As many of you know, Duarte Design offers a workshop that covers the principles from Nancy Duarte’s award-winning book, slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. Our public workshop covers both comprehensive visual storytelling development as well as the application of design thinking in an all-day, interactive environment – which includes group and individual exercises to reinforce learning.

And now we want to take slide:ology on the road.

So we need to hear from you. Which cities you’d like us to visit? What days of the week are best for you? Please answer these few questions to help us decide where–and how–to bring slide:ology to you.

Nancy just received her bright and shiny gold medal with the words “Success Through Knowledge.” I couldn’t think of a more appropriate phrase to recognize the passion for sharing knowledge that slide:ology represents.  We’ve debated internally about sharing this kind of news with our community because to be quite frank it sometimes feels a little self serving. So what we’d really like to know from our community is how you view awards.  Creative agencies love awards but each year at Duarte we go through the categories and try to find one for presentations and find ourselves feeling a little discouraged and left out.  Here are the two questions we would like to hear your thoughts on…

The rumors are true… I’ve been hard at work on another book, and I’d like to give you a sneak peek of our first draft at a cover design.

After several internal brainstorms and sketching sessions, we ended up with these concepts.

We all felt that there was something special about the word resonate being made out of dots that look like they are being magnetically pulled towards a gathering. The sketch was inspired by this stitchery I found online.

Diandra, my Creative Director felt that the dots could be people walking or running towards the gathering. It could look like an aerial shot of the Million Man March in Washington DC.

My team meticulously drew all the figures and shadows. We played with color combos and textures and ended up with this AMAZING cover.

What do you think? We’d love your feedback and comments. Stay tuned as we will be sharing more of these insights along the way.

A couple weeks ago Jennifer Aaker brought me in to speak to her “How to Tell a Story” class at the Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. By the time I showed up, the students already been through the process of identifying a personal story that has professional relevance and then they brought me in for two hours to train on transforming the stories visually.

One of the tools we used was our Glance Test. This test was co-created with Glenn Hughes over at KLA Tencor. In slide:ology I state that slides should be processed in 3 seconds or less. It’s impossible for people to process your slides and your words simultaneously. The test gives you a quantifiable way to test a slide’s viability as a glance medium by calculating a signal-to-noise ratio for individual slides.

Click to download PDF of the Glance Test

If you have a longer presentation, try the Glance Test for 5 slides on a page.

The students each submitted a 4-slide story. Duarte filled out a glance test for each one. By using this process, most of the subjectivity is removed but here’s how they faired:

Storyboard 1:

Even though these slides are more simple than most corporate presentations, they still didn’t pass the test. The placement of images was random and the images themselves didn’t work together as a system—where they all seem related in some way. There was too much text on each slide which took longer than 3 seconds to process. What this student did do well is on the first two slides they created a sense of flow using arrows and placement to guide the eye.

Storyboard 2:

I actually adored this presentation. It’s better to make simple crude drawings of your concept than to muddy it up with random meaningless images. I could identify the concept right away from the images. The illustrations were all uniform, there was no clutter, they have a color system (albeit a simple one), flow, low text. This one got 2 thumbs up from me.

Ideally all your slides will have zero noise. I realize though that in organizations that can be impossible. Set a goal for your department or organization and use this tool to hold the troops accountable.

Just a quick reminder, today is the last day to complete our survey for a chance to win a workshop!

And if you’re holding back because of travel costs, we’d like to remind you our workshops are also available via webinar!

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and complete our survey, and we’ll put your name in that hat to win a workshop or webinar.

Winners announced tomorrow! That’s Thursday, June 25.

In order to make our blog the best it can be, we’d love to know a little more about who makes up our community.

We’re too proud to beg for this information, but we’re not too proud to bribe!

Take a few minutes to fill out our survey (less than 10 questions long!) and you’ll be entered to win a seat at one of our upcoming slide:ology workshops. That’s a $575 value! Not too shabby.

Thanks in advance for taking the time to share some info. The survey will close at 12 midnight on June 24. We’ll notify the winner on our blog on Thursday, June 25.

Click here to complete the survey:
http://surveys.polldaddy.com/s/F8F8340C05ABEF81/

Click here to learn more about the slide:ology workshop:
http://blog.duarte.com/workshop/

Thanks and good luck!
Paula

As we research for the next book, we’re putting together an analysis of the Top 20 speeches. It’s easy to identify political speeches but we’re looking for a variety. They can be political, but we’d also like any other types, too. They can be closing arguments, speeches in movies, lectures, sermons, Nobel Prize speeches…anything. Submit your favorites in the comments.