A friend of mine runs an art gallery in Liverpool. – she’s called Lydia and she’s lovely. Reading a blog article of hers called “A picture’s worth a thousand words” reminded me that cliches are cliches for a reason – firstly because you need to avoid them when you’re presenting, obviously, but secondly because they’re true.
What’s also true is that we’re visual animals – we take in stuff through our eyes better than most other animals and a huge proportion of our brain is dedicated to handling visual information. So why not combine those two ideas and have a presentation which is (almost) entirely made up of big, bold, visual images?
The tips for picking the images?
- iconic – the image needs to encapsulate the idea you’re talking about in the same way a road sign tells you what you need to know in one glance: you don’t need to spend precious seconds when you’re driving concentrating on it.
- big – it’s far, far easier to scale an image down than up if you want to keep the quality and in terms of display, size is important.
- quality – nothing says that you don’t respect your audience more than crap pictures.
- high contrast and bright colours – your data-projector and computer will between them do a good job of mucking about with the colour balance of your pictures so it’s essential you start off with something big and bold, otherwise it’ll just appear flat, boring and perhaps even hard to make out.
- legal – make sure, obviously, that you’ve got the rights to use the picture. I shouldn’t have to say this, but it appears I do! :)
- safe – you’d be surprised at what some people can take offence at. What’s natural and reasonable to you won’t be, necessarily, to someone else. (And visa versa, too, so don’t got off thinking they’re prudes!)
