A picture in your presentations

The old adage says “A picture paints a thousand words“.  And (details aside) they’re right.   To illustrate the point, there are only a few word in the first half of this blog post. Instead, consider the picture below, and ask yourself if you can guess what I’ve done for the previous couple of hours with my wife… :)

 
Then think about how effective a good image can be for getting information over in your presentations!

The key thing here isn’t just that the image contains a huge amount of information, but that the information is structured in such a way as it tells a story: you know what it means at a very ‘human’ level. I don’t mean that in the sense of us having done something human, but in the more vague sense of ‘it not just being meaningless numbers’. It’s something that people can ‘grasp’ – quickly and easily. Isn’t that exactly what you need to do in a presentation?

What’s more, even a poorly structured image as this one (it was a quick point-and-grab on my iPhone) can give a wealth of detailed information.

Take a moment to look at the picture again, You can probably infer

• how ‘posh’ the restaurant was
• whether we’d already paid or not
• how busy the restaurant was
• and lots of other stuff.

Soooooooo here’s the question… when it comes to passing on large amounts of information during your presentation, and doing that in a way which can be easily accessed and understood by your audience, what ways have you got to present your data visually?

… and don’t tell me “It’s a nice idea Simon, but it won’t work for me because…” Because it won’t work for you if you don’t think it’ll work for you :)

What options for images in your presentations do you have? I’m thinking of everything from presenting a call-to-action all the way through to technical presentations such as explaining how something works…