presenting

presenting is a skill, and like the majority of skills- you can learn how to do it.creating art, design or product for a living implies a desire to make something people will notice, and while there are those who never show their creations to anyone, they rarely make a career out of it. i do believe that to be successful you need to be able to talk, present and most importantly make people listen to you.

"As creative professionals, we're often called on to show the results of our work in visual form. The mistake many of us make is assuming that a well executed visual can take the place of a well thought out presentation. It can't. When you're planning your presentation, think about it as a narrative arc: what story are you trying to tell, what's the beginning, middle and end, and why should anyone care?"

here is a summary of top tips to assist us in standing out from the crowd.

it is you that is giving the presentation, not your stuff.
people have came to see you, not stuff. people are more important than things. think about it as a narrative arc: what story are you trying to tell, what's the beginning, middle and end, and why should anyone care? Once you've got the story organised, build a presentation to express it. The assets you assemble should support the story, so that when you get to that gorgeous rendering you spent 4 days on, your audience knows exactly why it's so great. You wouldn't create a design without solidifying the concept behind it first...why would you do that with a presentation?

know the people you are talking too.
figure out what your audience wants to know. think about what you would want to know it you were them.

control your environment.
presenting is a room you are familiar with is a luxury. but in the case of presenting on foreign territory, you have to be early and be prepared. have everything you need- blue tac, pins, plugs, projectors etc..

don't talk too much.
knowing your stuff and being prepared and knowledgeable does not mean being long-winded. use visual communication or an image or an object to break up talking and hand-waving. if you're giving a slide show, limit yourself to a minute of talking per slide, and aim to average less than half that. remember telling a good story doesn't always mean saying a lot.

plan ahead.
in my opinion winging it expresses arrogance and disorganization. plan , practice and organise. the same as you do with your creative work: refine, refine, refine.

one thing at a time.
if your story needs a period of speechifying, go to a blank slide, turn the projector off, or stand in front of your pin-ups. Be the center of attention for a bit. what you want to avoid is obscuring your story by trying to push through conflicting media streams simultaneously. humans are excellent at synthesizing information from multiple sources, but not so good at paying attention to two or three things at once. this is why it's often so excruciating to listen to a presenter read the text off of their projected slide: most people's brain's aren't really wired to listen well and read well simultaneously. so don't make them.

Similarly, there should be no superfluous images or text in a presentation. too often, presenters feel like everything they say needs to include an image, even if it doesn't communicate anything. if you need to show some text, show it and talk about it, and don't feel like it needs decoration (save your efforts for formatting and font selection). if the text can be related to an image, go ahead and show them together, but make it clear how they're related.

get it in a can.
certain presentations you're going to give again and again. that's a good thing. if your job requires you to make the same client-pitch presentation 7 or 8 times a year, or you're called on to describe your firm's design research process every other week, you need a presentation template. just as you might create an underlay for working out multiple sketch versions of a single illustration, or build a template that can be adjusted to fit a particular brochure layout or website, a presentation template can save you hours of work and improve your effectiveness. the advantages are similar: you can refine the template based on your experiences using it, making it cleaner and more compelling as well as more specific to your own strengths. a template-based presentation also gives you the sort of freedom a good underlay does, letting you try out various options and seeing how they look before going with the most appropriate.

look the part.
as a creative professional you're walking several fine lines. you're competent, but in a way that might be foreign to your audience. you take direction, but are stubbornly insistent on crucial details. you're rigorous but imaginative. building credibility in the eyes of your audience means appearing to be all these things at once. the short form of the rule is to dress the way you usually dress, but a bit more professionally. the average designer, architect or illustrator has a decent understanding of color, pattern and stylistic trends, and this tends to play out in wardrobe selection.

the two mistakes creative professionals make when presenting are quashing that understanding in favor of looking completely "normal", or accentuating their "creativeness" to the point of parody. if you're presenting in distressed denim and a Very Cool T-shirt, most of your audience will be paying attention to your sloppy threads instead of you, regardless of how limited the print run on that shirt is. Conversely, if you have a boring suit that you only wear when you're presenting, your audience might wonder why they're paying someone who looks just like them to come up with new ideas--and you'll be 5% less comfortable if this is the only day all month you've worn a tie or heels. a button-up shirt and some decent jeans are the bare minimum for either gender, and no flip-flops. nobody cares how comfy they are.

leave behind a good leave-behind.
if you want to leave an impression, you need to leave something behind. assuming your audience won't be taking notes, a few printed pages per person will do a lot to keep the magic alive. this doesn't need to be much, a simple word document with some thumbnail images is usually plenty; enough to remind the audience what you talked about in a minute or two of light reading. if you can write a few paragraphs with some annotated images, that's fine, or an outline with bullet points. if you planned out your presentation as a narrative, the notes you used to do this often become an excellent leave-behind with just a little fleshing out and formatting. what you must never, ever do is print out your entire slide show and drop it on everyone's lap. it will be put in the bin.