Making my presentation – part two

(Part one is here)

After I had my draft structure done I had to distribute the content along a 10-minutes’ timeline, because I had only 10 minutes for my presentation. Actually, I had 10-12 minutes, but I decided to leave 2 minutes as a reserve in case something goes wrong.

Now the process of distributing all I wanted to say properly was a real challenge. In order to make it easier, I first drafted a timeline in my notebook.

Then I typed the text word by word and tried to read it with a stopwatch. Although I managed to fit it into the time frame (at the third attempt), I realized that I have to make it even shorter and, what is most important, to get rid of syntactically complicated constructions. So I ended up having a text divided into parts according to my presentation slides with 3 to 8 sentences for each slide.

Ah yes, regarding slides. Well, I decided not to use the colour scheme I was testing in the previous post, because it seemed to me boring. Instead I took this one by plamenj, which looks like this:

And here’s my presentation at Slideshare (actually longer than it used to be, because I split the animated slides made in PowerPoint into separate slides, as Slideshare doesn’t read animation).

It is originally in Russian of course, but I translated it.

Also, thanks to Jakes from my wonderful Team 10, because he sent me very helpful materials regarding designing presentation. And thanks to Irina (from the same team among all) for also sharing materials and generally being extremely encouraging.

By the way, I found out that PowerPoint and SlideShare are badly compatible. So I had to do some extra editing to make it look similar to its initial ppt version. Maybe next time I’ll try playing with Google and Libre Office equivalents, as well as Presi.com. But hopfully, not too soon, because I want to get back to the wonderful Python MOOC, which has already begun. The 1st week’s tasks don’t look too challenging, but there’s a bunch of some new information that I want to digest before I receive the next portion of tasks.

Preparing the first presentation in my life

This is supposed to be a complaining post. But I’ll also try to make it somehow useful at least due to the links to helpful resources I find on the way. Now, to the point. As I have already mentioned (more than once, I think), I hate visual stuff. And presentations today are all based on slides, so I’ve got to not only think about the structure and opening and closing and hooks for the audience, but also about making some decent background for my presentation.

So, learning again.

A couple of words about the circumstances. I’ve got to prepare this presentation for a conference on social computing that takes place in Moscow this Friday (on 21 June) and my topic is data journalism. Although I’ve got, say, 3 days ahead, I’m very short of time, because during these days I’ll also have to work and learn etc. So my most immediate target is to make at least a draft presentation to have some back-up in case I’m overwhelmed by work during the week.

So, first thing I did, I went web-hunting to find some tips on what to do. And here’s what I’ve found instructive so far.

• First of all, I must mention this awesome post by Irina Radchenko. The problem might be that the post is in Russian, but the remedy (apart from Google Translate) is that it contains quite a number of wonderful links to English language resources.
• Among those links I want to feature 10 Tips for Making Beautiful Slideshow Presentations, because it’s rather instructive and well-structured.
• How to make great presentations – A whole site about it.
• Moreover, these guys produce very nice videos. Like this one about colour schemes for instance.
• And they also mention a fascinating resource ColourLovers.com where you can find and download (for free) various colour schemes.

Now, in order to start the process, I decided to create some structure. And in order to do this, in turn, I first put down some information blocks in order to later arrange them more logically.

Here’s what I’ve got in the end:

Feel free to see this monster full-size.

And I was actually testing this palette by GlueStudio (which I downloaded from ColourLovers I mentioned above).

OK, next I’ll have to fit all this into like 5 slides (I’ve got no more than 12 minutes for my presentation).