{"id":3661,"date":"2016-07-15T16:49:38","date_gmt":"2016-07-15T15:49:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=3661"},"modified":"2016-07-26T08:50:09","modified_gmt":"2016-07-26T07:50:09","slug":"how-do-design-a-presentation-from-scratch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/how-do-design-a-presentation-from-scratch\/","title":{"rendered":"How do I design a presentation from scratch"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_3819\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3819\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-3819\" src=\"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/coffee_iphone-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"presentation design tool - coffee\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-3819\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Let&#8217;s face it, this is your number one presentation-design-tool ;)<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In a little while I&#8217;m going to give a presentation I&#8217;ve never given before &#8211; and it&#8217;s not one I&#8217;m likely ever to give again. \u00a0 I&#8217;ve been asked by a school to give a presentation about my time as a researcher: <strong>being on the cutting edge of research<\/strong>. \u00a0I thought it might be useful if I sketched out the process I&#8217;m using to create the presentation, from scratch, as it&#8217;s something of a novel situation for me (but common for a lot of people) in that<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;m starting from scratch; and<\/li>\n<li>it&#8217;s not a presentation I&#8217;ve <em><strong>chosen<\/strong><\/em> to make.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Step one<\/h3>\n<p>Just think about it&#8230; I&#8217;ve let it mull in the back of my mind for quite some time. I&#8217;ve used <a href=\"https:\/\/evernote.com\/?var=1\">Evernote<\/a> to jot things down as they occur to me, to make sure nothing from my subconscious is ever lost. \u00a0I can&#8217;t stress how handy Evernote is, because it syncs to all my hardware, but that doesn&#8217;t matter so much as the idea that you capture everything. \u00a0For me, this process has taken several weeks, but I&#8217;ve written before about what to do if you&#8217;re not given much warning time.<\/p>\n<p>Personally, I find the times when ideas arrive most easily is when I&#8217;m half asleep or concentrating on something else (such as driving), so it&#8217;s really important to have a good way to capture things&#8230; my iPhone is perfect: and syncing via Evernote means my &#8216;thoughts&#8217; are available elsewhere when I need them to be.<\/p>\n<p>By the time it gets to when you&#8217;re formally working on it, you should have quite a collection of thoughts and ideas.<\/p>\n<h3>Step two<\/h3>\n<p>Think about it some more, if you can. \u00a0:) \u00a0You really can&#8217;t spend too much time in this bit.<\/p>\n<h3>Step three<\/h3>\n<p>Set aside a block of time in your diary and make sure you&#8217;re not going to be disturbed. Then, take each and every thought, idea or half-baked-almost-thought and put them, one at a time, on index cards.<\/p>\n<p>Spread them out on the floor or your desk if it&#8217;s big enough. Sometimes I use postit notes and spread them out on the wall.<\/p>\n<p>If it&#8217;s a group presentation you might want to put them on the wall particularly, to make it easier to collaborate, but you get the idea &#8211; you put them spread out so that you can see everything at once.<\/p>\n<h3>Step\u00a0four<\/h3>\n<div id=\"attachment_3816\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3816\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-3816\" src=\"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/IMG_1232-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"A snapshot of us doing exactly what I'm describing here to design the structure of a presentation.\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-3816\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">A snapshot of us doing exactly what I&#8217;m describing here to design the structure of a presentation.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Group cards (by moving them around and putting them on top of each other) when you&#8217;ve repeated yourself, or when the ideas look similar in the cold light of day. That way you&#8217;re reducing what you have to handle. You can probably throw away a few of the cards at this point when you realise that they&#8217;re just the same thing said in different ways. If you&#8217;re leery about throwing ideas out, use a paperclip to fasten them together: that way you save the repeated information and you can decide later what which of the different ways to say it you want to use.<\/p>\n<h3>Step\u00a0five<\/h3>\n<p>By now you should have got a reasonable idea of what material you&#8217;ve got to play with and if you&#8217;re lucky some sort of structure should be becoming relatively obvious. \u00a0If it is, arrange your piles of cards appropriately.<\/p>\n<div class=\"jbox red\" >  <div  class=\"jbox-title red\">No structure?<\/div><div  class=\"jbox-content\">If there&#8217;s no obvious structure, try creating something at random and see where that gets you &#8211; the very act of &#8216;imposing&#8217; a structure will give you and idea of what&#8217;s starting to work. \u00a0 It&#8217;s harder this way, but ether way you should be able to move onto step six. Be warned though, that in my experience, if you you can&#8217;t easily find a strong structure with a little bit of work it&#8217;s trying to tell you something&#8230; and what it&#8217;s telling you is that you&#8217;ve not got all the information down that you need. Think about going back to stages one or two and trying again.<\/div><\/div>\n<h3>Step\u00a0six<\/h3>\n<p>Go for an iterative process of changing something and having a break &#8211; then come back and see if there&#8217;s another change you can\/should make.<\/p>\n<p>Carry on doing this. It&#8217;s probably a good idea to float your thinking past other people too. Frankly and brutally, it&#8217;s not so much that they&#8217;ll have good ideas, often, so much as the process of explaining your ideas forces you to get them clear in your head. <strong>If you can&#8217;t explain it easily, quickly and clearly, your ideas aren&#8217;t tight enough.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The time to stop is when you find yourself changing back to settings you&#8217;ve had before. :)<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The next stage, of course, is to start rehearsing, but that&#8217;s a blog for another day. There are plenty of other systems for designing the structure of your presentation, of course, such as using mindmaps or flow diagrams &#8211; I&#8217;m not suggesting this is totally definitive&#8230; but having a system, whatever that system is, can be very, very helpful indeed if you want to avoid the random &#8220;and another thing&#8221; sort of presentation :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; In a little while I&#8217;m going to give a presentation I&#8217;ve never given before &#8211; and it&#8217;s not one I&#8217;m likely ever to give again. \u00a0 I&#8217;ve been asked by a school to give [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3816,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3661","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3661"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3840,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3661\/revisions\/3840"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}