DESIGNING PRESENTATIONS

This page has been assembled especially for our current 4th year students who will be presenting an early draft of their senior project this upcoming week. This will mostly cover their ideas, research and very early prototypes and/or simulations of their final output. They seemed to be somewhat confused as to how to present their work, so I am giving them a few pointers using my own stuff as instructional material.

Well designed presentations definitely become a part of a designer’s portfolio. You can show them during job interviews and impress prospective employers. You can also publish them online as part of your creative output. So, take the time to always design a presentation intelligently, with taste and discrimination – just as you would do with any other design object.
______________________________

Design: Please click here to access the page >>>.
______________________________

Resources/Alternative Media: Please click here to access the page >>>.
______________________________

Structure: The setup of a presentation is pretty much standard and goes by the following progression and hierarchy:

1) Introduction: This is where you give a very brief description of the presentation. Should usually be only one slide, two at the most.

2) Background/Overview: Here you contextualize your own work by giving examples or references on what has been done before you in the area in which you are working. This can have sub-sections in which you describe different aspects of the background of your work. As an example if your work is combining the output of different fields then you would present these as subsections.

i) subsection 1

ii) subsection 2

ii) …

3) Body: This is the main part of your presentation where you will describe the work which you have been doing up until now. This too can have subsections where you go into different aspects of what you have been working on: Example, if you have been doing a lot of reading as well as preliminary design work, then again these activities should go into two subsections.

i) subsection 1

ii) subsection 2

ii) …

4) Conclusion/Future Work: Again, usually one or at the most 2 slides telling people what you plan on doing next with your project.

Your presentation may be printed or shown as a slideshow but the above hierarchy does not change much from one to the other. In a printed presentation you visualize this structure through clustering of content and in a slideshow by creating temporal, visual or even sonic spaces between the progressional components.
______________________________

Content: The thing to do is to plan and work on your presentation very much in the same way that you would work on any editorial project. So, here we go:

1) You will have text (your ideas, your work plan, your references etc). Take some of this text and turn it into headlines or editorial spots, quotes etc, to create hierarchies and highlights.

2) You will have visual ideas, turn them into images. These can be anything from your own doodles scanned into and refined in an image editor, images which you create from scratch in various design and 3D applications, and you can take screenshots from work in progress, or even use creative commons images (with attribution!!!) created by others which look similar to what you have in mind.

3) You can and should make diagrams, charts and mindmaps which show how your ideas and work flow connect. For these you can use software such as the opensourced yed graph editor (more below) and also the freeware software freemind for mindmaps (more on this below as well), from which you can take screenshots as well. You can also make beautiful legends for your diagrams which will add to their meaning and content.

______________________________

Design: Please click here to access the page >>>.
______________________________

Resources/Alternative Media: Please click here to access the page >>>.
______________________________