This Tuesday was a work day, with Comberg and I coming around to each student giving feedback. We found a couple of common snags with the presentations that are worth mentioning here.
Progression Context
Something that can really pull a set of slides together is some way to see where you are in the presentation. For presentations with a distinctive iconography, a powerful way is to keep all of the icons on screen, along one of the edges, and call out the current one in some way. This acts both as an element of continuity and as a sort of “progress bar” for the talk.
Personality
A common problem was an abundance of data but no way to relate it back to the presenter. Remember, the point of this is not just to show a graph of the number of fish tacos that you’ve eaten in the past ten years, but (for example) to relate it to the number of friends and relationships you’ve had over that same time frame. Try to bring it back to something meaningful, and often, this can be a factoid (fish tacos lead to a worse social life) that helps you in the future.
Links
- Queens of InfoVis (about two women that create information graphics for the New York Times)
- Worldwide Inauguration via Twitter (a FlowingData project that visualizes Twitter posts during the inauguration)
- Man vs Women Decision Making (a FlowingData post about a Goldstar beer ad campaign that uses flowchart graphics humorously)
Information Design at Penn 