The sixth Pecha Kucha Night – San Jose is just around the corner! If you’re interested in diving into a highly creative, low-risk presentation environment, Pecha Kucha is for you.

Each speaker presents 20 slides, for 20 seconds each. Which means that you get to hear several unique and highly visual stories, told in less than seven minutes.

DETAILS
Date: Tuesday, April 17
Time: 7-10 P.M.
Location: Sonoma Chicken Coop
Address: 200 E Campbell Ave, Campbell, CA 95008

AGENDA
7pm: Mingle, grab a drink, and get your FREE raffle ticket
7:30pm: PowerPoint Karaoke
(Raffle tickets available for sale after 7:30pm.)
8pm: Presentations begin

Photo courtesy of flickr user RicBret

In case you don’t know about Pecha Kucha yet, an excerpt from their website describes it best:

PechaKucha Night was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. It has turned into a massive celebration, with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of “chit chat”, it rests on a presentation format that is based on a simple idea: 20 images x 20 seconds. It’s a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.

Presenter Line-up:

Michael Goodson Multi-year winner of the privately held invitational Lip-Synco competition will discuss creating award winning lip sync videos, and we’ll be showing some that will destroy your preconceptions of lip sync as an art!

Howard Cooperstein Howard returns with a heartwarming tale of family, hardship, triumph and social media like nothing you’ve heard before.

Maurieen Stakey Area artist Mo will discuss and show her art, everything from comics to magazine covers.

Scott Stiefvater The Divisiveness of Mourning will explore how a family loss challenged and grew the survivors involved.

Mark Jaremko A true renaissance man, Mark explores what it is to be a “maker” in the Silicon Valley, demoing some of his inventions, and providing some guidelines and inspiration for those that may want to take a similar path.

Hope to see you there!

(And if you’re interested in presenting, reach out to us and we’ll put you in touch with the event organizer.)

SXSW is an event like no other. Where else can you hear Rainn Wilson’s thoughts on spirituality, Ray Kurzweil on artificial intelligence, Anthony Bourdain on social media, and Al Gore and Sean Parker on democracy?

This annual event attracts creatives, developers, marketers, educators, non-profit folks, and start-up entrepreneurs from around the world. For the first (and definitely not last) time, Duarte sent a small team to SXSW Interactive. Over the course of five days, we attended as many sessions, keynotes, and conversations as we possibly could. We came back to work with new insights and renewed enthusiasm. We still have plenty to process, but here are some of the highlights.

Cartoonist Matthew Diffee gave one of our favorite talks, “How to Be an Idea Factory.” He draws single cell cartoons for the New Yorker and TEXAS MONTHLY, and he walked us through his creative process, from coming up with an idea to drawing a cartoon and writing a caption. We realized that, at its most basic, a single cell cartoon isn’t really all that different from a slide in a presentation. Each begins with an idea or concept and is executed with visuals and either speaker notes or a caption. Diffee has the extra challenge of making it funny every time. His presentation incorporated the worst clip art he could find, making the cartoon interludes of his own work that much more satisfying.

We appreciated how Diffee broke down his creative process into simple, manageable tasks. “I fill a pot of coffee, then I empty the pot and fill a page with ideas,” he said. This approach makes it easy for him to get started. Eliminate distractions. Make your creative process a matter of habit. Practice everyday. Let yourself get better. Do a little more everyday. Remember, being creative is fun, and it’s hard for everybody. It’s great advice, no matter what your medium.

Baratunde Thurston gave the first keynote, “How to Read the World.” He is Director of Digital for The Onion and co-founder of the black political blog, Jack & Jill Politics, and he recently published How to Be Black. He began by talking about his family’s political history and his own relationship with politics and humor. He asked, “What happens when comedy takes on power on a global scale?” He shared inspiring examples of how political satire is shining a light in some very dark places around the world, including Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, China, Nigeria, and others. He gave a great speech, and you can listen and see his slides.

We learned about technology, transmedia, advertising, design, social media, and social change. We sketched, tweeted, talked, and trekked all over Austin fueled by breakfast tacos & BBQ. Next year we’ll be even more ambitious.

Kate Middleton received a lot of press attention this week for delivering her first public speech as the Duchess of Cambridge. In her three-minute address at the Treehouse, a hospice run by East Anglia’s Children’s Hospices, she tried to connect with her audience and make a favorable first impression.

The Duchess faced a challenge familiar to many newly promoted business leaders, elected officials and public figures: with so much riding on first impressions, what can you do to win the favor of your audience?

Here are some tips to help those stepping into the spotlight shine.

Practice - Audiences can tell when you’re unprepared. Practicing will help you feel confident and comfortable when you have to step up in front of a room full of people for the first time. When President Barack Obama practiced for the presidential debates in 2008, his team built an entire mock stage to replicate the exact conditions of his speech and figure out what he needed to do better. That might be a bit extreme for the average speaker; instead, ask someone whose opinion you trust to watch you rehearse and give honest feedback. Or, as a complement to a practice audience, record yourself practicing and then watch the video to see what works and what doesn’t.

Relax – It’s important to prepare, but it’s just as critical to stop worrying about perfection. When a speaker becomes too focused on getting each word precisely right, they get nervous and stiff during their presentation. Audiences would much rather hear from an authentic speaker than a perfect one.

Relate – Your audience came to see you speak, not to see your slides. Make it worth their time by remembering to be relatable. Weave in a story, tell a joke, or remark on a personal anecdote to make your presentation more compelling and keep your audience engaged. Tim Cook did this well in his first product launch as CEO of Apple. He began his presentation by making a joke about the audience’s keen awareness of the change in Apple leadership. By lightening the mood, he helped the whole room relax and focus on the launch.

Restrain – One thing that Kate Middleton did well was to give a speech exactly the length it needed to be. Too many speakers overload their presentations with unnecessary facts and content to try and make a powerful impression. But most audiences aren’t looking for lots of detail and they’re not hoping you make your presentation longer. They’re looking for a compelling story. Include exactly as much content as you need to get your idea across and not a word more.

The Duchess of Cambridge has a huge platform. When she speaks, the worldwide media pays attention. That can create a tremendous amount of pressure and it puts a premium on practicing and finding ways to relax. She did a nice job with her first public speech and we can’t wait to see what she does in the future!

From Copernicus to Kerouac, diagrams have been helping people see what they’re saying for the past 16,500 years.

Find the perfect diagram to visualize your info at http://www.diagrammer.com, and download the PowerPoint®-ready file for just $0.99.

Design by James Nepomuceno.

Where there is madness, Nancy Duarte finds method. This is how twenty years of sketches and infographic concepts became Diagrammer™, a searchable taxonomy of over 4,000 PowerPoint®-ready diagrams, available for you to download for just 99 cents each.

After more than twenty years of visualizing information for client presentations, Duarte designers had sketched thousands of concepts. Ever-anxious to find patterns and processes, Nancy gathered sketchbooks from each of the designers at Duarte. She then asked her trusty assistant (at the time, that was me!) to photocopy each of the pages of each of the books, so she could set to work cutting them to pieces, and sorting them. Nancy sat and sorted for hours, searching for patterns, deciding which concepts could be grouped, and which ones necessitated their own category. Lo and behold, a taxonomy emerged. This taxonomy of diagrams was featured in Chapter 3 of Nancy’s first book, Slide:ology, where it quickly became one of the book’s most popular sections.
Shortly after Slide:ology was released, its readers began to (politely) demand that Duarte offer training. And so began the development of the Slide:ology workshop. While creating the curriculum, the diagram concepts were converted into PowerPoint®, so they could be easily implemented by attendees. These diagrams garnered such an overwhelmingly positive response, and Nancy knew people were hungry for tools to help visualize their information. A team of people set to work creating thousands of PowerPoint®-ready diagrams, and now, nearly five years later, we are proud to announce Diagrammer™!

The taxonomy has been refined a bit since its first appearance in Slide:ology. There are five main categories–Flow, Network, Stack, Segment, and Join–which we believe encompass every type of relationship between information. Each of these categories has two or more subsets, to help further clarify your data. Check out the taxonomy below, or have it explained to you by a real Duarte lab tech, in just 96 seconds.

PowerPoint® is a trademark of Microsoft, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.