While it’s best to sketch a few ideas before you even hit the power button on your computer, once you do open your slideshow software, head first to the slide master and rearrange the default slide layouts into something more attention-grabbing. Try using the Rule of Thirds. The Rule…
Here’s what happens to audience brains when presenters speak while showing text-heavy slides. Their working memory gets overloaded. Working memory is that part of the cognition system where we contemplate information, wrangle with it, try to digest it. But working memory has limits on its cognitive load. It can only…
With my book manuscript and an edited volume of New Directions in Evaluation (on dataviz) due this Friday, this week’s blog post is a repost from an original article I wrote for Presentation Magazine. My background is a garbled mouthful: interdisciplinary program evaluation. What does that even mean? It…
Over here I talked about how important it is that we gradually introduce components of complex graphics – one-at-a-time – so as not to overwhelm the visual field and working memory of our audience members. We don’t want to slam our content in their faces all at…
I had the joy of working with Rodney Hopson, 2012 President of the American Evaluation Association, on the slides for his keynote talk. The transformation was so huge that I asked Rodney if I could write a blog post about it and the thinking we put into the new design.
My friend, Kurt Wilson, and I just wrapped up a contract to revise a set of slides – and the graphs within – for a big international client I can’t name. Here I’ll walk through one of the original slides and our revision of it. Keep in mind that these…
Most people fall into one of two camps on this issue: There are the newbies, who use animation with abandon to kartwheel text onto a slide. And then there are the veterans, who are so sick of kartwheeling they’ve rejected any slide animation on any computer anywhere in the…
It’s time to talk about bleeding. Bleeding is a technique used by graphic designers in which the image extends all the way to (or even beyond) the edges of a page or slide. In the slide below, the image is not bleeding. The picture of the tractor is…
It’s time to write this post. This may be the most frequently asked question in my workshops on evaluation reporting, data visualization, and graphic design. What do I think about Prezi? Most people’s first reaction to being in the audience of a Prezi presentation is “Wow, that…
As much as I advocate for minimalistic slide design, sometimes that just can’t happen. Sometimes you’ve gotta have a lot of words or a logic model or diagram to show. I previously showed one strategy for handling this – the Slow Reveal. But incrementally revealing parts of a complex…
