Hello, my name is Nick Smith and I’m a fanatic. (“Hi, Nick!”)

When something piques my interest, I take on a nigh-obsessive curiosity for it and the very mention of said topic gets me very excited. Such topics for me include, but are not limited to:

• Chipotle Restaurants
• Mini Coopers
• Apple products
• The Beatles
• Animated movies (particularly Pixar)
• Coffee
• Presentation Design

You read this list and you probably don’t care a bit that all of those things are very important to me. But there’s a story behind every one of them, a reason for why they first caught my attention and for why they persist in interesting me to this day. Unless you share in one of those interests, though, you’d probably think me strange if my eyes lit up at the sight of a passing Mini or if I got excited about Target commercial with a cheesey Beatles cover for a soundtrack.

Let me share one of those stories with you.

I’ve always loved movies because from as early as I can remember movie-watching was one of the things that brought my family together. We’d have movie nights and special trips to the theater that were always so special. We got to eat Strawberry Twizzlers as we were transported to different worlds we’d never actually be able to visit. Those nights were magical.

My love of movies, and my interest in math and science, led to an interest in movie magic, the special effects behind those movies I loved, and could not get enough of behind-the-scenes shows and books about how they made such spectacles seem real. I had (and still have) a huge book about the early years of Industrial Light and Magic that I loved to look through as a kid. I would dream about being able to be on the team that created such amazing visuals like that.

Over the years, I became more and more excited as in computer generated imagery and animation (a blend between my love of technology and cinema) became popular. You can imagine my delight when Toy Story, the first full-length, computer animated movie came along. My love of computer animation developed into a love  traditional, hand-drawn animation as well. My Bachelors degree thesis was on the changing gender roles of characters in Disney films. After I graduated from college, I actually came very close to enrolling in a computer animation program, but balked when I saw the kind of debt I’d have to take on to complete the degree.

You can imagine my disappointment when Disney Animation Studios announced that Home on the Range would be its last hand-drawn movie, and my excitement when The Princess and the Frog signaled a return of the hand-drawn musical genre that I loved as a child. Even at twenty-seven my excitement is part childhood memories of movie nights with my family and part adult fascination with a craft that is at the same time so artistic and yet so technically demanding.

Having heard that story, it may be easier for you to understand why I get so caught up in any mention of a new animated film. Had you not heard that story, though, you might think I’m quite strange, perhaps even childish. But I might look right back and wonder how you could NOT love animation the way I do.

My point is this. The goal of any presentation is to convey information to your audience. You have a story to tell. Maybe it’s the story of how the company did last quarter. Or the story of the heroic strategy that will lead us out of this recession.

You already know the story so it’s easy for you to get excited about it. Unless you can convey that story to your audience, however, no amount of statistics and charts and images and quotes and whatever is going to drive it home with them. You have to give them a glimpse of why your story means so much to you. And by telling them the story, you invite them to make it their story. You invite them to join you in knowing what you know and feeling what you feel so that they can ultimately understand why and how you want them to act.

Presenters are storytellers as much as any animator or film-maker or novelist or playwright. At least they can be. And you should be, too, if you want your audience to remember what you said.

One of the things I love most about being a Mac is that there never seems to be an end to cool little apps and widgets that Mac developers come up with to make your Mac even more awesome. As a slide designer who often uses my Mac to host presentations during important meetings and things, Caffeine is now one application that I can’t imagine having to live without.

Has this ever happened to you? You’re giving a presentation in front of a huge room of important people, you spend a few minutes on a particular slide and all of a sudden, the screensaver comes on, distracting your audience and forcing you to authenticate to unlock the computer and get back to your presentation. Maybe it’s happened to you while you were teaching a class or preaching a sermon, but no matter what, it’s always a pain. The only solution is to spend several minutes remembering to turn off your screensavers and sleep settings before the presentation starts. If you give lots of presentations, this can be really frustrating. Thankfully the folks at Lighthead decided to put a stop to this.

Caffeine is a simple, freeware application that lets you turn your screensavers and sleep settings off and on in just one click. It adds a little coffee cup icon (clever) to your menu bar that you can toggle on and off. When the cup is full, caffeine is on and your screensavers and such are turned off until further notice. Whenever your presentation is finished, just click the cup again and caffeine lets your screensavers go back to their original settings. You can even set it to run for a certain amount of time so there’s no chance of you forgetting to turn it back off again.

When the cup is full, caffeine is on and your screensavers and such are turned off until further notice.

Caffeine isn’t just great for running presentations.  It’s also good to use while watching long videos on YouTube or Hulu, or for reading long blog posts…anything you do regularly during which screensavers are a hassle. I’ve been using it for several months now and love it. It was one of the first things I installed when I got my new Mac recently.

P.S. – I don’t know of anything like this for PC, but if some you do, do share. If not, PC developers, here’s a great idea…

Sorry about that deadline.

I spend most of my time here posting about how great presentation design is and how much I love it, but in the spirit of fairness I want to post about something that I don’t like about it for a change. This blog is really about me learning what this presentation design stuff is all about anyway, so there’s bound to be some negative mixed in with all of the awesomeness. The negative thing is a realization I’ve had recently.

Clients don’t come to you until they’re in a hurry.

Over the past few months I’ve been trying to get experience in presentation design to develop my skills and begin building a portfolio of work. In trying to get started, I’ve accepted pretty much every opportunity to do slide work for anyone who would let me. I’ve done some for work, I’ve talked with the preachers at my church and I’ve even spoken to some friends who have businesses that might need marketing materials and such. And in the projects that have ensued I’ve noticed that most people don’t start thinking about their slides early enough. In fact for most, it’s an afterthought. It’s step eleven of a ten step process for preparing for their speech. And so I find myself getting calls for help on presentations at the last minute, with only a few days, and sometimes hours, turnaround time.

Should I have seen this coming? Yeah probably. I guess I’d expected it, but I thought maybe it would be the exception, not the rule.

It makes sense, actually, considering the way many people (including me in the past) approach creating slides; basically a well decorated outline. It didn’t require any more thought than just formally typing up my main points and picking a good template. Which isn’t to say that this approach isn’t appropriate some of the time. But for more important presentations, this simply doesn’t leave you or your designer enough time to do what ought to be done.

If you’re thinking of using a designer to improve your slides, you have to understand that it’s going to take him or her some time to understand what your message is and then to design images and charts that convey that message as effectively as possible. The thinking and brainstorming alone can be very time consuming to do properly, let alone the execution of producing those graphics. Thus, the better you want them to be, the more lead time required.

The good news is that once you realize this is the case there are ways to make things better for both parties.

Clients – Try to give your designer as much time as you can to work on your deck. Factor the slide design process into the time needed to prepare your presentation. If you hand your stuff off to him or her at the last minute, you’ll be getting rushed work and that degrades the quality of the finished product in any discipline.

Designers – Get used to working with people who are under a tight deadline. As much as you’d like to have three weeks or three months to work on something, unfortunately sometimes people don’t find out they’re giving presentations until very close to when it’s due. Just accepting that this is the case has helped me mentally prepare to deal with the kind of pressure that comes from working with people who are running out of time. If you expect this to be the case, it won’t make you nearly as crazy and it will be a pleasant surprise when it doesn’t happen.

On second thought, this may not be such a bad thing after all. Designers could (should?) seize the opportunity to cash in on their client’s desperation by charging more for quicker turnarounds and rush jobs. This, in turn, would incentivize clients to get work submitted sooner to avoid having to pay more. In that case designers should still mentally prepare for the stress of a deadline, but perhaps the promise of higher compensation would make the tension a little easier to bear.

Image Credit: Barbara L. Hanson / CC BY 2.0