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Showing posts from May, 2012

Presentation (anti?)guru: Don Mcmillan

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Remember chicken chicken ? Well, let engineer and comedian (his words, not mine) Don McMillan break it down for you. Enjoy!

A word on visuals: Typography

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Source Wikipedia under CC license by Brandenands I have always been hesitant to write about typography because I have no formal education on it. However I can't keep quiet after what I have read and seen last week. Last week I found Emiland De Cubber .  He describes himself as a "full-time presentation lover and a part-time presentation designer." Certainly, Emiland's visual stacks stand out, but I disagree with his advise on typography and how he uses it. Now, I know I'm nobody in the Slideshare /presentation world, neither do I want or pretend to be.  I also know that in graphic design there is an entire world of styles. But I also know that design should be One and Universal, and that respecting the audience also means offering them type they can easily read.  So here is can I think about typography.  One single typeface is enough for one presentation stack I'm with Seth Godin in that a slide shouldn't have more than 6 (six) words,

Great documentaries for great presentations

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In recent months I have turned to documentaries for inspiration. Truth be told, this post is inspired by Sheila Bernard's book Documentary Storytelling. Make no mistake, documentary makers are researchers, some scientific, some not.  In any case good documentaries contain important lessons for scientific presenters. Learning from documentaries is only helpful if you watch a same documentary several times and start identifying its structure and visual consistency. Particularly,  listening the director's commentary you will find that there is a lot of valuable and important material that doesn't making it to the final cut.  This is a lesson for all scientific presenters: you can't present all what you have found and pretend that your audience is going to care. Documentary-makers face the awful challenge to compete with fiction films. It would hard to get people interested in documentaries if directors, producers and writers don't show their research in a creative