{"id":126,"date":"2008-03-17T21:55:08","date_gmt":"2008-03-17T20:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/2008\/03\/17\/a-picture-and-a-thousand-words\/"},"modified":"2008-03-17T21:55:08","modified_gmt":"2008-03-17T20:55:08","slug":"a-picture-and-a-thousand-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/a-picture-and-a-thousand-words\/","title":{"rendered":"A picture and a thousand words"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A friend of mine runs an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lydiabates.com\/artfinders-gallery.html\">art gallery in Liverpool.<\/a>  &#8211; she&#8217;s called Lydia and she&#8217;s lovely.  Reading a blog article of hers called &#8220;A picture&#8217;s worth a thousand words&#8221; reminded me that cliches are cliches for a reason &#8211; firstly because you need to avoid them when you&#8217;re presenting, obviously, but secondly because they&#8217;re true.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s also true is that we&#8217;re visual animals &#8211; 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?<\/p>\n<p>The tips for picking the images?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>iconic &#8211; the image needs to encapsulate the idea you&#8217;re talking about in the same way a road sign tells you what you need to know in one glance: you don&#8217;t need to spend precious seconds when you&#8217;re driving concentrating on it.<\/li>\n<li>big &#8211; it&#8217;s far, far easier to scale an image down than up if you want to keep the quality and in terms of display, size <strong>is<\/strong> important.<\/li>\n<li>quality &#8211; nothing says that you don&#8217;t respect your audience more than crap pictures.<\/li>\n<li>high contrast and bright colours &#8211; your data-projector and computer will between them do a good job of mucking about with the colour balance of your pictures so it&#8217;s essential you start off with something big and bold, otherwise it&#8217;ll just appear flat, boring and perhaps even hard to make out.<\/li>\n<li>legal &#8211; make sure, obviously, that you&#8217;ve got the rights to use the picture.  I shouldn&#8217;t have to say this, but it appears I do!  :)<\/li>\n<li>safe &#8211; you&#8217;d be surprised at what some people can take offence at.  What&#8217;s natural and reasonable to you won&#8217;t be, necessarily, to someone else.  (And visa versa, too, so don&#8217;t got off thinking they&#8217;re prudes!)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A friend of mine runs an art gallery in Liverpool. &#8211; she&#8217;s called Lydia and she&#8217;s lovely. Reading a blog article of hers called &#8220;A picture&#8217;s worth a thousand words&#8221; reminded me that cliches are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}