Walking his talk

In the last few days, I've been studying the work of Cliff Atkinson. I've ordered his book, Beyond Bullet Points, from Amazon. The second edition just came out last year. He has developed a presentation formula that really makes sense to me, using the classic structure of stories to design a presentation. I'll tell more about that another day.

You've probably experienced many PowerPoint presentations in your life, most bad. Cliff co-authored a paper with Richard Mayer, a researcher at UCSB, which gives insight into why they can be so mind-numbing. The fundamental reason is that they don't correspond to how humans take in and make sense of information.

"The design of PowerPoint presentations should be compatible with how people learn."

The typical PowerPoint presentation contains slide after slide of text, which the presenter often reads to the audience. Because we have parallel channels for processing visual and verbal input, our verbal channel gets overloaded, reading and translating the written words plus hearing what the speaker says, while our visual channel has little to do (look at the speaker, the room, other audience members) and does not receive any reinforcing input. If a presentation is to inform, the speaker should understand how best to get their message across, which is to use both the visual and the verbal channels. Give the eyes something relevant to look at, and speak the message they are trying to convey. As Bob Horn says, let words do what they do best, and let pictures do what they do best. By stimulating both channels, the brain automatically seeks to make connections between the new information in the presentation, and relate it to existing knowledge.

What I mean by "walking his talk" is that this paper exemplifies the format that Cliff recommends for presentations. It is a "notes page" view handout from PowerPoint, which shows the slide on the top of the page, and the speaker's notes or narration on the bottom half. You can see that there is an engaging graphic on the slide, with a headline that summarizes the current topic, and useful details are given in the narration. The paper, in PDF, is "Five ways to reduce PowerPoint overload". This is one of the most succinct and informative explanations I've seen about why to use visual communication, and how to do it effectively.

Cliff's websites are well worth exploring. There is one for each version of the book. The new site is a focus for a "Beyond Bullet Points" online learning community, so much of the content is restricted to members (currently $25 annually), but there are still a lot of free resources, including PDF downloads of chapters 2 and 3 of the new book, and templates for Word and PowerPoint. Here is Cliff's new website, corresponding to the 2007 edition of the book. The older website represents his business, Sociable Media, and also has chapter and template downloads, plus a lot of articles and interviews, and an archived forum (new discussion is moved to the new site). Here is the website corresponding to the 2005 edition of the book. I invite you to explore these resources to find inspiration, rationale, and tools for improving any presentation you may need to give.

Working, part 2

More work I've been doing lately is freelance mind mapping for a software company called NovaMind. They make the NovaMind mind mapping program I use for planning, organizing, note taking, and more. They've just revamped their website, and a lot of the mind maps in the informational pages on mind mapping are mine, and I'll be working on mind maps to illustrate some of the pages that don't yet have them.



The illustrations in this post come from this page, Mind Mapping for Students. While I did all but one of the mind maps on the page, the webmaster did the nifty "cover flow" gadget at the top of the page that scans through the mind maps, and the automatic magnifying lens that gives you a closer view when you move your cursor over an image.

See this page, and others linked from it (in the Mind Mapping menu on the right) for more of my work. Check out the informative video (8 minutes) on the NovaMind home page to see just how useful and versatile this program is. I couldn't be without it: it helps me think!

Working!

Wow, it's been over two months since my last post. Like many bloggers, that means I've been busy with higher priority, i.e., rent-paying, things. Plus, I feel more comfortable posting finished work and considered thoughts, rather than ramble about raw work in progress. So today, I'm posting links to some of what I've been working on lately.

A couple weeks ago, I went to Oahu for a meeting on a Clean Water Act water quality project with the state Department of Health. The lead contractor on the project is a woman named Robin Knox, who has water quality expertise, and she asked me to partner with her to help create informative graphics and facilitate the workgroup meetings we will be convening. She gave a repeat performance on Maui today. This PDF is a good summary of the project, and the purpose of the meeting. Our presentation (PowerPoint file, with speaker's notes) is here. Both, plus a handout, are linked from this web page (scroll down a ways until you see a little yellow "New" flag and "May 7".) Next steps are to convene working groups for two more meetings and to submit a report of the group's recommendations.

Art & science

In Dick's color class Tuesday we were exploring colored light, and talking about the difference in colors between sunset and sunrise. Kit Gentry proposed a theory about more color at sunset due to more moisture and particulates in the air. I confirmed this later in The Nature of Light and Colour in the Open Air, by Marcel Minnaert. I was reminded again of the common drives shared by artists and scientists, curiosity and exploration, and their common disciplines of observation and experimentation.

I love this quote from Edward Tufte, because it helps me make sense of my parallel interests:

"Science and art have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information."

(from Beautiful Evidence, 2006, p. 9)

Artists and scientists used to be the same person - daVinci, Goethe - the modern gulf between them is artificial and detrimental. This is one of the ideas of Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind: We need to unite these world views. Dick's class does. It teaches artists to see more carefully and scientifically, and shows how this rational approach can enhance their creativity.

This is why I'm so excited about visual thinking and visual communication - it is consistent with more of who we are.

(Photo by Kit Gentry)

VizThink wiki page

Today I created a new page on the VizThink wiki, in order to share my summaries on each session. I'll be blogging about each session individually, but for now, at least a jpg of my mind map summary of each session's highlights is available.

Illusions

Color class, Feb. 19

Tuesday was the seventh week (of ten) in Dick Nelson's Interactions of Color class. I'm way behind in blogging about it! He starts each session with an exercise to introduce the day's topic. The students spend some time working in pairs. Here, they've talked through how they would create an illusion of a veil on a given composition (covered in the last two weeks), and are starting to cut and paste to create the illusion of a spotlight, the new topic.


They were given a composition something like this, and told to choose colors (from a set given) which would create the illusion of a veil (such as a piece of tracing paper, or thin fabric) over the elliptical area outlined.


Illusion of a veil

Then they were asked how they would create the illusion of a spotlight on the same composition, and given swatches of color to cut and paste into position. The resulting compositions looked like this:

Illusion of a spotlight

There followed a discussion of the differences between creating the two illusions. A veil lightens, or tints, all colors behind or underneath it. A spotlight causes all areas outside it to appear darker, or shaded (like a film, an earlier subject). What they have in common is their unifying effect on a composition, and they can also create focus, mood, or mystery.

What do these illusions have to do with art? An artist who wants to create a particular mood, or render a particular scene or effect, can use this knowledge to create the effect they want. A misty atmosphere or fog can be thought of as a series of veils. Trees and other objects farther away are lighter, with less contrast to their surroundings. A scene with some brightly lit areas will have other areas of deep shadow. Scenes rendered without this awareness will look flat and false, no matter how realistically drawn.

Visual summaries

I've been reviewing my notes and summarizing my learning from the VizThink conference. I find mind maps useful for this, and for referring to later, though they lack the hand-drawn images that my composition book notes contain. This image contains summaries of all 8 sessions I attended in the two days (two general and two breakout sessions each day), which is actually readable when printed on two pages. I've also put each session in a mind map of its own.

A couple of other VizThink attendees have also done interesting summaries. My husband did his in a nice one-page visual format

and posted it on his blog, VisualThinkScape.

And graphic facilitator Brandy Agerbeck took her visual notes on index cards, and posted them to the conference wiki. Here's her photo of her cards and markers

and here's her wiki page, with her cards from each session.

Trying new things

One of the first events in the VizThink conference was a very quick "learn to draw" session with Dave Gray, CEO of Xplane. He had us draw some very basic shapes, then taught us to "take the stick figure to the next level". People instinctively start with the head, but he recommends drawing the head last.

1. Start with the body, which communicates the action
2. Draw the legs next
3. Then the arms
4. Finally, the head

Dave sees this kind of drawing not as art, but as a means to communicate, and encourages everyone to try it. His argument runs:

Every 5 year-old can draw
You were once a 5 year-old
Therefore, you can draw.

It doesn't have to look just like the real thing for someone else to understand it, so you don't have to be an artist to use drawing to communicate.

Here is his popular 2005 blog post on how to draw a stick figure. In this one, he starts with the body, as above, but draws the head second. And here is his 2007 post on how to draw a stick dog. This uses the body first, head last process. I think his thinking on the best order has evolved over the past couple years.

I drew this picture on my laptop, using the touchpad and a new program I tried at the conference, Alias SketchBook Pro (now Autodesk SketchBook Pro). It was designed to be used with a tablet PC and works well for artists who use a Wacom interactive display or tablet. It has a number of drawing tools like pencil, ballpoint pen, marker, chisel tip, brush, and airbrush, and a unique semi-circular menu that sits in the lower left or lower right corner of your screen. I've only begun to explore it, but it looks fun and powerful!

Bob Horn at VizThink '08

Nancy Duarte and Cliff Atkinson interviewed Bob Horn about his work during the first general session of the conference.

Nancy described his book, Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century as "an encyclopedia of visual language and visual thinking" and said it was a big influence on her. (See my earlier blog post on the recent republication of this book.) Bob claims that visual language is a new language being born, an international auxiliary language. He defines it as the "tight integration of words and visual elements". He uses a familiar and simple example of this tight integration, the "one way" sign:

Neither the words alone, nor the arrow alone, convey the meaning. You need both.

Much of his work lately has been in the form of large murals, which can convey both an overview, or big picture view, and details. He says these can help us "think bigger thoughts" about the complex problems we face, because they provide a way of "keeping the entire strategic context in front of us". He thinks that "large murals should invite people to make their own patterns, associations, and objections." Ideally, they provide information which allows us to form thoughtful opinions, and make reasoned decisions, considering the multitude of factors and perspectives involved.

Here is the leftmost one-quarter of a large timeline mural on management of nuclear waste in England:


Bob pointed out that murals can convey emotion as well as information.


I attended Bob's breakout session. Here is the session description. My mind map notes from the breakout session are at http://wiki.vizthink.com/BobHornBreakout

VizThink08 conference

I just got home from the VizThink conference in San Francisco. It was an inspirational and educational 4 days: 2 days in a pre-conference infographics workshop with former Newsweek graphics director Karl Gude, and 2 days of conference sessions with other greats in the world of visual thinking and visual communication. I'll be posting more pictures and notes from it soon.