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Activity Instructions: Think about an upcoming (or previous) presentation or project.  

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Activity Instructions: Think about an upcoming (or previous) presentation or project.  

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Answer the following:

Level 1: What was the main takeaway?

Level 2: Write it in motivator + means format.

Level 3: Can you distill it 5-8 words?

You can comment below or live in the chat.

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A takeaway inspires and motivates your audience to want to learn what is being presented. It is the point of your content. Think of it as a newspaper headline; if it doesn’t grab attention, people are less likely to read the article.

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Activity Instructions: Use your takeaway to briefly outline 1-3 slides.

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Activity Instructions: Use your takeaway to briefly outline 1-3 slides.

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Directions

Step 1: Outline

Step 2: Sketch 1-3 slides

Step 3: Review it. What are the muddiest points? Does it flow?

Outline

Main takeaway:

Supporting Point 1:

1.

2.

Supporting Point 2:

1.

2.

Supporting Point 3:

1.

2.

Here is a Word template you can use.

You can also use a few post-it notes, a sketching tool like OneNote, GoodNotes, or Noteability.

You can also use a PPT file (DO NOT USE ANY DESIGN FEATURES YET, Just text and sketches or quick image searches that you are NOT committed to).

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It is the point of your entire presentation

Drives your content development

Connects the learning objectives to the resulting benefits

Lowers level of effort when building new presentations

Lowers the number of slides made and reworked because only content related to your message matters

Improves outcomes and increases learner engagement

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Directions: As you go through the presentation or immediately following the presentation, comment on this card using the template below:

Summary (A few sentences summarizing the material):

Take Home Points (list 3):

1.

2.

3.

Other Facts/Opinions/Ideas to share

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Always write your takeaway before developing your slides

Implicit or explicitly share the takeaway with your audience early

Include no more than three benefits in one takeaway to avoid diluting your message or lessening its impact

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The first part of your takeaway statement (motivator) gives your learner a reason to care, and the second part (by what means) tells them how they will achieve the promised goal.

Motivator: Better design

+

Means: starts on paper.

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Amazon.com: Non-Designer’s Design Book, The: 9780133966152: Williams, Robin: Books

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CRAP! 4 Basic Design Principles Every Creator Should Know

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CRAP! 4 Basic Design Principles Every Creator Should Know

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When it comes to blogs, featured images, or video thumbnails, there are a lot of easy concepts that are really no-brainers everyone should work on to elevate their craft.
As well as a short primer on how to train your designer's eye.

If we don't take these principles into consideration, we're going to end up producing a lot of CRAP!

And no one wants to produce CRAP! their entire lives.

Eventually, we need to refine our into better even if it will always feel like to those of us unfortunate enough to count ourselves among the perfectionists.

Enter Robin Williams's book The Non-Designer's Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice.

This is exactly the type of book I needed to read when it came to thinking about how to create more interesting CRAP! for my blog posts and YouTube videos.

Remember, all of the CRAP! we make is competing for the first few seconds of someone's attention, so it's important to think about how to hook them as soon as they come across our work.

Now, I consider myself both a "non-designer" and a "visual novice," which has really made this difficult.

And who can blame me?

Writers aren't known for being visual thinkers, after all.

That's what graphic designers are for!

Writers are supposed to put out a whole lot of word CRAP!

That's what we do.

That being said, words are technically a visual artifact - they are interesting symbols with agreed-upon meanings, not altogether unlike the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt or the cuneiform script of Mesopotamia.

Learning how to play around with words both in the featured image of blog posts and within the text itself is something that can pay-off for any serious writer in the long-run, so I took it upon myself to read Robin's book and implement her teachings in my own work as time goes on.

And I'm glad I did.

As I read, I was immediately struck by how many mistakes are easily avoidable - and how many I had been making...

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CRAP: 4 Basic Design Principles Every Creator Should Know

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When it comes to blogs, featured images, or video thumbnails, there are a lot of easy concepts that are really no-brainers everyone should work on to elevate their craft. Eventually, we need to...

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C.R.A.P. Presentation Applied to Academia

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C.R.A.P. Presentation Applied to Academia

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Storyboard is your plan. It connects the dots between the takeaway and the narrative. It saves time and ensures your presentation tells a story and supports your takeaway. When you create the slides first, you are making a presentation for you by you. When creating a storyboard:

1. Tell a story

2. Keep it simple

3. Use hierarchy and structure

Applying the storyboarding process saves you time and increases the effectiveness of your content.

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Your storyboard is your plan

It is meant to be fast and agile so that you don’t overinvest in any one solution.

Capture your thoughts quickly so you can move forward.

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Create your outline first

Each slide supports your takeaway

Tell a story and view your content as a dialogue

Use visuals in your slides to make it engaging

Use pen and pencil (or a tablet). It’s faster and you don’t determine aesthetics too early on in the process.

When you jump into PowerPoint first without outlining or sketching, it takes longer to produce high quality slides and the end product is less effective

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Contrast is one of the most effective ways to add visual interest to your page and to create an organizational hierarchy among different elements.

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Repetition can be thought of as consistency. As you look through a brochure, it is the repetition of certain elements, their consistency, that makes each of those pages appear to belong to the same brochure.

We need repetitive elements to clarify and unify.

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Design Principles: The C.R.A.P. Framework

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Design Principles: The C.R.A.P. Framework

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People use look and feel as their first indicator of trust.

Good design principles:

Build trust because it communicates information about your content and YOU as the presenter.

Helps your audience understand and remember your content.

The contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity (C.R.A.P.) framework was written by Robin Williams, the author of the Non-Designer’s Design Book ("The less you say, the more they will remember”).

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Every item should have a visual connection with something else on the page.

Otherwise, without order, there’s discomfort; it appears to be unorganized; we don’t know how to be effective.

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Physical closeness implies a relationship. The basic purpose of proximity is to organize, making the information more likely to be read and remembered AND BONUS, by organizing, you also create visually appealing white space.

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What did you learn? What are you applying right away? What did you want to know more of? What was useful!?

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What did you learn? What are you applying right away? What did you want to know more of? What was useful!?