how she sets the stage, and then afterwards she begins to explore her evidence. So, she dives into her research data, she shows the fascinating and appalling numbers about women in cinema, both on screen and behind the camera, and after that, she actually proposes concrete solutions to how those problems could be solved, and they're really interesting proposals. I won't go into the details now, because, I don't want it to be too long, but I would highly suggest that you watch this video and then see what she has to say. Finally, in her call to action, it's basically like," Look, I've told you what's going on and here's how we can change it. Let's change the world, let's eradicate this epidemic of invisibility." So, her talk also follows this persuasive presentation structure. I'm going to change gears a little bit here and talk about how you might use a persuasive presentation structure in a business meeting. So, for example, say you were trying to convince your boss to hire a social media team. So in order to set the stage, you don't necessarily want to start right off the bat with," So we use social media team." So it might be more nuanced, and more of a big picture story, if you're asking from a more broad perspective saying, " How are we going to stay relevant in a rapidly evolving retail landscape?" That sets up the stakes of why you're going to be proposing, what it is you're going to propose. So after that, after saying," How are we going to stay relevant with retail changing so rapidly?" Then you're going to say. " Well, look at what our competitors are doing. This other brand has all this social media presence, this other brand is doing this, this other company is doing that. What are we doing?" That's why your going to lay out, and you explore the evidence stage, and then you propose your solution. And you say," Well, look, here's what we can do. We're going to hire this kind of person, we're going to hire that kind of person, we need this equipment, and it's going to give us this, and it's going to be amazing." Then in the last step you go," And here's what it's going to cost. Here's who's going to take care of it. Here's the timeline, and here are the next steps, and here's what you need to do." That basically lays out everything that your boss needs to know in order to make this decision, and debate with you the pros and cons of doing it or not. Another real life example of a presentation that I've had to give, I had to convince my CEO to build an innovation center for our design teams. So, how did I do that? Well, First I set the stage by saying," Hey look, what are our development teams workspaces like now, and where are they working?" In fact, they were working quite far apart from each other, and all of this stuff. So, and number two, in the explore the evidence stage, I took that context of like, "Okay. So where are we now?" I say," Well, where could we be? What kind of work environments foster innovation and collaboration?" I gave case studies from Google, and Facebook, and all of that, in order to show evidence of how this kind of innovative workspace could boost your business, basically. In the third stage is where I said, "Look, here's our concept, we took this evidence, we got inspired, and we created this design to solve these problems that we were seeing, and here's what it's going to look like, and here's what it's going to give us. Here's our vision." In the final stage of execution, this is where we talked about costs, logistics, timeline and next steps. So basically following the exact same persuasive presentation structure. So, now that you know what a persuasive presentation is supposed to look like, I want you to sit down and have a look at these four stages and think about how you're going to structure your presentation and write down in broad strokes what it is you're going to say in each section. To give you some tips about how to do this, I want to suggest that you probably already know your stage three. Your stage three is the thing that you want to get people to do, you probably already know that. In box number one, I want you to think about the problem that your solution is solving, or think about the context that your argument lives in and make that feel really vivid, so that it creates a nice contrast between the two. So, when you offer your solution it feels like such the right path, given the context that you presented earlier. Once you've made the problem or the context feel really vivid, you're going to want to show what is needed to solve that problem. So, your X, your Y, your Z, here's what we need in order to solve this problem. Then once you have shown we need X, we need Y, we need Z, then show how your solution solves X, Y and Z by doing A, B and C, whatever that might be. Then finally show how you're going to get there. Similarly, if you're using the sort of flipped presentation structure, you do the same thing just a little bit different. So, good luck, and share your presentation structure on the course comments, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Narrative Presentations: So in this lesson, I'm going to be talking about narrative presentations. So how do you know if you've got a narrative presentation? Well if you're trying to inspire, entertain, provoke thought, express yourself, share an experience or tell a story, you're definitely going to be making a narrative presentation. Okay. So without further ado, I'm going to share with you the breakdown of how a narrative presentation works. So the first thing you're going to want to do in a narrative presentation is to establish the context. This is the starting point. Okay. And the next thing that happens is that there's a catalyst, something changes, something instigates the start of a journey. The third part of a narrative is going to be the climb. Okay. So something has happened, something has changed, and it leads you to this journey, this climb. It might be episodes, different things happen, and those kind of culminate in the crux. All right the crux is kind of like the climax of the story, the most important part of the story. And finally, after the crux, there is closure, catharsis. And don't worry, I'm gonna take you through how this all works. So, let's break it down. First, you're establishing your context. This is kind of before the journey begins, we're setting the stage, we're introducing the main character which is probably you, but not necessarily you, and we're kind of just getting to know how things began and who you even are. Right? So this is kind of establishing things before the story starts to change, which is where the catalyst comes in. Now the catalyst is that moment where something starts to happen, it might be a big event, or it might be a clue that leads you into a longer journey. After the Catalyst begins the climb, this is the journey, this is the ups and downs, this is the minor skirmishes, and the obstacles and experiences you had that lead you to the crux. Okay. The crux of the story is, this is the moment of truth, and this moment is what the story is all about. This point is the point that you should kind of feel in your gut that the story is about even before you craft everything else. Okay. This is kind of the core feeling, or event at the heart of the story. And after that crux you need to have closure. You need to know, what happened next, or what does this all mean, or lessons learned, or hopes for the future. That kind of catharsis. And know it might sound a little bit abstract now, so I'm going to be giving you example. These are harrowing tales, they're epic journeys, and inspiring stories. So I'm going to go through each one and show you how it does track this narrative structure. All right. So let's begin. The first talk I'm going to describe is called 'This is what it's like to go undercover in North Korea' and it was given by Suki Kim. Suki begins by describing how she's a South Korean writer living in America, who was really seeking the truth you know wanting to find some truth about North Korea, which as you probably know, it's very difficult to find the truth about, because it's so closed off, and all of that. So that's the context that we're starting from. The catalyst, when the journey all begins, is when she gets an undercover job as a teacher for elite school boy in Pyongyang which is the capital of North Korea. So that kind of begins this journey for her. And for the climb of the story, what happens is, she slowly gets to know these schoolboys, and she glimpses their real selves underneath this culture of lies, which she finds really interesting and strange. And what she finds over the course of this journey, is that she's desperately wanting to tell them the truth about the country, about the world outside, but she's not allowed to say anything about that in her position. So, at the crux of this story, at the heart of this story is this question of, what is more important to her? The truth which she always was dedicated to as a journalist and a writer, and what she went there to find, or, was it more important to her that her boys be safe, knowing that if she told them the truth that that would put them at risk. So that is that is truly like the heart of this story, and that's the crux. And so after she describes that crux, that's when the closure section of her talk begins, and where she kind of shares that despite her deeply held values about the truth. She decides to choose the safety of the boys. And she follows that up by kind of sharing a letter that, if she if she could talk to them now, which she can't, this is what she'd say, and this kind of provides the emotional catharsis and the closure of her story. It's really good. I definitely recommend you give it a watch and see how it does track this narrative arc structure. So I have another example for you. This talk is called The Power of Vulnerability by Brene Brown. This is also a narrative type of presentation. Brene begins by first explaining what her profession is, and introducing us to her snarky sort of thick skinned well armored personality, and that's how she kind of sets the stage and introduces herself to you. After that, is when the catalyst happens. And hear what she says is, she takes us back to that moment when she decided to focus her research on human connection. For her the climb of her story is really the huge number of research and interviews she did that lead her to her crux, her conclusion which is, shame is the undoing of human connection, and by contrast, vulnerability, which is her worst nightmare as she kind of alluded to when she introduced herself as kind of this armored person. Vulnerability is actually the antidote to shame in all of this grief that that shame causes in society. What she does really well here, is that she kind of creates this persona of herself in a certain light, and really flips that around at the crux, saying look," Look, here's who I am. And here's why my findings were so hard for me to accept, and why it was so meaningful to me when I found that out." After that, the rest of the talk is kind of about how she copes with her findings, what it means for her, and what it can mean for you. I definitely recommend you give this talk a watch. I definitely don't cover everything that she says, I'm just trying to give you a sense of, how she does use this narrative structure in order to give her message across. My next example is called 'How electroshock therapy changed me' by Sherwin Nuland. So this is a really interesting talk. He establishes the context by painting a vivid picture of the history of electroshock therapy, as a treatment for mental illness. And then for the catalyst of the story, he reveals that his life was actually saved thanks to electroshock therapy, and he takes us back to the 1960's which was the start of his mental illness. And basically he describes, in his case, it's not really a climb as much as it as a descent into really awful mental illness, and how he almost lost his life and his career. And at the crux of the story, at the last moment when, he lost everything and they were about to give him a lobotomy when a young resident doctor kind of vouched for him, and wanted to give him a chance, and wanted to try electroshock therapy on him, and it works. He actually he regained his entire life, his career, and his family. As for the closure of the story, his message is, basically like if I could survive this, then you can survive anything. So for my last example, I'm going to break down the structure of a talk called 'My Stroke of Insight' by Jill Bolte Taylor. This is an incredibly popular talk on Ted. First Jill sets up the stage by explaining who she is. So she's a brain researcher, she studies the brain, and talks about her research in brain mapping. That's the context. And then the catalyst of the story is, one fateful morning, she experiences a massive brain hemorrhage. For the climb of the story, she describes that morning, and what happens to her, and all along the way kind of explaining how the two courtesies of the brain are totally separate and different, and how that morning she had a hemorrhage in her left brain, and how that completely changed her experience of the world, and how she suddenly felt this like deep love of humanity and the universe, and it felt like nirvana, it felt very different from the analytical scientist and doctor, that she normally was. At the crux of her story is, what a gift this stroke of insight was for her, and how we could use her experiences and insights to perhaps change the way we live our lives. In closing, she asks," Which side of the brain are you going to choose?" And she shares her wish that everyone could tap into that peaceful loving and beautiful experience that she had in her right brain. Now that I've shared with you some concrete examples of what a narrative structure looks like, I want you to think about your story, and the story that you want to tell, and I want you to sketch out your presentation structure in broad strokes. Think about, what is my context? What is my catalyst? What is the climb, crux and closure? I want to give you a pro-tip, start with your crux, everything else falls into place if you know your crux, and if you don't have a crux, you don't have a story. Let's take the ugly duckling as an example. All right. The crux of the ugly duckling story is that he becomes a beautiful swan. If you know your crux, then it's actually relatively easy to know how you should set up your context. If the crux is the beautiful swan, the context has to be the ugly duckling. And then, between those two, if you know where you're starting from and where you're going, it's fairly easy then to know, what begins that journey, and what takes place during the journey to get to that crux. After the crux, that's your catharsis, that's your conclusion, that's the meaning and the kind of the aftereffects of of what the journey meant to you, and means in general. So good luck, and I'll see you in the next lesson, where I break down in even more detail how you're going to plan out your outline from context through to closure. 8. Explanatory Presentations: Okay. In this lesson, I'm going to be covering explanatory presentations. How do you know if you've got an explanatory presentation? If you're going to be giving a lecture, teaching a process, giving an update, sharing information or showcasing your work, most likely you're going to want to be giving an explanatory presentation. So, basically how an explanatory presentation works is like this. First, what you're going to want to do is set the stage. You introduce yourself, you provide context to what you're talking about, define the topic, hook your audience, that's really important to get them interested, set expectations. After that, it really depends on what it is you're trying to share, what it is you're trying to explain. But essentially, what you need to do after you set the stage is deliver a logical sequence of information in clear sections with clear takeaways, all building towards a larger message or goal. After that, you're going to want to have a conclusion where you wrap up, summarize your takeaways. That's really important that you're not just dumping a bunch of information on people. If I'm being honest, people have really bad memories. It's not dumb people, this is smart people. It's just hard to take in so much information at once. So, that's why you need to have really clear sections with really clear takeaways, ideally like three to five. Of course you can go into each of them in detail, but then at the end of the day, are people going to remember those three or five things that you really wanted to get across? In your conclusion, you're going to want to wrap up by showing why those things are important, summarize them again to help them remember, and show them how it's related to whatever snacks or whatever is out there in the world. I've prepared these examples. There's a lot of really good examples of explanatory presentations online and I'm going to go through some of them to show you how this structure works in their talks. So, for an example, I'm going to break down a YouTube video called How to recognize poor versus good quality in clothes. So, this is a great and quick video where Justine, who's a fashion designer, explains how you look for good quality clothes and how you can identify bad quality in clothes. So, she sets the stage by introducing the premise of the video and outlining, at the beginning clearly, what it is she's going to cover. So, she says, "I'm going to cover cut and fit. I'm going to cover colors and dye. I'm going to cover prints, appliques and jacquards. Then, I'm going to cover fabric, and fiber quality, and how you look for clues there. Finally, I'm going to look at sewing quality." So, she lays it right out at the beginning. Then as promised, she goes through each of her topics and she explains. Here's what you need to know for this. Here's what you need to know for that, and it's just really well edited and really well sequenced for you to feel like, "Oh, now I have a good sense of how to look for good quality clothes." For her conclusion, it's very simple. It's, "Hey, now you know how to look for good quality in clothes. Thank you for watching. Please subscribe," or whatever it might be. So, it's basically her next steps and a thank you for watching. Now, I want to share with you a variation of the explanatory presentation. The one that I shared before was a very basic style. But there's another variety where you've got this big idea. With that big idea, you instantiated or show examples of that big idea in case studies or smaller stories in the body of the presentation. So, this is basically one big idea supported by various examples. The way this presentation works is, first, you introduce yourself and you hook that audience by explaining or sharing that big idea, and oftentimes, it's in the form of a story that thematically frames the rest of your content. After that, you share each example you have making sure it ties back to that big idea and develops or exemplifies it, maybe shines a light on it in some meaningful way. As your conclusion after you're done sharing all your examples, you show takeaways you should impact, you show relevance and the relationship to whatever is next. An example of a presentation like this is called The Power of Time Off by Stefan Sagmeister, who's a famous graphic designer and he's given a bunch of TED talks. So, his big idea for this presentation is every seven years, he takes a one year creative sabbatical. It sounds great. This creative break informs his agency's creative work for the next seven years. He's so free and productive during this time that it really does feed back into his normal career. So, he gives that as kind of his big idea and as his examples, he shows different concepts that he created during that time. Then later on shows how those examples kind of fed back into his work, which is really cool. In his conclusion, it's kind of an odd conclusion but he kind of ends with a funny video of a yogi just doing laughing yoga. But basically, this conclusion exemplifies his theme of intentionally seeking happiness and fulfillment in your life and career. The next example in this category is called The best stats you've ever seen by Hans Rosling, who's this amazing Swedish researcher, and he's such a great presenter. You definitely need to watch this talk. So, he uses the same style. It's a big idea exemplified with a bunch of case studies, interesting case studies. So basically, his big idea is that people know shockingly little about global health and the developing world. Even really smart people and even like- it's really surprising to him how little we know. His proposal here is we can use visualized data in amazing ways to kind of explain how things really are in the world. So, he uses these fantastic moving graphs and charts that show things like how fertility rates and life expectancy over time change, and the global shift from short lives and big families to long life with small families. He's really smart. It's really interesting. I definitely recommend you give it a listen. I'm not going to try to explain all the stuff that he shares in the video because it's a little complex but it's really good. After he shares all of these really fascinating case studies that fit into his big idea, his conclusion is we have so much data in the world, but it's just sitting in these dead databases that are so hard to understand and so hard to to get meaning from. So, why don't we bring those to life by animating them and telling stories with the data that we have. So, now that you understand what an explanatory presentation should look like, I want to encourage you to sketch out your presentation structure. Find your big idea, find your hook, your introduction story. Then really plan out your sections so that they follow each other in a meaningful way. Why are you saying that first? Why are you having that section after that? What are we building towards? What kind of picture are you trying to create for your audience? What goals do you have for your audience afterwards? What do you want them to know? What do you want them to be able to remember and tell you? That's basically it. Good luck and I'm looking forward to seeing your narrative arts in the comments for your explanatory presentation. In the next lesson, I'm going to cover how you take this broad general outline and turn it into a real specific storyboard, where you understand what slides you're going to be making and how that's going to actually play out in your presentation. So, I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. What is a Storyboard?: So in the previous lessons, we've learned what our narrative arc is and how it serves as the big picture frame or outline in the presentation. Now, with the storyboard, we're going to be diving into the nitty-gritty of what you want to say and how to arrange that within each section of your presentation. Okay. The way we're going to do that is by creating a storyboard, which starts as an outline. Okay. This is the part of the process where you start conceiving of your slides and your script simultaneously, thinking about what am I going to say and what is going to be showing while I say it, and all the while following some key principles, which I'll be explaining shortly. Okay. 10. Why you need a storyboard: So, why do you need a storyboard? Well, after the narrative arc, which is so crucial to defining the impact of your presentation, the storyboarding phase, to me, is what really defines how smoothly your presentation is going to go. This is really where you hash out the logic of your presentation and where the slides that are going to be part of the final deck are going to be born. 11. Creating your Storyboard: So, let's begin our storyboard. Essentially your storyboard is going to be a visual outline of your presentation. Okay, and for me my storyboard is essentially the very beginnings of the presentation, and I like to do it in the software that I'm going to be working in. But sometimes it can be helpful to do it on paper as well. So, I'm going to take you through the process of creating an outline and a storyboard together, and this is going to become, it's going to grow into, what ultimately will be your final presentation. In order to start your storyboard, what you're going to do, is first, open a notepad. Okay, and what you're going to want to do next is to write out your narrative arc, which you've already defined in the previous lessons. Right? In a bulleted form. And once you've got your basic narrative arc bulleted out, you're going to want to create subsections of those bullets. Filling in all of that content, all of your ideas that relate to each bullet point, and here is where the structure and the content of your presentation really, really, gets flushed out, and really gets organized. So, here I usually spend a lot of time rearranging the content. Thinking," Oh, does this make sense here? What should I have first? What's a good introduction for that? What's a good transition between this and this, are they related? Do people really need to hear this? Is this just something that I want to say, but no one else needs to hear, is this important? Should this be included in the presentation?" And this all happens kind of in this Word document or in this note Notes app, and I kind of hash out the logic of the presentation there. And once I've gotten to a certain point with the outlining, here's where I also begin to simultaneously create visual sketches, ideas for slides. Saying, ' Oh, it would be great if, when I'm saying this, it would show this photo, or if when I share this quote, if it was big in the center of the screen, and nothing else was showing. "And I kind of plan out visually what's happening as I'm talking. Of course, always the talking points are the most important thing, and the visuals should only ever enhance, and should never distract from whatever it is you're saying. All right? And after I've got a sense of the visual ideas, and the logic of the presentation, is when I bring it in to presentation software. Okay, and I start building it out from there, and it kind of grows from the various sections growing all at once. Now, that you know how you're going to start building your presentation, before you do begin, I want you to answer these questions. Okay? Answer them to yourself, maybe answer them in a Word document. Ask yourself; Why am I doing this presentation? Okay. Is it because I need to share this, these marketing stats, or rather, shouldn't you think of it from the audience's perspective?" I'm doing this presentation, so that they will know that the company is doing okay, or that the company is in trouble, or whatever it is." Understand what your goals are for the presentation, so that you can better curate what it is you're trying to say, and you can have a more streamlined and clearer presentation. All right? Related to that, write down what the audience should walk away with. If they only remember three things from your presentation, what are those things that you want them to be able to remember, and once you know that, be sure you emphasize that in your outline, make sure that they feature largely. Similar to this, you know ask yourself; what do I want the audience to feel? Do I want them to feel inspired, do I want them to feel excited, do I want them to feel like we're doing a great job? You use that kind of goal of what you want them to feel, and you allow that to kind of frame your attitude, and what content it is you're sharing, and how you share it as well. I want you to also ask yourself; What are the most interesting aspects of this presentation? Okay? What you're doing is, you're getting in front of a bunch of people, and you're taking their time, and their attention. And I really want you to value that time and attention, and to feel as though you should be offering them something interesting, you want, you want to engage them, you want to excite them in some way, or at least, share with them information in a way that's really going to bring it to life. Tagging right under that; How can I make this worthwhile for them? Maybe this is where you can brainstorm case studies, anecdotes, maybe even jokes or things that you can use to naturally bring your presentation to life. And finally, I want you to ask yourself; Where do my passions, my experiences, and this presentation intersect? Because, if you're giving a presentation about something you don't really care about, or you don't really know about, it's going to show. Okay. So, even if you feel like it might not be totally your area of expertise, or you might not feel that passionate about it, do try to make it more personal in a way, and inject a bit of yourself into the presentation, because, in the end people do connect to people, and whether or not you feel as though you have much to do with what it is you're presenting, it's still you that's they're presenting it. So, try to bring your unique experiences, and passions, and background, into the way that you present whatever it is you're trying to present. Okay? All right. So, that's just an example of how you can fill in these questions that really kind of set the tone for how you're going to be planning your storyboard and your outline. So, good luck, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. Outlining a Persuasive Presentation: So, in the previous lessons, I showed you basically how a persuasive presentation works in terms of its narrative arc, but that was in quite broad strokes. So now, I'm going to go into a little bit more detail for each section to help you further outline your presentation, and help you feel more confident in what you're doing in each section. So, in the first section of a persuasive presentation, you're going to be setting the stage. Here, you want to introduce yourself, be human, make sure that people get a sense of who you are from what you say here. Also, this is quite important that you use this time to establish the need for your solution. Really, make the problem come to life so that when you do unveil your solution, it feels that much more impactful. I would recommend that you try not to give away or unveil your solution here. Rather, you use this intro, as I said, to frame the presentation as solving a particular problem or exploring a particular question, rather than rushing in and being like, "This is the solution." You got to take the time and explain the problem. In the next section, when you're exploring your evidence, this is where you can explore the problem in a systematic way, in more depth, or you can use this section to imagine what could be. If in the first section, you've already explained your problem and then you'll say, "Well, what if it could be like this, what if it could be like that?" One great approach here is to outline the criteria that would solve the problem that you described in the first section. So, in other words, you draw the boxes here that your solution is going to take. So, you say, "Oh gosh, wouldn't it be great if we had X, if we had Y, and if we had Z, how wonderful would the world be?" All right? That sets you up in the next stage where you propose your solution to be like, "Well, look at this. This solution does X, it does Y, and it does Z, and here's why, and here's how." In terms of what specific types of evidence you can use, case studies, user testimonies, research findings and insights, and also like what other companies have done, all work really well in a section like this. So, then you've kind of drawn all the boxes that your solutions are going to take, now you can go ahead and propose your solution. In this section, you really want to show how your proposal meets all the needs that you outlined in the previous stages and along with your solution, it's good to showcase your research, proof of concept efforts, any the prototype testing you may have done. Basically, any evidence that your idea has a strong foundation or better yet, has been tried and tested. If you can, while you are proposing your solution, try to address any counter arguments that you can think of thoroughly and thoughtfully before they're brought up by your audience. Finally, now that you've proposed your solution, explained it well, shown how it works and what it's going to do, here's where you're going to want to show that you've thought about the nitty gritty, all right, timelines, budgets, next steps, who's responsible, action items, practical stuff. Afterwards, you want to reiterate the vision, the dream, what's possible if your proposal is accepted or if people change their minds and agree with you. What could happen, what are the consequences? Especially, if you're doing a business presentation where you're trying to persuade people to do something, in this last section, you're going to want to make it very clear, who needs to do what, by when, and what it is that you're exactly asking your audience for. That's really important to making your presentation feel effective. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to continue building on my example of the innovation center. I'm going to show you how I went from the narrative arc, the really broad outline, into a more detailed storyboard outline. As you'll probably remember, I set the stage by asking, "What are our product development teams workspaces like now?" Then, I go into, "Well, what kind of work environments actually foster innovation and collaboration, what does this look like, what's the proof that these actually work and where are those case studies looking like?" After that, I'm proposing the solution. How will this new design drive innovation and collaboration? Then after that, the execution, cost, logistics, timeline, next steps. So here, you'll see what those turn into. How that outline explodes into the actual case studies, into the actual points that I'm going to be making. I won't go into the details of those there, but if you want to pause the video, you can read like how does this break down exactly? Here, you'll see the ultimate outline of that presentation and specific points that I made and how they were organized. So, you can kind of see how this actually does go from a broader narrative arc into a more detailed outline and then storyboard. So, for your assignment for this lesson, I want you to fill out your storyboard outline. Have a final outline ready to go for the next stage is where we start working on the visual storyboard aspect. So, good luck and I'll see you in the next lesson. 13. Outlining a Narrative Presentation: All right. So, in previous lessons we've learned about the narrative arc. The general big picture outline of how a narrative presentation is supposed to go. So, what I'm going to do now is break down each of those steps even further so that you can get a better sense of exactly what it is you should be doing in each of the sections. All right. So, let's begin. What I would recommend for you and what I recommended in the previous lesson was that you actually start planning your narrative presentation or your narrative story from the crux. The crux is really the most important moment of the entire story. This is the moment of truth. It's the pivotal question or the revelation. This moment is where the heart of this story is. So, whatever dilemma, question, struggle, deep-truth,idea, turning point, miracle, a-ha moment, tragedy, whatever that is at the heart of your story, you need to place it here within the context of the narrative arc. This is really important because if you don't have a crux, if you don't have a meaningful and a strong crux, you really don't have a story. So, I want you to think really hard about what this moment is and what it means for your story. From there, I think that the easiest thing to do next is now that you know what the crux is, that helps you to frame your context, to provide a contrast to your crux. As I said before with The Ugly Duckling, if that pivotal moment is that transformation into a beautiful swan, then in the context you really need to tell the story of the ugly duckling, and the contrast between the two is what makes the journey really meaningful. So, once you've got your crux and your context, the next thing that you can do is basically interpolate between them. So, you know where you're going and you know where you're coming from. What's next is what starts that journey? And that's the catalyst. So, what event or decision rips that hero out of their status quo and begins their journey of change? Once that's been started with the catalyst, here's the climb. This is the buildup, the struggle, the series of episodes that leads you to that major crux, that pivotal moment later. The key here is that each element or episode in the climb should somehow bring the story forward and not just serve to flatter the hero or as an interesting diversion, it should meaningfully bring that hero up towards that crux. Having a good meaningful climb is what makes your crux then feel earned, and then comes the crux which we've covered and after the crux, you want catharsis, you want closure. So, you've been through this journey and this huge thing has happened, and then what? What does it mean? What's next? Sometimes there's no firm ending, and the journey continues. If so, you can talk about what that means to you and what you bring with you in that continuing journey from this narrative. Sometimes the ending is bittersweet as we saw with Suki Kim's talk. It's not all happily ever after wrapped up with a bow on top. But there should still be a message or a sentiment that encapsulates or closes the story in a satisfying way. That's what you want to achieve with your closure. So, now that I've explained in a bit more detail strategies for outlining your narrative presentation just beyond the basic points of the narrative arc, I want to give an example. So, the example I'm going to be using is The Ugly Duckling. So, I'll show how this plays out in the structure of the story. So, for the context of the story, this is where you describe, there was once an ugly duckling that was bullied by everyone he knew for his unappealing appearance. You stress how sad he is and how much suffering there is because of how he looks. Then, the catalyst is one day he's pushed to the breaking point with all this abuse. So, he decides to set off on his own into the world to find his place. That's his catalyst his breaking point to start the journey of change. Then, there's the climb. This is the series of episodes. He meets certain people, he has these adventures. He has these close calls and encounters. Eventually at the crux of the story, he's at his lowest point. He's had all of these bad experiences and crazy experiences on his climb. He's alone in this cave, and he's really sad. When spring comes, he sees this passing flock of swans, beautiful swans. He thinks, "Oh, it's better if I'm killed by these beautiful birds rather than living my life of ugliness and misery." But then surprise, he sees his own reflection in the water and it turns out that he's become a beautiful swan after all, all along really. That is the crux of the story. In the closing section of the story, the closure part, the swans welcome him and accept him into their group, and then they take to the air together. So, this shows you how a classic story and really any story as I hope I explained with the examples before, can follow this story structure. Now, that you hopefully believe that this structure works and can work for you to help you plan out your narrative presentation, I want you to fill out your storyboard outline in more detail. All the while taking into account the different relationships between the parts. So, understanding that the crux is the point of the highest tension, the biggest emotional impact is there. Then you want to create contrast with that in the context section in the very beginning. Then, have a meaningful journey and a satisfying catharsis or closing. So, good luck and I'll see you in the next lesson. 14. Outlining an Explanatory Presentation: All right. So, in the previous lessons, we've learned the basics of how an explanatory presentation should basically be laid out, the narrative arc of an explanatory presentation. In this lesson I'm going to explain or share with you in more detail what thing should happen in each section and in order for the presentation to be more successful and impactful. So, in the very beginning, when you're setting the stage, if these people don't know you, you definitely want to introduce yourself. Really be human and let them get a sense of what person you are. That really will help your content be more meaningful just because, when you feel like you have more of a connection with someone, it's easier to remember what they're saying. After you introduce yourself you want to start strong here. Now, is the moment when you hook your audience. So, consider setting the stage with an interesting story or an idea that frames the rest of the presentation. Or perhaps it's an enticing proposition as to why they need this information that you're about to give them. Here it's where you can also provide context, define the topic. Hey, here's what we're going to be talking about. Also set the expectations for what they're going to be seeing in the rest of the day. You don't want to just dive right into the content. They need to know why they're there, you'd be shocked, well how many times people sat down for a meeting and they don't know what's being presented or why they're seeing it. So, that's really important. In the body of your presentation as you plan your sections, I want you to ask yourself, for this idea why am I including this? Is this election crucial or could I get rid of it and it would still be alright? Is there a clear and interesting takeaway for this section? What's the outcome? So what? What are we doing with this information? Also is there enough context for this section? Will the audience be lost? Do they know what I'm talking about? If not then you're going to have to try to explain it so that they know what we're doing with this information and why we need it. Basically does this section order make sense? Am I building upon their knowledge as I give them more information? In the conclusion of your presentation, a few good options here are summarizing the learnings. It always helps to here's something again. Restating how this information can impact the audience, action items, if you have action items or a call to action here this is a really good place to put them. If you're looking towards next steps or the future, you can talk about that here. Also if you started with a narrative, it's usually often a good idea to have a concluding moment for that narrative. Bring that narrative story back into the loop here at the end. So, here what I've done for this slide is I've created a sample explanatory outliner storyboard in an imaginary lecture about the science of color. So, I just imagine, oh, if I were going to teach a class about the science of color or color in general what would I say? So, I would start with an introduction about the power of color. What color does in the world? Psychological effects it has on us. That is to say this is why this is important. It has impact in the world, it has meaning. Then I would go and break down. Okay. So, first I would start with color theory. How does color work? What's the color wheel? What is the language of color? What different color systems are there? So to give people a background of the universe of color. All right. After that after they've got the foundations then I would go into applications. So, I'd say, "Hey look in interior design here's what people are doing. Here's what happens when you do this with color." Then I would use another example, photography. So, color is super important in photography and film using different colors can really affect the ways that you perceive an image and in creating a mood. So, here's how different color strategies would effect that. So, then that takes the theory and it applies it in interesting ways in real life. Then after that I would have a section about taste and color. Color is not just scientific it's also subjective. So, I would talk about how the audience could figure out what they like in color and why and looking into the more personal side. I would look at color trends and trend agencies and teach people about taste makers and that thing and how color functions in business and in design. In conclusion I would give an assignment. So, I might give an assignment about pick a color and notice that color and take a picture every time you see that color over the course of the next week. So, that's basically an example of how I would use this explanatory presentation structure to craft what feels like hopefully a meaningful and logical flow for a lecture. So, it's not obviously going to be just lectures that fall into this category. Especially for those of you who will be doing business presentations, I created this little checklist for you to refer to when you're creating your presentation just because really there are so many bad, I'm sorry to say, business presentations out there in the world and I'm totally guilty of having given those myself. So, I wanted to make sure that you tick these boxes. So, if you're making a business presentation, I want you to ask yourself, does the audience know why they're seeing this presentation? Are there clear goals or action items? For each slide, ask yourself, why does my audience need to see this slide? What is my goal for showing this. Furthermore, do you have clear takeaways or therefores for each concept presented? So often I see people just putting up data just because they feel like they need to show the data. But they don't say like why it's important? What are the insights? Why do I need to see them? What's the outcome? And what are you trying to say by showing this data? The next thing you're going to want to look for is ask yourself, can the progression of your presentation be summarized in a logical verbal statement. So it's not just, oh, I showed that, I showed that, and then I showed that, and there's no reason why. You want to say "Well, I wanted to convince my manager that we did a good job on the research and I wanted to show him the steps that we took in this project. So, we started with that, and then we gave him the background on that, and that led to this, and this is the conclusion. That you need to be able to verbally say quickly what the structure of your presentation is and how it makes sense, cause if you can't do that that means there's probably something broken in the narrative arc or in the underlying logic of your presentation. That's the worst thing for a business presentation you don't want people to be sitting there being like "Okay, so what? Like why did you just present that to us?" The last point here is, does the audience know what the next steps are that need to be taken? What do they need to do next? So, often in a business meeting there could be a great presentation and then nothing happens after that. So, if you have really clear next steps and people clearly feel they know what they need to do in order to bring this forward, that's really really important as well. So, those are my tips for business presentations. The assignment for this lesson is simply to fill out your storyboard outline. Knowing what you've heard in this lesson. Have a good think about how am I going to set the stage? What are the topics I'm going to cover? Why should they be in that order? How am I going to wrap everything up and does this presentation make sense? All right. So, good luck and I will see you in the next lesson. 15. From Outline to Storyboard: So, now that you've got your outline mostly fleshed out. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how you go from an outline to a visual storyboard. So, the first thing I want to share with you before we dive into it is I have a few presentations here that I think make really good use of slides in a presentation. Basically you want to create slides that complement what you're saying without distracting from what you're saying. What you're saying is way more important than what is showing on the screen. When what you say is battling for the attention of the audience with what's on the screen, that's when you're going to get diffusion of attention and people are going to get a little bored or they might get confused. Have a look at these presentations and see how these presenters are using slides to supplement what they say, to bring what they say to life without distracting from it. Once you've done that and you get a sense of what it is you're going to try to do, what I want you to do is take your outline and then print it out on a sheet of paper, but print it out so that it only takes up half the page and leave the other half blank. What you're going to do is you're going to use a pen and paper to draw little thumbnails of slides that you think will boost the impact of what it is you're saying at any given point. So, the trick here is it's a cool thing where if what you're drawing is a little too detailed to make sense of it a little thumbnail sketch, then actually your idea is probably too complex and needs to be simplified. This is a really good way to ensure that your presentation is impactful visually, simple visually and not overly bogged down with too many words or images. So, I want you to go through and really think about what you want to be showing at any given point in your presentation and to use this little thumbnail trick to get you started. As for a few tips, as you're doing this clarity is king. People are easily bored and they have terrible memories, really terrible. Research shows that they will remember only the most basic and easily digestible information from your presentation no matter how smart they are. So, your job is to keep things visually simple and make your takeaways very clear. The second point is break things down. Are you trying to cram a bunch of concepts into one slide, see if you can break it down. Maybe you could put separate concepts on separate slides. You won't always be able to do that but it's a really good option that you should always look to if you're finding that your slides are a little bit complicated. The third thing that you are going to want to ask yourself is is this crucial? Is this slide crucial? Is what I'm saying in this section crucial to what my goal is for this presentation? Self editing is really difficult but it's so important if what you want is a really good presentation. That's all there is to it. For every slide and even for entire sections ask yourself, what is this achieving? Do I really need it? Once you've gotten a good start, sketching out thumbnails of what you want to be showing throughout your outline, here is a good time for you to just dive in and fire up your software, whether that's PowerPoint or Keynote or whatever it is. Fire it up and start fleshing out your outline. Import this outline into the structure of of your digital presentation and start fleshing it out even further. From there this is really where the bulk of the development happens. You'll basically be tweaking and perfecting slides and script simultaneously until your presentation is done. So, now that you know the basics on how you plan and draft your outline, the next few lessons are going to be covering tips on how to prepare script and what to do for your delivery. So, I'll see you there in the next lessons. 16. Planning your Script: All right. So, let's say you've finished planning your presentation and you're getting ready to present. What you're going to want to do to prepare for the actual delivery is work on your script. Okay. There are a few different approaches to scripting that I've used and come across in my research. All right. The first approach to dealing with your script is to have just a rough outline, know roughly what you're going to say and that outline might be printed and might be written down or it might just be in your head. The second scripting approach and one that I really like is having a slide lead talk. This is where you've put so much work into crafting the slides and the narrative in the slides that you don't need to have a printed script or a printed outline. You can just follow what you've already prepared and you have your talking points already in your head from having done all that prep. The third type of scripting approach is fully scripted. All right. I feel like most TED talks are fully scripted just because it's such a high stakes important presentation. When I gave my master's presentation, that was fully scripted. I think for really important talks, that's a really good option to go with fully scripted and either you memorize it or you have this script in front of you and you try to deliver it in an engaging way. All right. So, now that I've outlined a couple of scripting approaches, I'm going to go through them one by one and give insights or tips that I've found in my experience or from doing research online. So, for the first type of scripting approach which is a rough outline. I think that this approach is really best for confident and experienced speakers, only because if you're not that experienced or confident, you may tend to stumble and ramble a little bit. Yeah, that's what I found, I've found that even TED talks where the person seems to be kind of flying by the seat of their pants or just a rough outline, it tended to be a bit scattered. So, I would caution against this. If you're concerned about coming across well and you're not super confident in your speaking skills, okay. But if if this is something that you feel comfortable with, you might use this approach if you have very few slides but a really long talk. This is a good way of organizing your thoughts. I would recommend that you print out an outline and use sub bullets, like a bulleted outline with sub bullets with key phrases or words that will help you remember specific ideas that you want to share. In your outline, I would recommend that you flag your slide transition points visually somehow maybe with a highlighter or with asterisks or something like that so that you remember to advance your slide show at the right moments. My last tip for this approach is to print your outline in a large font so that you're not squinting at it during your talk and you can use graphic elements like horizontal bars or boxes around different sections to clearly indicate section changes. My last tip for this is to print double sided on one sheet of paper so you're not rifling with this like stapled stack of papers on stage. For this type of script planning, I've found a couple of talks online where it looks like this is what they've done. Academic lectures often tend to be this way and yeah, there's a few, these four talks that I've found and if you like, you should go and have a look and see what the results are and see how confident the speakers are and kind of how they find their flow. All right. So, the next type of scripting approach is slide-led. For this type of presentation, you really need to plan your slides really carefully to ensure in advance that the overall narrative of course makes good sense and covers all your bases, and what you want to do with this is place cues and clues in the deck to help you remember what to say on each slide. It goes without saying that if you're going to do this without a written script or a written outline, you need to know your content extremely well. You need to be really familiar with it so when you see the slide, you know what you're going to say. Also you want to make sure that you know what your key messages are and make sure those really get hammered home. A good tip for this is to rehearse in advance either out loud or mentally on what you're going to say on each slide. Using the slide notes panel is really useful for this type of script planning and I want to emphasize here that you're not making stuff up on the fly. You're letting the pre crafted narrative in the slides guide what you say in the moment so that you don't need to read all of the script. I've brought a couple of examples of slide-led presentations that I found online and you'll see how the speaker will see the slide that's showing and be responding to it and sharing. It might feel somewhat rehearsed or like they've definitely thought about it before but it's because they have. They've put so much time into preparing the presentation that they know what they're saying at that point. So, I think it's interesting to see when people have used this approach and see how it affects their delivery. All right. So, for the last type of scripting approach, this is a full script. This is for really high stakes presentations and you might want to use this approach for something like a thesis presentation or a Ted-style talk. If it's really important and if you have the time, memorize your script. That's always going to be better than reading off of a piece of paper. If you don't have time to memorize your script, I would highly recommend that you print out your script in a large font, something easy to read, and this is crucial, you're going to want to use bolding, highlighting, italics, whatever you want to do to help you plan your intonation and your speech cadence to help you ensure that you're bringing the words to life rather than reading things in a monotone and everything sounds the same and it sounds like you're reading off a script. So, have an example here where I just take a sentence, I just made it up and I put bolded words where I wanted to have emphasis in my intonation. Okay. So, when I was a little girl, I dreamed of being a toll-taker on highway 17. If I could go back in time and tell my 18 year- old-self one thing, it'd be this. So, you can probably hopefully hear that I'm putting emphasis on different words, and my goal is for that to bring the sentence to life and to make it sound more dynamic and interesting. I really recommend that you do that. So, it will also help you in the moment to feel more comfortable in your delivery if you've already pre-planned how your script is going to sound. So, I have a bunch of examples here of talks that were fully scripted in advance. It seems pretty clear from the way that they're delivering it, it's not that it sounds unnatural, actually, these are really good speakers but you can tell by how nice the writing is that they're not just making it up on the spot. Okay, this is something that they've crafted in advance that they're delivering to you. I think it's definitely valuable for you to watch a couple of these and see how it's done. All right. So, your assignment for this lesson, it depends on what scripting style you're going to be going for. Okay? If you want to try the outline style, write and print down your outline, rehearse your presentation, making notes and helpful changes you can make to your outline. Don't just shove out the outline and you want to go and just run with that on the day of your presentation. You should be refining it as you go. If you're doing a slide-led presentation, I want you to write down notes for what you're going to say during each slide in the presenter notes section of your slide show or in a separate document that you can print out to practice with. Okay? In the event that you're going to be using a full script, write your script, polish it, make sure it's great and then use formatting, bold, italics, underline and color to help guide yourself into giving a natural and dynamic delivery. Good luck and I will see you in the next lesson. 17. Tips for Delivery: All right. Now that you've planned out your presentation and you've got it built out in your software, I want to talk to you about your delivery, okay? So, how do you come alive during a presentation? How do you offer a really engaging and fun delivery? Well, I have a few tips on how you can do this, ways that you can work on it. I'm going to break them down one by one in the following lesson, okay? So, the first tip I have is to showcase your personality. It's easy to say that, but how exactly are you going to showcase your personality up there on stage? So, one way of doing that is to use your own unique voice, okay? Avoid cliches. Only say something if it's meaningful and true, and try to say things that only you would say, and some people to watch who I think do this really well include Chip Kidd and Brian Little. You can find their talks on TED. All right. Another way that you can showcase your personality is to let the audience in a little bit. Show us a glimpse of your real self by maybe sharing a joke or something about your family, potentially an embarrassment, everyone can relate to that story. Basically, any way you can humanize yourself, and show a bit of good humor and vulnerability that really helps people relate to you. People who I think do this really well include Alain de Botton, Susan Cain, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Brené Brown, all in TED.com, okay? So, find their talks, give them a watch, and see how they do it. Okay. So, my next tip for bringing your presentation delivery to life is to have empathy for your audience. All right. Speak clearly and simply. Not everyone understands the industry jargon that you know. Try to explain things in a way that any normal smart person would understand if they don't have the background that you have. Someone who I think does this really well is a researcher called Esther Duflo. She has this awesome talk on TED about using social experiments to fight poverty. You should definitely go have a watch for that. My next tip for how you can have empathy for your audience is use descriptive words that come alive. Use vivid metaphors, craft examples that create clear mental pictures, and use body language. Someone who I think does this really well is a neuroscientist called VS Ramachandran. He has a couple of talks on TED. One of them being the neurons that shaped civilization. You'll see, when he presents, he does this super well. He uses really beautiful language to describe scientific things. It's really, really nice to see. All right. So, my next tip for how to have a really engaging presentation delivery is engage with the audience, okay? You're not just talking at them. You're not just offloading information onto them. You are having actually a conversation with them. So, ask questions, quiz them, ask their opinion, ask rhetorical questions or what if questions. Someone who does this really well is Hans Rosling. Check out his talks on TED. Another tip that you can try for engaging the audience is using second-person language. That means using the word "you". Address them, talk to them. Ask them to do things, ponder things or imagine things. Someone who does this well in her talk is Kelly McGonigal on TED. So, for my last tip, it's speak naturally and dynamically. Try to talk the way you really sound. So, try speaking like a more eloquent version of yourself chatting with friends. This will help you feel more relaxed and it'll also help the audience bond with you more. Some people who I think do this really well include Justine LeConte. She's a YouTuber. She's a fashion designer, and she has these videos on YouTube talking about clothes and fashion. She just has a really fun personality, and she really engages with the camera, with the viewer, and her voice really comes alive, and sounds really natural, and engaging. Another person who I think does this really well is a YouTuber named EmmyMadeInJapan. She's not over the top. She's not super theatrical. She just, her personality really comes across in the way that she talks and the way that she creates her videos. So, I think, definitely give her a watch and see her like, how can I also have my personality come through in the way that I am talking when I'm presenting? Finally, there's another person who I think does this well and that's Jane McGonigal. She gives a couple of TED talks where you hear her talking and you feel like that's who she is in real life. So, she's talking naturally and dynamically in an interesting way. My second tip here is to use intonation, prosody, and a dynamic voice. Try not to sound like a robot. Use the musicality of language in order to convey meaning. This is hard to, I guess it is hard to teach, but watch good speakers that you like and try to emulate them. Practice with your script. Record yourself using a video camera to try and see, "When I get nervous, I tend to go monotone or in this section, I don't know what I'm talking about. So, my priority gets really flat or whatever it might be." More people who I think do this really well include Elizabeth Gilbert and Malcom Gladwell. So, having given you all of those tips, I wanted to share some examples from online of people who I believe have memorable, personal, and authentic delivery styles. So, I won't list them out verbally, but check out this list, and definitely go through, and watch some of these presentations if you haven't seen them before, and learn from their body language, learn from how they're speaking, and try to use that to develop your own presentation style. All right. So, now that I've given you tips on how to have a really vivid and enjoyable presentation style, I wanted to give a few points on how you can be more confident onstage and how I've learned to be a little bit more confident when I'm giving a presentation. Number one is trust your plan. Have a good plan and trust it. If you feel like your plan has got your back that nothing can really go wrong because it's been planned out in advance, that really helps me feel more comfortable on the stage. My second tip here is to slow down. That's something that I'm not always good at. I tend to run really fast in the way that I speak, in the way that I think, but it helps to slow down. If you're taking your time, you can really be deliberate about what it is you're saying and I think your audience will appreciate it too if you're not going at a million miles an hour. All right. My third tip, easy to say, hard to do, but compartmentalize your stage fright. Just say, yes, I am nervous to be presenting in front of 50 executives and it's scary. All right. Fine. I acknowledge that emotion, and I'll deal with it later, and just set it, and forget it. Just realize that it's there and then move on. I've been able to learn how to do that over the years and I think that you can too. All right. Finally, my last tip here is to know your stuff and practice. Practice, practice, practice. Keep trying. If you mess up, don't worry about it, just keep on growing on and you'll be fine. So, the assignment for this lesson is some delivery exercises. I recommend that you watch videos from at least five of the speakers I recommended in this section. Pick your favorite speaker out of those and write down three things that you like about their delivery style. Next, I want you to identify and write down three delivery techniques that you'd like to try in your next presentation, whether it be asking the audience a question or something you saw that you liked in another speaker's work, whatever it might be. Write down those three techniques and try them out. In terms of practice, it depends on what kind of presentation it is you're giving. If you're going to be giving a persuasive presentation, I recommend that you practice by making a short video, recording yourself maybe with your phone, whatever it might be, record yourself making an argument about something. It can be anything. Why cats are better than dogs? Why dogs are better than cats? But just have practice, speaking under pressure, and see how it goes. Similarly, for the narrative presentation, I would recommend that you record a short video of yourself retelling a story, any story. Maybe it's a fairy tale or maybe you're summarizing your favorite book or something that happened to you or your friend over the weekend, whatever it might be. But if you recording yourself telling a story, I think this is good practice for when you're going to be telling your narrative presentation later. If you're going to be making an explanatory presentation, I want you to record a short video where you explain something relating to your job or one of the hobbies you have. So, for example, I'm obsessed with vintage lenses, so maybe I would practice by recording a short video explaining how you use a vintage lens on a modern digital camera. So, that's just an example. But hopefully, with these exercises and tips, you'll feel more confident in delivering your next presentation. Now that we've done with all of the presentation planning, and script planning, and delivery planning, if you're already a graphic designer and you're already all set to go on your presentation, you're done. But if you want some tips on how to make your presentation more attractive and more well-designed, please move on to part two where I breakdown, how you design a really attractive presentation, and go over the visual principles and design principles that will help you have a really appealing and nice deck. So, I'll see you in part two. 18. PART TWO: Designing your Presentation: Hi. Welcome to Part 2 of a presentation designed for smart people. All right. So, in part one we learned how to plan, outline, and storyboard our presentations. In this section, we're going to cover tips on how you can create a really well-designed and clean, nice looking presentation. So, first, I'm going to go over quickly how to use templates from online. There are free ones, there are paid ones. I'm going to go over what to look for when you're looking for a template, and why you might want to use a template in the first place. After that, assuming that you want to design your own presentation, I'm going to first cover visual hierarchy. This is like design from a big picture perspective. After that, I'll be going into the details about slide design. So, this is fonts. This is colors. This is layouts. This is more nitty gritty advice on how you can design your slides. So, yeah, let's begin. 19. Templates: All right. So, in this lesson we're going to be talking about templates. I'm going to make an admission, I have never used a template but what I've done for this section is, first, I'm listing out reasons why you might want to use a template, and also if you're going to go and look for a template, then what you're going to want to look for. Finally, in this section, I've listed a bunch of templates that I found online that I've vetted, and then I looked at and I think have a really nice design and that I would feel comfortable recommending to you to use in your work. All right. So, let's get started. When should you use a template? You might want to use one if you have a high stakes presentation and you're not cool with using any of the prepackaged templates that come with PowerPoint or keynote. Generally, I never use those. I don't really like them that much. So, if you have a high stakes presentation and you don't have time to design your own deck or to hire someone to design it for you, then using a template is a really good option for you. All right. Another reason to use a template, I mean, if you're going to go out and buy one is it can be a really good investment. If you really like the design of a template, you can use it again and again in your future presentations. All right. The last reason you might want to use a template is if you want a really high quality, nice design presentation and you don't want to put in the effort to get your unique design perfect. They're just pre-made, they're well designed by professionals, and, yeah, they can be really good. When you're looking for templates, here are the things that you're basically going to want to look for. Number one, it should have good graphic design. I'm not sure if you have a sense of what good graphic design looks like. So, that's why I've gone through the effort of, in the following slides, listing out a bunch of examples of templates that I think have really good quality designed to them. All right. So, you're going to want to look for good graphic design that's great fonts, nice colors, beautiful layouts. In addition to the layouts looking good, you want the template to have useful layouts, ones that understand the principles of slide design, meaning you don't want to overload the slide with too many different things. Some templates are super busy and they have way too much going on. That's not good. So, you're going to want to look for a template that has clean useful layouts for what it is you're presenting. The third thing you're going to want to look for in a template is something that has the right mood and tone for what you're going for. So, if you are an accountant or if you're presenting sales numbers to your marketing team or something, that's going to probably require a different mood and tone compared to like, say, you're a photographer or you're a fashion designer and you're trying to get new clients. You're going to want to create different impression then the different templates available online just have wildly different looks and moods. So definitely, choose one that conveys a message that you can convey about yourself, okay? So here, I'm not going to go through everything in detail. This is really a resource for you to go through after the video. I'll provide an attachment where you can take your time going through all these links. But basically, I've found a bunch of free templates for Keynote, PowerPoint, and Google Slides and picked out some good ones and put them here. I've also found a few paid ones that I thought looked nice. Disclaimer, I've not bought them, I haven't tried them but from their website they looked nice and I think that they could be promising. So definitely, do your research and check make sure that it's the right template for you before you go and buy it. So, that being said, the assignment for this lesson. If you want to go the template route. Number one, find a template you like. Number two, buy it if it's not free. Number three, download and install it. This may require installing new fonts. Often, this is the case. Finally, start your presentation. So, good luck. If you want to learn some principles about slide design, I'll see you in the next lessons. All right. So in this lesson, I'm going to be talking about visual hierarchy. What does that even mean? What I want to cover in this lesson is basically, you have slide design which I'm going to be covering in the next few lessons. But before you start diving in designing your slides, you want to make sure that, overall, your presentation has a coherent look to it. You want to make sure that the color story makes sense, right? So, for example, if you have a header, a type of header slide, so you have three sections, and this header slide introduces each section. You want to make sure that the colors are the same on all of those header slides, and that the fonts are all the same, and that they have the same weight in that kind of stuff. In order to explain better what I mean by visual hierarchy, have a look at this slide. This is what I would call an example of bad visual hierarchy. So, this slide, imagine this text is a metaphor for your slides. So, here, the text, they're all different; sizes, they've different colors. Some of them are labeled with numbers. Some of them are labeled with letters. They're all over the place. There's no consistency to it, and you can't tell from the formatting how these words relate to each other. All right. So, what I mean to show with this is some presentations, the design is all over the place. Everything changes from section to section. There's no real continuity. You can't really rely on the visuals, the colors, the fonts to tell you how the content relates to each other. All right. By contrast, if you look at this bulleted list, everything is the same. It looks fine but actually some of these bullets are actually subsets of others but you can't really tell how any of the content is related to each other because everything has the same weight, everything has the same design. That's not good either, right? So, when I'm talking about a visual hierarchy, this would be an example of a nice clear visual hierarchy. So, visual hierarchy is about clarity. You're visualizing a logical structure, you're showing consistency, and you're grouping related content together visually and those things lend clarity to your presentation. Okay. The next thing that visual hierarchy achieves is it gives your slides momentum. Because when you see, "Oh there's another header slide," it helps to signal subject changes, it helps to keep the viewer alert and it helps to keep things moving forward. All right. So you can see this slide, it has the same text as the two slides before because of the way it's organized and the colors and headers are big. It helps you understand, "Oh, those three bullets are part of Section 1," and those two bullets are part of Section 2." So, what I'm going to cover in the next couple of lessons is, number one, how you create a clear visual hierarchy. Number two, different types of slides in a visual hierarchy. Thirdly, common problems that I think people experience with creating a nice logical visual hierarchy. All right. So let's begin. 20. Visual Hierarchy: All right. So, how do you create a clear visual hierarchy? So, my main tip for this is use your outline as a guide. So, for example, you've already done all the planning and created different sections and already discovered the logic of your presentation. So, use that outline to help you know how to design your slides so that they reflect, visually, that logic. So for example, your section headers should all share the same design throughout your presentation. If you have any parts that have a table of content, maybe that section is a little more complex, make sure those table of content type pages all look the same. Similarly like, if you have sections where the content is similar, make sure that you have consistent design principles across those sections. So for example, if you have three case studies, make sure all those three case studies follow a similar format. Lastly, just in general, similar slide types should look similar. So, for example, a common type of page is a list page. So it's a list of some kind. So, you should make sure that all your list pages throughout your arc look the same and they have the same layout, the same colors, the same fonts. So, those are the basic overview of how you can use your outline in order to ensure that you have a clear visual hierarchy. Some more quick tips on this, important stuff should be big. It sounds dumb but that's true. Things that you want people to focus on should be very clear and should not be bogged down by other details. Good luck and in the next section, I'm going to be talking in more detail about the different kinds of slides that you might have in your presentation, and that might help you to further clarify the visual hierarchy of your presentation. So, I'll see you on the next lesson. 21. Visual Hierarchy - Different types of Slides: Okay. So, in this lesson, I'm going to talk about a few different types of slides that you might find yourself using in your presentation. So, the first type of slide is a header slide. This is basically like the title of a section, the title of the whole presentation in general and generally should use large fonts, I would say, in order to be very clear and easy to see. Another type of slide would be a table of contents slide. So, this is setting a roadmap for, here's what you're going to be experiencing in the next few minutes. I think it's helpful to have this, especially on longer sections. There's also big ideas slides. So, if you have a quote that you're going to share or something you really want to hammer home, you can make a big idea slide. It could have an image or not or it could have just text. But basically, it's one slide showing one concept very simply and very clearly. Another type of slide is a chart or infographics slide. So, here you're trying to convey a certain type of information, certain facts and using a visual format whether that's a graph or whatever it might be. My advice for this type of slide is that you keep it as simple as possible, never put more than one chart on a slide unless you have a really good reason, like you're comparing the two directly. Try to make sure that every visual that you share, especially if it's an infographic visual or quantitative visual, that there's a clear takeaway, a reason why you're sharing that. Here's the bar graph, what does it mean. Never leave that out. Another type of slide you're probably going to have is an image slide. My advice here, go big or go home. Have the image fill the whole slide almost the whole slide depending on the impact that you want that image to have. Of course there will be times when you're going to want to have a large-ish image but then a little bit of space for text as well, that obviously makes sense in a lot of cases too. Another type of slide that you're going to have is a list slide, like this slide itself. So, that's pretty straightforward. A slide that I found myself using for this presentation is a reference slide, it's not something that's meant to necessarily be used during the presentation as such. But it provides the sense that look, there's more to come, there's a toolbox for you to access later and we're not going to go through it right now, but just so you know how much info there is and what kind of stuff is waiting for you at the end. So, a reference slide is something like that. So, now that you have seen a couple of different slide types, hopefully that inspires you in how you're going to flesh out your own presentation and how that works in terms of visual hierarchy. What fonts you're going to want to use between the different types of slides, the fewer the better. But choosing choosing fonts, that's something I'm going to cover in a later section anyway. So, I won't go too much into it now. But in the next section, I'm going to be talking about common problems that people have with their visual hierarchies. So, I'll see you there. 22. Visual Hierarchy - Common Problems: In this lesson, I'm going to quickly go over some common problems that I see and experience myself when trying to make sure that my presentation has a good visual hierarchy. So, some common problems that I see include, sometimes people don't include signposting slides. So, what is signposting? Signposting is basically things that show you where you're going. It's like a signpost on the highway. So, a signposting slide might include a header slide or a table of contents slide. I think it's really important to include these so people feel like they understand where the presentation is going, especially with explanatory presentations. So, another thing that I noticed that's a common problem with visual hierarchy is, people have inconsistent designs between similar slide types. So, like I mentioned before, if you have a list slide like this, sometimes, depending on how you make it, it might be aligned way to the left, and sometimes it'll be more centered and there might not be consistency across the different lists that might appear in the deck. So, try to make sure that any time there is a slide where there's other slides like it, make sure they all look the same. So, by contrast, I've seen presentations where all the slides look the same. It's just all one format, the header and then bullets, or something like that. You don't want that. You want to have some variety, you want to have the slides come to life, and you want the slides to reflect the logic of the presentation. So, definitely try to have the slide match the content that it's trying to deliver. On the other side of the coin, there are some times, and I definitely suffer from this sometimes because I do create my own slide designs, is what can happen is that every slide ends up looking really different. You might be using different fonts on different slides, different background colors, things can get really miss matched. So, you don't want to do that. You want to try to rein yourself in and try to stick to a really consistent template, consistent design language. As for the last thing, it's similar, but sometimes what I see is a jumbled design language. So, you want to pay attention to things like numbers, colors, shapes, line weights. If on one slide you use an icon that has a circle in the background and it got colored in, on the next slide you don't want to go and use a wireframe icon. You want to try to make sure that things stay consistent, and that's what's going to make your presentation have a stronger visual impact. So, those are my quick tips on how to make sure you have a good visual hierarchy. For the assignment of this lesson, just check that your deck has consistency across all of its slide types in terms of color, font, shapes, layout etc. This is something that you're going to want to do toward the end once you've got everything roughed out. So, I will see you in the next lesson where I'll start talking about the devilish details of slide design. So, I'll see you there. 23. Why fuss over slide design?: So, why fuss over a slide design? Put simply, bad design is distracting, okay. It's not just a matter of ego or a matter of wanting to look good. A badly designed slideshow is going to detract from your message. And it's really doing a disservice to the audience, okay. Trying to pay attention to a presentation with horrible slide design, it's kind of like trying to listen to someone talking who's got a huge chunk of black food stuck in their teeth, right? It's just- it really takes away from what it is they're trying to say. So, having good clean slide design really helps your content shine. So, in the next four lessons, I'm going to cover the elements of slide design. I'm going to go over the do's and don'ts and tips for color, fonts, visuals, and images, and slide layouts. All right, so, let's begin. 24. Color: So, in this first section here, I'm going to be talking about color. All right. I love color, and the way I'm breaking it down is first, I'm going to share some dos and don'ts for color usage and slides, and then I'm going to share how I find color inspiration, mostly online. After that, I'm going to show a demo of how you can create a color scheme for a slideshow using inspiration that we find online. The last section here is in practice, nitty-gritty tips in the software, showing how you can use the tools available to create a good color experience in your slideshow. Okay. So, let's get started. 25. Color - Do's and Don'ts: Okay. Some do's and don'ts regarding color, all right? Here's a do, you can use color to add interest and structure to a slide and you don't even have to use that much, all right? It doesn't have to be terribly complicated. Like what I've done here is, I have some simple text and a headline and rather than having just the background be all one color, I've chosen to have a bar of color up one side and I've chosen to use a banner to give contrast to the title to make it pop more, all right? So, that's how I'm using color here to add interest and structure to this slide. Another thing you're going to want to do with color, is balance the color of the text with the color of its background, okay? In this example, yellow on white doesn't have enough contrast, it's going to be really hard to read. For green on red, these are complimentary colors which is a tricky name because they don't actually look good together, they clash quite harshly. So, be careful about using complimentary colors on top of each other. In this next example, these two colors, they are different in hue, but they're really close in value meaning, they're a kind of the same brightness. So, the contrast isn't high enough for you to be able to read it well, all right? This last example that doesn't really work either because the contrast is maybe a little too high. The purplelish color seems to vibrate a little too much on top of that charcoal black color, and it looks a little bit harsh, okay? So, definitely be considering how your text colors interact with the background colors. So, for my next tip, it's balance you're neutrals with highlight colors. For example, black on white or as I like to do off-black on white, is safe and good, but it's also a little bit boring, a little predictable. So, you can add interest to that by adding a highlight color which is represented by that yellow dot the side. So, that would mean on a whole slide like say, you have a big picture slide or you have a quote in the middle, that can be charcoal on white, but then maybe you can have accents of yellow here and there in one location to bring a little bit of interest to the slide. Okay. My next tip here is, white on a darker color tends to work well, okay? The next tip, black or off-black on a lighter color is usually okay. Just be careful about the color that you choose for the background, maybe make sure it's not too loud depending on how much of it there is on the screen. For my last tip here, a pastel color on off-black can be fun and modern. Just try it and see if you like it, see if you think it looks good. A tip here about gradients. Definitely be judicious with your gradients meaning, be careful. They can be quite trendy and cool depending on what you're going for, the mood of your presentation, but they also go in and out of style okay. So, definitely just be aware of what colors you're using and how it portrays your content, all right? My next point here is don't use too many colors, all right? It's distracting especially if you don't know what you're doing. Even more so, if the colors clash, please just try to stick to maybe one main color and one highlight color, not too much beyond that unless you really know what you're doing, all right? By contrast though, don't use too few colors. Color really does bring a slide to life. It can be boring if there's too many colors, especially if everything has the same value if you don't have much contrast or variation in the tones, right? Things become tiresome. That being said, monochrome can be cool if you know what you're doing. So, obviously none of these rules are hard and vast just kind of use your better judgment and see how it goes, all right? All right. So, my next tip is don't overlay complimentary colors. It's ugly. In case you don't remember, complimentary means opposite on the color wheel, all right? You can Google it, Google color wheel you'll see red and green are opposites, blue and orange are opposites, yellow and purple are opposites. I would recommend that you never overlay complementary colors on top of each other. I personally would recommend against using complimentary colors in a color scheme, but of course, it's up to you, it's about your color story and your color or personality. But in general, I would be careful when using two very different hues on top of each other and definitely be aware of how value which is light or darkness affects the color interaction, okay? If you can see what I mean here. This orange at least on my screen because of how saturated it is compared to its complimentary color blue behind it, it seems kind of electrified and it looks too busy for the eye. It's not a pleasant color story. All right, the same thing with this green and red and with this yellow and purple, it's just a bit harsh, right? All right. So, another tip I have for you is that neutrals and analagous colors and that means colors that are close to each other on the color wheel, they do help your key colors shine, okay? So, using analagous colors tends to be relatively safer, but even then it's not always a safe bet, all right? As a reliable choice, white or off-white is really classic. Just make sure you have enough contrast and obviously black and charcoal are good options as well. Just be aware of cultural color associations like Halloween and Christmas and that sort of thing. Yeah. So, that's been a couple of do's and don'ts for color and in the next section, I'm going to talk about finding color inspiration online, all right? So, I'll see you in the next lesson. 26. Color - Finding Color Inspiration: Okay. In this lesson, I'm going to talk about finding color inspiration. I'm going to start by saying what I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to tell you to go buy a Pantone set. You don't need a Pantone set. I'm not going to tell you to go and get inspiration from nature because I think that's really corny. I'm not also going to tell you to look at the color wheel. You don't need to look at the color wheel in order to develop a good color palette. I'm also not going to tell you to use the default themes in your software because those are generally really horrible. So, what I'm going to tell you is where I find my own color inspiration. So, I'm going to start by sharing that I love going on Pinterest. So, if you go on Pinterest, if you've never used it before definitely give it a try. Things that I like to search for when I'm looking for color inspiration includes terms like graphic design, book covers, web design, packaging design has really nice colors. You're going to try to look for things where text is interacting with color and images. So, this could also include searching for illustration, prints, risographs have really interesting colors, woodblock prints can also be a really good source for color inspiration. Furthermore, poster design, branding, typography and color. Those are all really good searches that you can mine on Pinterest for some color inspiration. The great thing about this is that if you find one thing you like and you click on it you scroll down it'll show you 20 more things that are like it and that can lead you on a trail of inspiration to finding something really good. So, beyond Pinterest, I found a couple of other sites that I think have cool color inspiration. So, this one is called Color Hunt. there's another one called Design Seeds that offers color palettes for you to use and be inspired by. Another pretty good resource is Adobe Color. So this has tons of color schemes. I would be a little more careful with this one just because these haven't been curated really. There's just like a massive database full of random people's color combos. So definitely do this. Use this with a grain of salt. Use the app, it has a bunch of cool interesting features. Yeah, just give it a look, have a look, and see. once you've kind of gotten familiar with the online resources for color inspiration, what I want you to do for the assignment for this lesson is to find one image that you love the color of and use that to adapt a color scheme for a header slide. So, as you can see, I've done it here. I found this beautiful, I think it's a wedding invitation or something, from Pinterest. I've borrowed the colors from it into a slide design. What you can do from here is it explodes into an entire theme. So, I haven't taken the colors exactly, so what I've done is I've used the eyedropper and I've shifted the tones a bit to be more what I like working better for how I'm going to be using it in the slideshow but using that inspiration as a starting point. So, I want you to try the same thing and post your results to the course. So, I will see you in the next lesson. 27. Color - Demo: In this lesson, I'm going to give you a demo on how I go about using color inspiration that I find online and turning that into a color scheme for a slide or presentation design. So, first of all, we're going to go to Pinterest. When we get to Pinterest, I'm going to type in, let's say book covers, and we're just going to see what crops up and see what we like. This Great Gatsby cover is pretty cool, pretty nice bold fonts. I like how this cream color is lined with a kind of, it looks almost brown, this dark color here and with the yellow. So, maybe we'll use this. So, I'm going to copy this image. I'm going to paste it into here and we're going to use it as inspiration to create a title slide. So first, let's pick the background color of the slide, and we can do that just by borrowing color directly from the image using Eyedropper tool. So, this yellow is pretty good. It looks a little dark, so I'm going to lighten it up a little bit here. There we go. That's pretty good. Yeah, there we go. So, I'm bringing down the saturation a little bit, maybe not quite that much. Yes. So, it's almost the same, but I'm tweaking it to suit my needs. So, the next thing I'm going to want to do is create a title. So, this is, let's say this is The Future of Digital Media, let's say. So, let's pick a font for that. I think Lemon Milk would be good. Big John's pretty good too. Let's see what fonts I've got up here. This should be good. So, let's make this real big, maybe not that big. Actually, maybe that big's okay. The future of digital media. Digital marketing, that's what I wanted to say. So, it's a little too big. Let's make that a little smaller. Yeah. All right. So, line up like this. So, that is also going to be not white, but rather this roast brown color. I'm not quite liking how that brown is playing with the yellow, I think I'm going to bring down the saturation a little bit. There we go. That's looking better. Now I want to also add the impact that this cream section is adding. So maybe I'll add a visual element, perhaps to add a little more interest to the slide. So, let's see how this looks. I'm going to borrow the color from here. Okay, that's a little dark for what it actually feels like, so I'm going to bring that up a bit. Yeah, there you go. That's about right. So, what can we do with this bar. Let's send it to the back. Maybe it could be the banner underneath. To add some interest, we could make it a little bit tilted. That could work. One thing that I like about this cover is the line drawing aspect. So, what I might do here is go to the nounproject.com. So let's see. Let's have an iPhone, like mobile phone. Which one looks good? This one's pretty good. So, download the icon and be sure to shout out to the author agents and design just for example's sake. We double click that to crop out, and then we'll definitely make sure to credit the author later, and we can use this icon to bring some more visual interest. I'd probably definitely add, by Joe Soandso. Match the colors to that. So, it's an art form. You have to play with it until you like it and learn as you make your layouts, what you do and don't like. Yeah. So, in the next lesson, I'm gonna be sharing some more nitty-gritty tips on things you can do in your software to achieve a good color theme for your presentation. So, yeah, I'll see you there. 28. Color - Nitty Gritty Tips: In this lesson, I'm going to show you guys some nitty-gritty tips on how you can work with color in practice in your slide shows. I'm going to be using Keynote for this but you all are smart so I think you'll be able to import these tips into PowerPoint as well. Just to get started, the Eyedropper tool. The Eyedropper tool is all powerful, it's really great, especially if you're using images from online for inspiration or anything like that or even within your slideshow. I'm just going to show you here. This is where you access the Eyedropper in Keynote. Basically use it to capture any color on the screen. If you want to change the background color of the slide you click out there, if you want to change the color of a shape you click on the shape and then you format. This I believe it's part of a group so I can't edit the color directly. I have to ungroup it first and then I can update the shape color. Now, it's here and I would just go there and I can use the Eyedropper tool or I can use a preset color. I undo that and that's the Eyedropper tool. In terms of creating a palette slide, this is really useful if say you have like a visual hierarchy where you've got a lot of different colors going on and you don't want to go through the hassle of changing your actual palette in here which I rarely do. What I sometimes do is I will create a blank slide and then create these shapes and copy all of the most commonly used colors that I'm using in a particular presentation and then just have them in one slide. Here I would take Eyedropper and grab this orange, then here I would go ahead and grab this blue and here I'll grab the off black, and so on and so forth. You kind of catch my meaning here. Then, you create this pallet slide and whenever you need to grab a color, you just navigate to the slide, you grab the Eyedropper and you want to change the color of something. What often you can do is say you want to change the background color of a slide, if you want to change this to say the blue. I would navigate to this slide and scroll to the pallet slide in the navigator, and then just Eyedropper it like this. That's my tip for creating a color system with a pallet slide. In terms of changing the colors of fonts and shapes using the Eyedropper tool is great but if you want to create your own colors, let go into there, and if you select the color picker, there's a couple of different ways you can create color. You can use these sliders, you can use this wheel thing which I find is okay but my preferred method for whatever reason tends to be that HSB. Say I want to go with like a turquoise, I would drag it over here and then once I know the color, the hue, I can play with the saturation and the brightness to get it to the level where I like it. I find this a lot easier than using the RGB just because I usually know what hue I want. So, this is not that useful to me. I mean to each his or her own find whatever color situation fits you best, I like HSB. For this tip here, when to use drop shadow and banners. For drop shadow, I find that when you're putting text on top of an image, sometimes the image has a lot of white in it. If you're trying to use white text, your text might actually get lost. Let's give you an example. Let's make it a new slide. Let's just use this as an example. The default Keynote. Let's say "All my lovely kids" or whatever it is, and we'll make this bigger. As you can see here, it's really tough to see this especially right here but white is a nice choice for the rest of it. Here that looks really good. What you can do with this is that you can create a very gentle drop shadow that doesn't look like this. Looks pretty corny. You don't want to go with the super corny drop shadow but if you blur it quite a bit and play with the opacity so that it's really gentle, I think that that's actually a fairly good option and depending on where you want to put it. Let's see here we're will this go. I think that's still the best choice. If you have the option, it's best to just have it not cross a line like that so it doesn't clash visually. If it were me I would do this but even here I would still consider having to drop shadow because without, it's still a little hard to make out, just a little bit. I think it does help. Let's have a look at this full screen. That looks nice. That's my tip for when to use drop shadow. As for banners, let's say you needed to have this title over here, and let's say you wanted it in white, you didn't want it in black or anything like that. One thing that you can do is obviously create a banner or something to put behind the text that will make it much easier to read. You can play with whatever colors you want. I use this technique a lot. It's useful. Some people don't like the look of a box behind it. You can play with the shapes you can have one with rounded corners. If this looks too sharp to you, then you can probably use something like this and just play with the radius of the corner as well by clicking on that green dot. Here, it became more like a slot. That's a pretty good option as well and I probably wouldn't leave that blue, I might change it to a different color like black or not quite such a harsh black but maybe an off black as I do like to do. That's my tip for using banners other colored tips, gradients, as I mentioned before, I think you should be very judicious and careful in using your gradients but if you want to create one here's how you do it in Keynote at least. I think Keynote is actually better at gradients than PowerPoint but I'm sure you can do it in PowerPoint as well. If you go to the background, you do a gradient fill and then here you just pick the two colors. So, let's maybe try like a yellow to a blue and let's make it look less saturated. As I said, gradients are such a crap shoot but if you're into it, this is how you do it. In terms of color blocks, for a color block that can be, I think I've talked about this a little bit before but it can be a nice way to add some interest visually to a slide. I'm going to create this block and I'm going to just push it off kilter a little bit just to make it a little interesting and then I'm going to change the color maybe let's say something more neutral. Let's just say that for now and then we can create like a nice big title here. "Quarterly sales report." Basically that's a color block just to add some dynamism to the design and that probably would only be useful for header slides where there's not much else going on, then you can have like your little other text here. Patterns and image backgrounds, I would recommend you do those also really judiciously. One thing that you can do, I think that works alright, is sometimes you can get away with like a subtle natural pattern, like a white marble or like wood. White marble, images, and I would say size is large. Usage rights, for reuse. Those aren't so nice but we'll see how it goes anyway. We'll copy this image. Basically, you can use subtle textures like this to add visual interest behind your text. This isn't the best example of a white marble. It's small. It's not that nice looking, but you take your time, you search through the images you're allowed to use. All right, so something like that. I would recommend you keep it toned down, keep it classy but that is another option that you can use to bring some visual interest to your slides here lines. Those are mine nitty-gritty color tips and in the next lesson we are going to dive into fonts. I'll see you there. 29. Fonts: All right. So, in this lesson, I'm going to just quickly talk about why you need nice fonts. I mean, hopefully, you already know why. But just to be certain, I'm going to quickly say you need nice fonts because the quality and the attractiveness of your fonts can really make or break how professional your presentation looks. All right. Just to use a metaphor. Fonts are like shoes. You can tell a lot about the person using them. There are a lot of really hokey designs out there, and choosing them is really quite subjective. But that being said, there are definitely classics you can use and that you can go with pretty safely. Okay. I just want to make it also a caveat here. Real typographers and graphic designers probably already could tell this but I'm not a typographer okay, in any way shape or form. To be honest, I don't really even like typography. I just know blatantly bad typography when I see it and it really hurts me. Okay. So, I've developed some tips here to protect you from committing some of those sins, and I want you to consider this as like very surface level advice from a non-expert, non-typographer but still advice that hopefully will still be serviceable to non designers. So, caveats complete. Let's begin. First, I'm going to start telling you some do's and don'ts with fonts and then I'm going to show you how to find nice fonts. All right. After that, I'm going to do a demo of how I go about pairing fonts in my presentations and then I'm going to give you some nitty-gritty tips in the software and things you can do with fonts. Okay, so let's get started. 30. Fonts - Do's and Don'ts: In this lesson, I'm going to talk about some dos and don'ts when it comes to fonts. All right. So my first tip, I'm going to recommend that you try and locate some stylish modern sans-serif fonts. Okay? I've made a list here of some of the sans-serif fonts that usually come prepackaged in software or on computers. I would say that most of these are pretty safe bets in terms of using them in presentation, and they are pretty easy to find. For my second tip, if you're looking to use a serif font, try and locate a clean and classy looking serif font. Okay? I feel that, sometimes, serif fonts can get a little bit over the top or they can just look a little bit odd. I like most of the ones that I've listed here and I think that they're pretty safe bets for using it in a presentation. Just a word of warning on serif fonts, they tend to be more appropriate for more formal types of presentations. So, say, you're going to be giving an academic lecture, that might be a good place for you to use a serif font, or if you're talking about anything that might be a little bit historical or kind of old-fashioned, this would be a good place. So, this isn't to say that serif fonts can't look modern, they definitely can, but it's just a rule of thumb for you to consider. One thing I definitely want to caution you against is avoid corny, overly stylized fonts like the plague. Okay? You want to stick to classic classy looking fonts and anything that looks like it has too much character is most likely going to look hokey, all right, in your presentation. So, all of the ones I've listed here are kind of like standard fonts that you might find and they just look a little too crazy to be taken seriously in a professional presentation. All right? All right, so my next tip is that you really should avoid using any of these default fonts that are really commonly used. The ones I list here, it's not that they're bad fonts at all, it's just that we've seen them so much that we are quite visually saturated by them. When we see them, it just doesn't have a good effect anymore, in my opinion. So, as far as possible, I would recommend you avoid any fonts like these. Okay? For my last tip, just remember that when you're presenting a slide show, usually your audience isn't right in front of the screen, their nose is to the screen, they're actually sort of far back. So, it's actually better if you use larger headings and they'll be much clearer for your audience to see. So, in the next section, I'm going to be talking about some resources that you can use online to find more unique and beautiful fonts. All right? So, I'm going to give you some tips on how to locate those, and I will see you in the next lesson. 31. Fonts - Finding Nice Fonts: In this lesson, I'm going to be sharing some resources I've put together on how you can find nice fonts for your presentation. So on this slide, I've put together a list of links that I'll focus on how you can find really nice font combinations or font pairings. It's really important that you find fonts that look nice together rather than just looking nice on their own. So I'm just going to go through a few of these sites with you just so that you can get an idea of what they're about. So a bunch of these are actually recommending Google Font combinations, which I think is nice because Google Fonts are easy to find and install. Essentially, you just go to the Google Font site, find the one that you're interested in, and then you select it, download it, and you can install it from there. All right. Basically, they're showing you how to combine header fonts, title fonts with body text and some headers, and that sort of thing. I think that the ones that I've chosen are really quite nice. There are a lot of resources online for font combinations and font pairings but, to be honest, not all of them are reliable. They have some pretty terrible-looking combinations that they're recommending out there. So, if I were you, I'd just stick to the ones that I'm recommending or if you've started to get a sense of what it should look like, then you can look for more on your own. But essentially, that's what I've done for that slide. So in this slide is basically a couple of quick links for you to find massive font databases. Obviously, there's going to be way more fonts here in these links than are going to be good for you, but definitely, it's good to check these out and see what's available there. Finally, this is kind of a miscellaneous list of various font-related things. I'm going to do a demo of Wordmark.it in the next lesson, so I won't cover that too much here. But all of these are basically more resources for you to find inspiration for nice fonts. All right. So in the next lesson, I'm just going to do a quick demo on how I like to work with fonts and pair them in a new presentation design. All right. So I'll see you there. 32. Fonts - Font Pairing Demo: In this lesson, I'm going to do a quick font pairing demo. So, let's say for example, you're doing an "About Us" slide. Maybe you're pitching to a new client or something. That should be larger. Helvetica is all right, but maybe something a little bit more fun. Then for the body, let's go and get some Lorem Ipsum. So, Lorem Ipsum generator. Lorem Ipsum is just a default text that you can use when you don't want actually write something. So, I'm just going to copy this random text and I'm going to paste and match the style. Yes, all right. So, that's pretty good. I think that the body text should be light. So, I might try Avenir, that usually looks pretty nice. That's a little heavy. Maybe we try light. I might try aligning it like that. That's not too bad, is it? Let's preview this. Well, that's really good. I'm happy with that. So, say I was going for a more conservative look, I might go with a Serif font and not bold it. One thing you want to avoid is having really short lines at the bottom like this. You want to have more attractive profiles to your text. Of course you can do justified, but it does depend on how much of this choppy looking blank space it creates in your text, and that'll depend on the length of your words. Let's center that and center that. That's looking pretty good. I'm pretty happy with that. So, that's just a quick demo of how I might pair fonts. You develop a sense for it and I've found a few fonts that I really like to use and of which I have already kind of recommended to you guys. So, yes, hopefully, you were able to find some fonts that you liked that looked nice, and classy, and clean. So, in the next lesson, I'm going to give you some more nitty-gritty tips in terms of working with text in your slides. I will see you there. 33. Fonts - Nitty Gritty Tips: All right. So, in this lesson, I'm going to give you a couple of nitty gritty tips on how you can work with fonts and practice. So, just to get started. First, I'm going to show you some useful text animations like the one you just saw. Then I'm going to talk a little bit about case and line spacing, and then I'm going to show you a demo of wordmark.it. So, first for the useful text animations, I have a couple that I want to show you. So, I'm just going to duplicate this slide just to give you an example. So, the first one is a color highlight. So, what I mean by a color highlight. So, when you're going from one topic to the next, it can be really useful to use a visual indicator, which one you're currently on. So, let me just duplicate those again. I got to group that. So, when we're on this one, we can change the shape color to indicate that we're currently on this one. Then in the next slide, we would do the same for the second bar and that would be there and the same for the third bar. So, this is a really basic tip, but so essentially it'll look like this. When you're actually giving the slide show, so will be, ''Oh! Here I'm talking about, topic number one, then topic number two. Now, I'm talking about topic number three.'' It's a very simple animation but very useful. So, for the next step, most animations frankly look really corny, but there are a couple that I think can be used to good effect. So, one of them is move in. So I'm just going to give you a quick example of that. I'm going to group these together, so that I can animate with them. On the build in, I'm going to say, ''Move in, that's it buddy.'' So, we already saw it here, and I'll just show you again how that looks. Of course, you can move in from different directions, and that will change how logical it actually looks. So, if you show it like that, that doesn't necessarily make a ton of sense. I mean, it's going to be better than something like this which makes no sense at all. But just use your better judgment. Another thing you can do is dissolve in. So, I'm just going to do that with a second example here. I'm going to add an effect and dissolve. One tip I want to give to you here is don't have to dissolve last too long. One second is way too long. I would stick with 0.2 or 0.3 seconds maybe a little bit longer is okay. Yeah. Depending on what you're going for and what mood you are in. But, that's awful. Then that's fine. So, that's my quick nitty gritty tip for text animations. As for case and line spacing, I'm going to bring back this slide that we worked on already. For case, my tip here is that you can define the capitalization in the settings usually. So, sometimes it can be nice to just quickly change something to all caps. Save, we're going to go back to that. Another tip here is that when you're using something as a header especially if there's a sub header. So, just be aware that if you're using a sentence case, it can cause a unevenness that might be better visually resolved if you use all caps. The reason is because all caps, everything terminate at the same level whereas with sentence case you have this undulating line and sometimes that just doesn't look as clean. So, I would just take that into consideration. So, say it's like something like this, where it can be a little bit visually busy if it's bouncing up and down like that. So, if I want to change that, I might change to a Sans Serif font, and then also change it to all caps, and then you have a more even set of lines sitting next to each other. I would probably make that smaller and consider the formatting a little bit. So, those are my tips about capitalization. So, in terms of line spacing, definitely consider the effect that your line spacing has. Sometimes if something is really tight, it can look a little too close, but then again if it's too wide, it might feel a bit airy or wholly. So, especially with headers. I think it's important to be aware of what's going on with your line spacing. Like here, I actually don't think I did the best job. I would have done it them even closer together, and I might even consider taking this into a new text box, so that I could change it in relation to the rest. So, I would say that tighter line spacing is probably working better than before. So, yeah. Just be aware of case and line spacing issues and how that plays with the negative space in your slide. So, for my last nitty gritty tip here, I'm going to show you wordmark.it. So, as you can see it's now created a series of previews of all the fonts I have on my computer, and up here, I can make it all caps, sentence case, or all lowercase. I'm also going to use this to make it bigger. So, I can see how these are going to look as a header. That makes it a lot easier for me to pick fonts when I'm making a new presentation. So, those are my tips and the assignment for this lesson is to find and install online two fonts that worked together as a header and subheader pair for your presentation. So, use all the resources that I've given to you so far and locate a couple of new interesting and nice fonts. So, that about covers it for the font section. In the next section, I'm going to be talking about visuals, and I will see you there. 34. Visuals: All right. So, in this lesson, I'm going to talk to you about the importance of meaningful visuals in your presentation. So, visuals are really tricky. On the one hand, you should be extremely selective about the images that you choose to use in your presentation. I want you to make sure that there's a good reason for including every image that you use. The reason is because images say so much, there's just the connotations of color, and just so many cultural implications, and the odds are fairly good that an image plucked from online will say, either stuff that distracts from, or it doesn't really match what you're trying to say or the mood you're trying to convey. So, my first piece of advice is be really careful about what images you pick, and try to pick as high quality images as possible. On the other side of the token, visuals can be so powerful, and sometimes an image or an infographic will be truly the strongest and best way of conveying a particular idea. For example, sometimes complex theories can be simplified or explained visually in a way that would be really kind of convoluted if you try to do it verbally. In other cases, products or designs, it's so much better to just show it. Show the picture, show the rendering, rather than trying to give a verbal description of it. Now, that that's been said, that kind of the importance of meaningful visuals, in the next four lessons, I'm going to share some do's and don'ts, how I find nice and free visuals online. Then I'm going to give a demo of how I place images into slideshows in my best practices for that. Finally, I'm going to show you some nitty-gritty tips, cropping, aspect ratios, that sort of thing about images. So, I'll see you in the next lesson. 35. Visuals - Do's and Don'ts: So, in this lesson I'm going to share some do's and don'ts when it comes to using visuals and images in your presentations. So, first off, I just want to list a couple of good uses of visuals. Charts can be really great when they clearly show something that is too complex to explain in words, and the key here is that it should clearly show it as in it should be comprehensible within one glance. If it's too complicated and too detailed, it's probably going to fall flat. They're not going to have time to parse it visually while you're standing in there talking to them. My second tip here is to use beautiful images. The higher quality the images you use, the better your presentation comes across if indeed you are using images and it's best if those images convey something important that words alone can't express. What you don't want to happen is you don't want to be using images that carry a lot of connotations or that just give a mood or tone to your presentation that doesn't match what your goal is. So, I'm going to give some examples of these and some negative examples in the slides ahead. Now, I'm going to talk about some types of images and visuals that you really should avoid if at all possible. The first one is corny stock photos or clipart and I'm just going to give a preliminary apology to anyone who is responsible for making these images but I'm sorry to say that they're really corny and using visuals like this is really going to bring down the overall integrity and quality of your presentation. So, if your corn detector goes off at all and hopefully you have one, just don't use that image. My next tip here is not to use convoluted infographics. One thing that I see people doing relatively frequently is using phony charts or infographics that almost make sense but don't really or they look smart but really it's like an empty or meaningless graph or chart. So you really want to make sure that if you do have say like a venn diagram like this, that it's truly like 100% meaningful and there's no BS there. As for infographics, again try to make sure that whatever concept you're trying to convey with it, it comes across really clearly. That's really important if you want your audience to be able to follow whatever it is you're saying. More examples of this would be poorly labeled or hard to read charts. For example, this chart has no title, this one you can infer the meaning from the axes, the more educated you are the higher your income, that's good but what's bad about it is that these tiles are really small. If I'm halfway across the room, I'm not going to be able to tell what that says. As for this one, I've got no idea what these bars mean. This is a list of airports in the Greater London area. This is the number of- It just says millions. So, just be aware of making your charts and your infographics as user-friendly as possible and that often will mean using larger font sizes and just really think about what kind of information you're trying to get across and really consider the type of graph or infographic that will convey that the best. And again, I just want to go over how annoying it is to look at meaningless charts or meaningless diagrams. Not all concepts can just be thrown into a venn diagram and have it make sense. I really want to encourage you to avoid making charts that sound vaguely smart but don't really make sense. Another thing I want to caution you against is using images where they aren't needed and don't add anything of value. So, an example of that might be if you have a slide about innovation, you don't need to have this corny image of a chalkboard drawing of the word innovation with a thought bubble, hopefully your words can just speak for themselves. Basically, I'm asking you to be quite judicious and careful about using too many irrelevant images again because they simply distract from your message unless you really need that image in your slideshow. Another thing I want to caution you against is the poor use of negative space and margins. So this looks okay but depending on what you're trying to say, it can be more impactful to just have the image fill up the entire screen. If it's really about the image, then why not give it all of the real estate that it needs or that it could use. So, another thing that you should not do if at all possible, don't use images with white background on a slide with a non-white background, it just looks so bad. So, if you need to use a bunch of images with white backgrounds say you're making like a mood board of products or something and they're all siloed on white, just make the background of that slide white, even if none of the other slides are white, it's okay. No one is going to complain. It's just really visually jarring especially if all of the boxes are separate, that drives me insane. So, those are some of my do's and don'ts for visual images and in the next section, I'm going to give you some tips on how you can find nice free visuals for your presentation. So, I will see you there. 36. Visuals - Finding Nice Visuals: In this lesson, I'm going to give you a few quick tips on where you can find nice free visuals online. All right. So, I've put together a couple of links on this slide, where you'll be able to find various things like free stock photos, vector icons, creative commons videos, and that sort of thing. I'd encourage you to go through them all and just have a look at what they offer. I'm just going to show you very quickly a few of them. This one, The Noun Project, is really neat. It's tons and tons of icons that you can search through. So, let's say for a candy, let's just say, as an example. It'll just come up with tons and tons of vector icons that you can download and use as long as you use attribution. All right. So, you got to credit the author for their work. So, that's a resource I really like. Pexels.com is a pretty good free stock photo page, and I find that the quality of the images is pretty good. Another way to find creative commons images is simply to use either the Creative Commons search, or actually if you're using Google, you can search Google images and filter by tools and usage rights. I'll just do a really quick demo of that for you. So, let's go to google.com, and let's just say "puppies". So if you go to Images, and over here to Tools, if you go under Usage Rights, you can find all the ones that are labeled for reuse, and those will show you the ones that are generally Creative Commons and that you'll be allowed to use in your presentation. Okay? Beyond that, there are a few resources here for templates on charts and diagrams, which are pretty interesting. If you need to make a visual, there are tons of resources online where you can modify an existing design to suit your needs. Okay. Like this one is $2, which isn't bad but there's a ton of free ones as well. All right. Here is a short list of places where you can find paid images and visuals. Just a caveat, I've never used these, I've never had to. But then again, I'm not a media agency or anything. I'm mostly using presentations internally so I feel comfortable using the methods from the previous slide for most of what I do. That's it. This is a quick lesson. The assignment for this lesson is to use some of the search tools covered here and find three high quality non-corny images that could possibly be used in your presentation, and save them to your project folder. That's it, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 37. Visuals - Image Placement Demo: Hi, guys. In this lesson, I'm going to show you some demos on how I like to place images in my presentations. So, let's begin. So first, I'm going to show you a big image plus quote. Then, I'm going to do an image plus a caption, so it's slightly longer than a quote. Then, I'm going to do a mood board slide and then I'm going to do a product feature callout slide for you. All right. So, let's begin with the big image plus quote. All right. So, if I had to put a quote on here, let's say. All right. So, as you can see, this image is pretty busy. So, I think what I'm going to want to do is create a shape that can serve as a background for this white text. All right. So, that'll be good. I want that be pretty dark, but I think I want to make it slightly like not a 100 percent opaque. So, I think that looks nice. I think for attributions, it can be nice if that is uppercase. All right. So now, we've got this. Let's put it somewhere good. I'm in the middle. Actually, it's still looking pretty busy with that being transparent. So, maybe something like that. That's not bad. Oftentimes, if the image is there to create a mood, you don't need to worry too much about blocking off a bunch of it. Okay. I don't feel too bad about this. All right. That's looking pretty good. So, I'll just demo an image plus caption. All right. If I needed to put a caption here, what I would probably do is create a block off to the side. Just because depending on the content of the image, something on the side can be nice or alternatively something across the bottom. I think can be good depending on the layout of the image. All right. So, I think that's probably pretty good. The interesting stuff in this image is definitely on the left side. So, I might do something like that. Actually, I know that this looks like this. We can probably make it smaller and improve the resolution a bit. Yeah. That's pretty good. Okay. So then, I would maybe borrow some text from an earlier slide and put that caption here. Obviously, the caption isn't going to be this long. So, that's looking pretty good. Next, I'm going to demo a mood board slide. All right. So, in a mood board, you're basically collecting a bunch of images that are meant to convey a certain idea when all put together. So, just for the purposes of this demonstration, I'm using random photographs from my collection. But obviously, you'd be doing it in order to create a mood or to convey a particular idea. So, for me, the trick is finding how the images fit together best in terms of their aspect ratios, and I often like to put a little bit of a border in between just depending on the colors and what we're going for. This is tricky because this one so big. I might have to make that one smaller. What I'm doing is aligning things right next to each other and then using shift on the arrow key to set them a set distance apart. All right. I'm not going to be too fussed about finding exactly all different images for this, but just that you get the idea. All right. So, there you have it. That's a mood board slide. Real quick. Finally, I'm going to do a product feature callout slide. So, say, you've got a product that you're trying to pitch and you want to show what's good about it at various points. So, you might use arrows in order to indicate your features and might use something that's probably good. So, I might do something like this. So, this is just a random example that I've done really quick for you, just to show you how it looks. So, I just like to use text and arrows in order to indicate features or something like this. All right. Right. So, now that I've done some demos for you, in the next lesson, I'm going to give you some quick nitty gritty tips on how to work with visuals and practice, including cropping, and aspect ratios, and stuff like that. So, yeah, I will see you there. 38. Visuals - Nitty Gritty Tips: Hi. In this lesson, I'm going to be going over a few quick nitty-gritty tips on how to work with visuals and images in practice. So first, I'm going to go over cropping and manipulation of images. Then, I'm going to go over images and slide background colors. How to make those work with each other well. Lastly, I'm going to show you how to do a high res and reverse image search on Google. So, for cropping and manipulation, I just want to show you quickly that you can and should manipulate your photos, and crop them so that whatever it is you're talking about takes center stage. So if, for example, this was more about the people, I would probably move it and zoom it in way on them, like so. Now, that's much more about the people rather than the entire scene. For another tip, you might sometimes wish to change the aspect ratio of an image. I wouldn't recommend it for photographs, but sometimes with patterns or other types of backgrounds you might find it necessary. So, you'd just want to go and make sure the proportions are not constrained, so you'd be able to stretch and pull your images as needed. Sometimes when you bring an image in, it might be accidentally contorted somehow, and then you can use that to get it into more normal proportions. For my next tip, I'm going to talk about images and slide background colors. If you have an image where it doesn't take up the entire slide but rather it has to, for some reason, be perhaps centered or otherwise not filling up the whole slide, definitely be aware of what color the background is. White can be pretty harsh depending on the colors in contrast to the image. Black might be a better choice or, as you know, I like a bit of an off-black. So, as you can see here, your eye goes straight to the image as opposed to being overwhelmed by much of bright pixels around it. But in other cases, if you have an image of an item that has a white box around it, you definitely want that slide to be of a white background. So just be aware of how your image is playing with the background color behind it. So, now, I'm going to show you a high res and reverse image search. If you go into Google and you search for images, something really great to know is that you can search only for large images, which will show up much more beautifully and with better resolution in your slideshow. So just select large and resize, and you'll be able to see, and, of course, you'll be able to filter by images that are labeled for reuse. One last thing I want to show you is a reverse image search. So sometimes what I end up doing is if I find an image that I really, really, really like on Pinterest that I need to use as a reference, sometimes I'll have luck. Say, that this image is only a certain resolution if I right click it, and search Google for image, and this might only work on Chrome, so you'll need to be using Chrome probably to do this. But you can reverse image search, and then you can filter by image size so you can find higher resolution versions of the same image. Just be careful, sometimes they're not actually good quality. But these ones seem to be pretty fair quality, so that's good. Just click on it and check first, and be careful about navigating all the way to the website. You can just- if you need to download it from Google. So, those are my tips for working with images. Pretty simple, pretty basic, but hopefully useful to you. So, the assignment for this lesson is to find a high-quality image online that fills an entire slide, and use your knowledge of font, color, and contrast to put a big idea or quotation on top of it. Good luck, and I will see you in the next lesson. 39. Slide Layouts: Okay. So, in this lesson, I'm going to be talking about slide layouts. Okay. Slide layouts are really important because you can have gorgeous fonts, beautiful colors, and pixel perfect images, but if you throw them together in a haphazard way, your presentation is going to end up feeling hectic, busy, illogical. Yeah. So, basically, in the next four lessons, I'm going to share some do's and don'ts for slide layouts, ways that you can find layout inspiration online, and then I'm going to demo a couple of examples of how I might do a slide layout for various slide types, and then in the last lesson here I'm going to show you some nitty gritty tips in the software on things you might want to watch out for when you're creating your slide layouts. All right. So, let's begin. 40. Layouts - Do's and Don'ts: Hi. In this lesson, I'm going to share some do's and don'ts when it comes to creating layouts in your presentation. All right. So, the first thing I want to talk about is The Squint Test. This is kind of related to when I had you drawing little thumbnails of what you thought might go on each of your slides. Basically, if you can't squint and still tell what's going on on a slide, it probably is too complicated. Okay? So, you basically want there to be no more than five key elements on a slide and the fewer the better. Yeah. So, if you're not sure whether one of your slides is too busy or complicated or not, step back, take a squint, and if you can't make out all of the main elements on it, then you should probably simplify. You can break it up into different slides. Worst case scenario, it can be broken down and it becomes a reference slide, which is okay too. All right. So, from here, I'm going to talk about a bunch of slide types that I really think that you should avoid if at all possible. Okay? The first one is Wordblob slides. Got an example on the right. Basically, that means a slide with a bunch of text on it. This is okay if and only if the presentation is mainly intended to be sent over email to someone who will not have someone presenting it to them, they will just be reading it for the first time on their own. Okay? That's okay for that. But, if you're actually delivering a presentation, you don't want a bunch of text on a slide like this. Okay? It's just going to distract your audience. Plain and simple. Similarly, you don't want to have long bullets, long text on bullets in a slide. Okay? You might think, "Oh, but it's just three things." It's not three things. It's about 20 sentences that they would have to somehow follow through while you're talking. So, definitely avoid slides like this. Pretty straightforward here in number three is, avoid confusing infographics. If you can't tell at one glance or with one simple sentence to explain what an infographic is about, it's probably too complicated, and you'll need to find of a simplified way of expressing the idea that you're trying to express. Showing slides like this probably comes from an impulse to show that you've got data or that you've done your work. But, in the end, if it's not somehow accompanied by a visual that actually makes sense or something that actually conveys your message, then it's going to overall weaken the impact of your message. Okay? Number four, please, please, please, avoid corny stock image slides. Just at all costs. Just don't do it. All right? Number five, avoid overfilled slides. Try to keep as few elements as possible on one slide. Yeah. So, those are my five simple tips for slide types and layouts to avoid in your presentations, and I will see you in the next lesson. 41. Layouts - Finding Layout Inspiration: Hi. In this lesson, I'm going to share a few quick tips on how you can find inspiration when creating your slide layouts. So my first tip here is, keep it simple. Try to put as few elements as possible on a slide and make important things big. All right. My second tip is to look at the templates that I recommended in Lesson 16. The templates that I found online have really pretty nice design layouts, so if you're not sure exactly what you should do, definitely take a look at some of the ones that have been developed professionally, and find inspiration from those. My third tip is to look at more professional slide templates. There's a bunch of websites online that offer them and you can just browse through and look for ones that you like and find inspiration there. My fourth tip is to search Pinterest for presentation templates. These ones are a little bit more dicey just because I don't feel like they've always been totally thought through and they tend to be a little bit complex and overly detailed, but in general, I think you can find pretty good inspiration on Pinterest for slide layouts. All right. That's it for my tips on how to find slide layout design inspiration. In the next lesson, I'm going to do some quick demos on how I like to design slide layouts. All right. So I'll see you there. 42. Layouts - Demo: Hi, guys. In this lesson, I'm going to demo a few quick slide layouts, so you can see on my process for creating new slide designs. All right. So the first one I'm going to do is a Header slide, and then I'm going to do a Three big ideas slide, followed by a One big ideas slide. And finally, I'll do a Diagram slide for you. All right. So if you'll remember from Lesson 24 on Finding Pillar Inspiration, I did this type of slide inspired by this piece on Pinterest. And I'm just going to just real quick recreate that process for you here. Let me go ahead and eyedropper that color that liked. Then I'm going to go in and create that bubble banner sort of thing. I believe that's white. I'll make that big. And for the text. All right. So we've got this, and then there was like a yellow shadow banner behind. Oops! Behind the white one. Yeah, that's looking pretty good. And the font was not this font, was it? Let's pick a different font. Didot. That's kind of nice. Maybe we'll try Didot. And Alexy. In the background at this size, it's looking a little pale to me. So I might actually strengthen that a little bit, maybe make it more saturated. Maybe not quite that saturated. Maybe bring down the darkness a little bit. That's pretty good. I'm happy with that. So from here, I'm going to load this out into a Three big ideas slide. So using the same theme, I'm going to copy the colors. I'm going to create some text. All right, that's better. I've sort of edited the text to have a nicer formatting. That's pretty all right. It's a little bit pale overall. I think it's still legible. So it's kind of all right. All right. So that is a Three big ideas slide. I'm going to go on and make a one big ideas slide. I think to do that, I'm just going to copy this. And maybe even just make it like white on pink. All right. And here, this is kind of to widen the gap for my liking, so I'm going to shrink that down a bit, and, I'm going to make that a little smaller. Oh, but I liked this. There we go. Yeah. I'm happy with that. Sometimes I like to add bars behind the text for emphasis. So if I send this to the back, if I really want to emphasize that she had no idea what was going on. Yeah. I kind of like this better without though, so, I'm going to take it out. And the last slide I was going to show you, is a Diagram slides. So, let's create a new slide. I'm just going to copy and paste this one. And then I'll use. Yeah. So that's basically my process for creating a diagram. Use shapes, and colors, and arrows, and subtitles. All right. So now you've got a sense of how I make diagrams, and different things that are possible. Obviously, you can play around with outlines of different colors. I mean, definitely you'd be aware of how the colors are interacting with each other. You can also play with Opacity, this could have no fill, and you can have overlapping lines and colors, and that sort of thing, depending on whatever it is you need, and what you're going for. All right. So that's going to be the end of this demo. In the next lesson, I'm going to be sharing a few nitty-gritty tips on working with layouts and practice. I'll see you there. 43. Layouts - Nitty Gritty Tips: Hi, guys. In this lesson, I'm going to give a few quick nitty-gritty tips on working with layouts in practice. So my first tip is wide screen versus 4:3 aspect ratio. Basically, my tip here is always use a wide screen unless you're 100% sure that you're going to be presenting on a 4:3 aspect ratio screen, which is less and less common these days. The way that you know what aspect ratio your presentation is as well as in keynote, you can go here to document and look here the slide size is as wide screen versus standard. Generally speaking, widescreen presentations just look a lot more dynamic and nice, of course you can show a standard presentation on a wide screen, you're just going to have black bars on the left and right which looks doofy. So, yes, stick with a wide screen. My second tip is to do with alignment and distribution. So, I'll just use these as an example. If you have a bunch of elements that you're working with and they need to be evenly spaced out you can select them all and go to format. Under Distribute, I prefer to stick with horizontally and vertically, in this case vertically. Now you'll see they have even spacing in between them all and it works the same for things that are in a row horizontally. So, for alignment, that's pretty straightforward. If I wanted to align all of these on the right, I would just go here to align and align right. You can also align things by their centers is like this. So they're all centered along their center axis. Then align middle is aligning them this way. So if I align all of these in the middle, that's not going to work. So, let's align these two in the middle, and now you'll see they're even side-to-side. So, that's basically my tips on alignment. My last tip here it has to do with animation. Generally speaking, transitions from slide-to-slide tend to be best done simply. So, in general, I use either no transition or a dissolved transition like this one. It's just a simple crossfade. It's probably 0.2 seconds, not a full second. So, basically my last tip here is about transitions. So generally, you don't want your transitions to last too long. Keep it simple. Use a crossfade and don't use any of those other crazy transitions that are made available in the software. My last animation tip is that you can use a panning motion by moving the image over time. As you can see, it creates a panning effect which can be cool if you have something to say and wanted to create a sense of motion and dynamism. That works from side-to-side for landscape images. For portrait images, you can make the image go up and down which can have a cool dramatic effect, depending on what you're going for and the mood you're trying to create. This one's a cool picture I took of New York City from an airplane. Yeah, it just pans down to Lower Manhattan, which is pretty cool. That's it. That's the last of my tips for slide layout, and that is the end of all of the lessons. So, for this final assignment, it's simply to finish your presentation. If you like, you can upload a PDF featuring your entire presentation, or if you don't want to show the whole thing, you can just show slide snapshots that give a sense of what it's about. Best of luck to you in delivering and creating your presentations. I'm going to do one last quick lesson going through a checklist of everything that we've learned and everything that you'll need to do in the future every time you make a presentation. That'll be it! Thanks guys, and see you in the checklist. 44. Presentation Design Checklist: Hi guys. In this lesson I'm going to recap everything that we've learned in this course, and also provide a quick checklist that you can use every time you need to make a presentation in the future. In making your presentation, first you're going to need to craft the narrative structure of your presentation. Second, using that narrative structure as your guide, fill out your content outline in bullets. After you've done that, you're going to need to make a visual storyboard of your presentation, imagining what the audience is going to see as you cover all of the content that you've outlined. Fourth, you're going to design and build your slides for clarity and good style. Fifth, you're going to choose a scripting approach. Sixth, you're going to practice your delivery. Finally, you're going to relax and do your best. 45. THANK YOU!: So, we've come to the end of this course. I want to thank you so much for watching it and taking it, and I really hope that it's been helpful for you in some way. If you have feedback, I'd love to hear it. If you have a presentation that you've created, please share it on the course. If you like this course and if you think it would be useful for someone else, I would so appreciate it if you would share it. Yeah, I hope to see you around. All right. So, thanks again. Bye. 46. Course Toolkit PDF: Hi, there. Long time no see. I just wanted to let you guys know that I developed a PDF cheat sheet for this course, and that you can find a link to it in the section below called "Your Project." In the right of that section, you should see a link to the attachment. It includes a ton of resources and cheat sheets for the topics we covered in the class, including the narrative arc structures, font and color examples, script development assignments, etc. I hope you find it useful. If you like this course, I would really, really appreciate it if you could give me a thumbs up, a written review, or best of all, a recommendation to a friend to watch the course. It would really help me out. One last thing, I just created a new course called How To Critique Any Design. It's a quick half-hour course where I teach my method for how to intelligently analyze and critique a work of design from graphic design to product design and beyond. If you're at all interested in design, please check it out by visiting my profile. You'll find a link to it there. If you like my classes, please be sure to follow me on Skillshare so you can be notified if I post a new class. Thanks, guys, and I'll see you around. Bye.