Back in February this year, I was asked to give a presentation about a project I was working on.  The presentation needed some diagrams in it to depict graphically how the project was going to achieve the client’s business goals.  Since things were at an early stage, the situation was not yet well understood, but I found that the diagrams I drew using the excellent Omnigraffle Pro were creating an impression of polish and completeness which was really quite wrong.

After some iterations and trials, I ended up redrawing the diagrams by hand.  It felt right to do it like that because it very powerfully conveyed the sense that here was a work in progress, needing to be questioned and refined, rather than being something mature and well polished.

Since then I’ve taken this approach quite a few more times, for different reasons, and it’s been pretty successful.  The slide I’ve used above to illustrate this is taken from Rethinking the Presentation, which I’ve talked about in the past in these pages.  I’ve also noticed other people, most of them more artistically talented than me, also taking this approach.  Most notable among these for me has been the remarkable Sacha Chua, a fellow IBMer, with her award winning “About Me” presentation.

My secret weapon in the field of drawing has been a fantastic piece of software, that I bought last November, called ArtRage 2.5. I quite regularly use this to draw pictures or diagrams for presentations, such as the one shown.  It is a very full featured art package which lets you draw using very realistic pencils, felt pens, chalk, oil paints, coloured glitter,  and more on a range of accurately simulated surfaces.

I’ve tried a few combinations for presentations, but I have mostly settled on the chalkboard surface on which I draw using… chalk.  ArtRage also has various tools that let you smear or smudge what you have made, realistically mixing paint colours etc. together as it goes.  I’ve used this to make chalkboard drawings that look as though they have been done on a knackered old smudge-filled board.  I’ve so far resisted the allure of using glitter in a presentation.

It’s worth noting that drawing with a mouse is quite hard, and it gets a lot easier if you use a graphics tablet, such as Wacom’s very reasonably priced Bamboo or more professional Intuos3 ranges that you can get from Amazon UK. Some of these products may even come with ArtRage licenses included, so check before you buy anything.

ArtRage is available for both Mac and Windows, and it comes in two flavours, a free version and a full version for $25, which is a bargain!  The full version supports layers, which I find particularly useful.  I often do all my drawing on a layer, and then delete the background layer (ie. the chalkboard itself) and export as a PNG.  This contains just the drawing on a transparent background which can then sit nicely on top of my “Gradient” themed slides in Keynote.

I’ve had ArtRage almost a year, at the time of writing, and I can’t say that I’ve constantly used it during that time, but it certainly fills a unique niche which I now find hard to imagine having to do without!

I’ve given Rethinking the Presentation a hefty tweak.  I have excised the end part, which was a discussion of what helpful stuff is around on the Internet and in books.  It suddenly hit me that this information was a prime candidate for a document, rather than a wordy five minutes on the end of the video.  Instead, I now have a slide with http://is.gd/2cMs written on it in a large font.  This link, intended to be easy to write down, redirects to a web page with all that information on it.

I’m also considering making a new, quite short, presentation with it in.  It just didn’t seem to fit where it was.

One thing feels a bit weird, though.  The video has had about a hundred hits, and I know that some of those were people sending the link to each other, or otherwise recommending it.  Now I have changed the thing that they recommended.  There’s got to be at least a possibility that they would have a different opinion of it in its new form.

Do I have a moral obligation not to change things, once they are “out there”?

Just over a year ago, I wrote a post here entitled “I Hate Presentations” in which I railed against some of the terrible things that audiences of PowerPoint presentations (specifically, me) have had to endure over the years. The endless dreary reading out of bullet points, the tiny fonts, awful clip-art, etc. etc.  I wrote the post in the context of a struggle to perfect a presentation about Virtual Worlds that I had to deliver it at an internal IBM UK conference for IT Architects the following week.  The presentation was a success – it went down very well, and it showed me that you can get away with tearing up the PowerPoint rule book – you don’t need bullet points and corporate templates to delight an audience.

Last month, a full year after these events took place, I gave a talk called “Rethinking the Presentation” at the 2008 incarnation of the same conference.  The purpose of this was to try and overturn some of the bad old assumptions about how to make slides.  What I have learned is that there’s a real desire in the world to do better at this, as well as a lot of room for the hoped for improvement.

This is a slidecast of my presentation – I hope you find it worthwhile.  I’m very interested to hear people’s comments and feedback – feel free to leave them here, or at blip.tv.

Edit: iPhone version added.

I suggest you watch in the fullscreen mode

Well, I have finished and delivered my virtual worlds presentation, and by all accounts the feedback was very positive. So now I am contemplating how I might take the presentation, with all its video, pictures, meaningful use of transitions, and the accompanying talk, and make it available for people to download, or even view online.

Given Andy Piper’s troubles in negotiating this exact same problem, I am giving this rather more thought than I had done previously – it clearly isn’t as obvious as it seemed. Exporting a presentation and adding audio should be simple on a Mac with all its media capabilities. That wasn’t Andy’s experience, though.

Unfortunately there’s no audio recording from the event itself, and so in order to produce a downloadable version, I will be required to reprise the talk that accompanies the presentation.

Here are my options for making a downloadable self running presentation, with audio:

1. Run through the presentation, using Snapz Pro X to simultaneously record the audio and screen capture the slideshow video;
2. Record the audio track separately. Listen to the recorded audio track, while clicking through the slideshow, and capturing it with Snapz Pro X. Use Quicktime Pro to join the audio and video together;
3. Record the audio track separately. Export the presentation to a Quicktime movie allowing five seconds per slide. Either export it in a video format that will be editable in iMovie or Final Cut Express, or convert it to one post facto. Finally, edit it to extend the stills so that the slides fit in with the audio track.

Keynote is very good at exporting. You can export presentations to PDF; to Flash movies; Quicktime slideshows and movies; Powerpoint; and other things.

Hence, superficially, the most attractive of these is option 3. However, there are difficulties in exporting slideshows to Quicktime that have movies in them. For example, where there is a delay in a slide to allow time for a movie to play, the delay in the exported version doesn’t begin until after the movie has finished which doesn’t work at all well. Also, in my slideshow, there are a couple of instances of running movies having other things fade in on top of them. Without having proved it, I suspect that, in the exported version, this is going to happen after the movie has stopped, which also won’t be as intended.

Option 1 is probably not going to work that well, because the idea that I might get the talk right in one large take, at least without an audience keeping me on my toes, seems a little improbable.

So, even though I’m not mad about option 2, it’s starting to look like the least painful way to do it.

Apple! If you’re listening, here are my suggestions on what you could do to make all this much easier:

• Fix Keynote Quicktime exports so that slides with movies in them work properly;
• Enhance Final Cut Express and iMovie so that they can edit at 640×480, 800×600, and 1024×768 – standard computer resolutions as well as standard video resolutions;
• Enhance Keynote to give it a presentation recording mode. The user would give the presentation, and Keynote would generate a Quicktime movie of the presentation, complete with the recorded audio track.

I’ll post again, if and when I’ve managed to do this!

Technorati Tags: apple, finalcutexpress, keynote, presentations, snapzprox, quicktime

Ive gone a bit quiet, haven’t I. It’s something I haven’t got enough momentum to do yet, really.

I blame the mayhem that buffets me in every area of my life at the moment. However what is really filling my head to overflowing at the moment is the presentation I have signed up to give next week at an IBM internal conference for IT Architects.

You see, I hate presentations. In my line of work I find myself in rooms looking at projections of Powerpoint slides at least once or twice a week. I’ve seen some truly awful stuff. Verbatim bullet point recitations vie with tiny fonts and detailed diagrams to give me a headache. Of course, it’s not all that bad, and it’s not all other people, either. However, I think that there is a huge scope for improvement in the way almost all presentations are created and delivered.

I have a goal to become an great communicator. Keeping this blog is part of that, but I’m currently focused on the part of it that is creating and delivering excellent presentations. I’m not aiming for average – i’m fed up to the back teeth with average in this field. I want to deliver presentations that are outstanding. They must be memorable and enjoyable, as well as conveying whatever message I have.

So I have been working very hard to come up with something a bit lot different for next week’s conference.

It was watching Alec Muffett’s presentation entitled Business Blogging – Innovate or Die which he delivered at the Blogs and Social Media Forum 2006 that started me thinking along these lines. That led me to Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 presentation at OSCON 2005. Since then I’ve done a lot of investigation and have trawled the web looking for ideas and techniques. I read Garr Reynolds‘ blog Presentation Zen in my RSS reader, and I bought and read Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points.

This is a kind of summary of what I have concluded from all this:

• plan the whole thing first, away from Powerpoint or Keynote or whatever;
• tell a narrative story – people remember stories;
• never use words when you could use a picture – take one yourself, or get them from iStockPhoto or the Creative Commons areas on Flickr;
• no bullet points. none. hate hate hate;
• surprise people – it wakes them up;
• consider abandoning the corporate templates and going for something much simpler.

Anyway, that’s enough procrastinationwriting about it. I need to get on with actually doing it.

If I can, I’ll publish the end result on here.

Technorati Tags: flickr, presentations, powerpoint, keynote