How about a USB Drive in a WATCH! I gave our friend Todd Dunn one of these; I think he still wears it… too clunky for a girl; sheik, geeky, fun?
Or a USB Drive/Pen. Not as obviously geeky, but still fun.
And for the Presenter? How about a USB/Laser Pointer?
Or here’s one… A USB/MP3 Player!
I want to know if they make USB jewelry anywhere like a decorative pin, or more feminine bracelet? I know you can get them with lanyards, but what about something a little more classy? For us girl-geeks?
Posted by Mary Waldera at 10:59 PM .
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Quote from The CreativeForum.com Website which is a very good description of what I do; be it content or design or both… so am I a graphic designer, a presentation professional, a graphic technician, are we one in the same or are Graphic Designers et.al. sub-sets of Presentation Professionals? In my past life I was a Visual Communication Designer, presently I’m a Graphic Tech; yet I do the same thing! How do you define your role in the Presentations Industry?
Here’s the quote, you should check out their posts and site…
“From my point-of-view, graphic design, in its basic form, it the blending of words, images, color, tone, line, etc. to communicate a message. Beyond this is the ability of the design to reach the audience on an emotional level that generates a response. That response can be to purchase a product, learn something, make a donation, change their viewpoint, or other actions.
I don’t believe graphic design is art, although they share some common characteristics. I see art as the personal expression of the artist’s ideas and emotions. Graphic design, on the other hand, is the expression and communication of the client’s ideas. Designers put a lot of themselves into their work – their style and experience – but the goal should be the memorable communication of the client’s message.
Before we were graphic designers, we were called commercial artists. It’s ironic, but the Master of Fine Art like DaVinci and Michaelangelo were the commercial artists of their day. Their Patrons dictated much of the work – their message, not necessarily the artist’s. So, who knows, maybe some of you will be the Masters of Fine Art in the future. But, for today we still need to meet the project goals, within budget, on schedule and generate some results for our Patrons.”
Posted by Mary Waldera at 10:36 PM .
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Please join the ICIA Presentations Council on their upcoming webinar, Wednesday, August 10, beginning at 5:00pm ET. Rick Altman, PowerPoint Conference Host, will present “Too Many Chefs? The Fragile Art of Collaboration.” To register, please send an email to Ellen Weber at eweber@pstrat.com. Registration will be limited to the first 50 who respond.
Too Many Chefs? The Fragile Art of Collaboration
A funny thing happened recently on the way to a PowerPoint Design Contest: There were 10 judges and 10 different opinions. The result was a comically-chaotic and mostly-futile effort at consensus. This is especially illuminating in light of the Presentation Council’s recent discussions about “best practices.” To what degree can we define a best practice? Can an art form be quantified that way? These fascinating questions all played out in a flurry of emails between 10 professionals who all had strong opinions to share.
This session will showcase many of the fine entries to the Sweepstakes (www.pptlive.com/contest.htm), as well as a few of the, um, less-than-stellar efforts. And we’ll unveil the winning entry and walk you through how a team (of less than 10!) turned the winning entry into the template that our entire presentation team will use.
Posted by Lee Potts at 12:01 AM .
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The July 21 post by Robert Befus citing the “1986 UM/3M Study” and his July 14 post regarding the “1981 3M/Wharton Study” clearly point up the dearth of research on the impact of visuals in the persuasion process. Those studies are decades old and were done well before computer-based presentations became commonplace. Even the 1996 update of the UM/3M study is antique by today’s standards. Yet these are still about the best we have of this type of empirical research.
But maybe it is not the volume, timeliness or even the quality of research that is lacking. Maybe what the industry needs is a new approach to understanding the power and impact of media in presentations. Maybe what we need is a more enlightened and contemporary methodology, a fresh look at what we need to know.
As the situation stands, presentation pros must use their instincts and training to determine when the goulash of media elements in a presentation works and when it doesn’t. Often, the presentation pro never sees the final presentation. Typically, only feeble attempts are made to collect information after the fact about audience reaction or effectiveness, with little attention given to media specifics. In most cases it is impossible to determine which individual elements—visuals, sounds, graphics, message, environment, presenter skills—were effective and which were not, much less how the elements worked as an ensemble to influence the audience.
In our search for understanding the impact of media in presentations, are we looking in the right cupboards? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Robert L. Lindstrom at 3:13 PM .
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Have you ever been told that you need to be a better problem solver or to “just do the math” and find yourself drawing a picture in your head or on paper and wonder what’s wrong with you and why you can’t just calculate something math-related in your head (like figuring out the tip after dinner)? The right-brain, left-brain theory comes immediately to mind, but so does another term. Extreme Thinking. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Mary Waldera at 12:57 PM .
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“Make sure you have finished speaking before your audience has finished listening.”
~Dorothy Sarnoff
Posted by Lee Potts at 12:44 PM .
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Brainbench.com is a cool website that offers Pre-hire testing and Employee development as well as Individual Certification. Their assessment products predict employee success in Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, Personality, Past Work Behaviors, Interview Guides, Certifications, and Consulting Services.
Great website for testing your own, your employees, or future employees knowledge and skills. Typing tests, Personality tests, software and much more. Some tests are free, others are reasonably priced.
The site has also just released released their 2005 Global Skills Report out now that you can download for free at: www.brainbench.com/globalskills2005.
Posted by Mary Waldera at 11:26 AM .
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I was doing some demographic research regarding seniors and the Internet and came across this “Enhanced Visibility” Keyboard.
Not that I am getting OLD or anything, but a couple of great features for those Power Point Trainers out there.
1. The larger letters on the keys
2. Works great in low light situations
3. Comes wired or wireless
The wireless is $79.99 and the wired is only $39.99
www.seniors.com
Posted by Julie Marie Irvin at 10:08 AM .
1 Comment »
Here are a couple of folks with some handy terminology info. These are personal sites so you may want to grab the contents in case it all disappears suddenly:
http://home.rochester.rr.com/interceptor/data.htm
http://missmax.com/orinda/measure.html
This is good stuff……………………TD
Posted by Todd Dunn, CTS at 8:57 PM .
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Background
Douglas R. Vogel is a professor and chair of Information Systems at the City University of Hong Kong. He is recognized worldwide for his research in areas like group support systems, MIS and collaborative information systems. Although most Presentation Professionals would not know Vogel by name, he has played a key role in developing our understanding of how visuals support persuasion in a presentation setting.
After graduating with a B.S. in electrical engineering from Montana State University, Vogel earned an M.S. in computer science from UCLA in 1972 followed by a Ph.D. in Business Administration/MIS from the University of Minnesota in 1986. While working on his Ph.D., Vogel was an assistant professor of MIS and the research coordinator for the Management Information Systems Research Center (MISRC) at the University of Minnesota.
In 1986, Vogel submitted a doctoral thesis paper to the faculty of the UM Graduate School entitled: “An Experimental Investigation of the Persuasive Impact of Computer Generated Presentation Graphics.”
Later a summary of this experimental investigation was published as a Working Paper Series entitled “Persuasion and the Role of Visual Presentation Support: The UM/3M Study.”
Vogel’s thesis paper is by far the most comprehensive look into the effectiveness of presentation support I have found thus far. The paper is 232 pages long, excluding the appendices and contains an abundance of information not included in the 19 page UM/3M summary report. Vogel did an extensive literature review, drawing from scholarly work in speech communication, social psychology and persuasion theory. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Robert Befus at 12:38 PM .
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In the 80′s and early 90′s Kodak products were integral to the work of Presentation Professionals.
I know Kodak was by far our biggest supplier of materials back then. Every year we used miles and miles of 5071 slide duping film and Ektachrome 100 along with ortho and tungsten 50…. not to mention hundreds of gallons of E-6 processing solutions.
Our first big jobs for pharma involved using specialty Kodak films in a customized Maron Carrol slide animation camera to duplicate hundreds of thousands of clinical xrays. Later we added a color photo lab, using countless rolls of C41 film and both color and B&W paper.
Even though Kodak has tried to become a digital company, with a new round of layoffs announced, Chuck Salter at Fast Company asks if it is finally over for Big Yellow?
Posted by Robert Befus at 7:25 AM .
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Lee, in response to your post entitled Tag, your it… there is a software made by Ontra Presentations that uses such tags, I think. The software is built on a database platform and allow you to search for content with key words. I’m evaluating their trial version now and it looks promising in many regards for interactive presentation. Nevertheless, I don’t think tags are the best way to find slides interactively. I prefer designing the slides to have various kinds of visual clues that guide a presenter to desired content. Typing in a keyword necessarily breaks the connection between speaker and audience. We need techniques that are much more fluid and conversational in my opinion. Various styles of visual hyperlinks are a better way to go, perhaps. I do completely agree with you that we need to change our presentation styles and become more spontaneously interactive…having that cloud of slides you referenced.
Posted by Robert Lane at 1:56 PM .
1 Comment »
Tired of PowerPoint charts but never created a chart in Illustrator before? Here is a nice step by step to creating charts in Illustrator.
Posted by Robert Befus at 8:30 PM .
1 Comment »
Cool keyboard. Each key is a stand alone display showing what that key is controlling at that moment. Site claims it is in early stage production and will be available in 2006.
Visit site.
Posted by Robert Befus at 2:48 PM .
1 Comment »
