As I mentioned previously, last week I traveled to San Francisco for the Atlassian Summit to represent my company, Freedom Information Systems. We presented for 45 minutes on the topic of how Atlassian Confluence (wiki software) was used at NASA to support the Ares I Preliminary Design Review. Atlassian did an awesome job putting on this conference and I’m thrilled with how this recording turned out. The way they incorporated the slides is pretty great, too.

I was also incredibly surprised to see and excited to see that Atlassian added my video to their list of Fan Favorites. At the top, no less! How cool is that!?!

I’m so proud to have been a part of the event. Thanks, Atlassian, for all of the awesomeness last week! I had a great time and I’m already looking forward to next year.

I will warn you that it’s a little long at right around 40 mins. But if you get bored, you can click the image below to watch my video or peruse the other presentations at the Summit website. I hope you enjoy watching.

Where I’ve Been

I was in San Francisco last week attending the Atlassian Summit on behalf of my company. I was actually one of the speakers this year which was a big deal both for me and for Freedom, the company I work for. It was one of the biggest, non-customer audiences our company has had. Needless to say I’ve been busy preparing for it in all of my spare time over the last few weeks, which is a poor but viable excuse for why I haven’t been posting much. I hope to begin posting more frequently again. If you’d like to view the slides from my presentation they’re on Slideshare. They also recorded all of the speeches and the videos should be posted within the next 24 hours. I’ll make sure to post a link here when it’s up.

Delivering Happiness Winners

Upon returning from San Francisco, I was delighted to discover two new copies of Delivering Happiness, the book I reviewed last week, sitting on my doorstep. These are not advance copies, but are real, hardback brand-spanking-new copies of the book. You see, in my eagerness to get a free copy I signed up for numerous giveaways never expecting to actually get any of them. But I’ve actually wound up with four copies total. Since I only had three comments on the post last week from people trying to win a copy, it turns out that all three of those folks will be getting a copy! Yay! E’erbody happy. I’ll be contacting all of you soon to get information about where to send your copy.

The Scope of This Blog

When I started Advance Your Slides last year, I envisioned it being a place for me to share all of the wonderful things I was learning about presentation design and communications. As things have progressed, I’ve decided that much of what I want to share here doesn’t really fit into that mold. So I’d like to try an experiment. I’d like to make this blog more of an online scrapbook with links and references to the awesome things that I run across on the web that I think will make me a better communicator/designer. Kind of like Swiss-Miss, but for presentations and presentation design instead of just the general design yumminess she posts. I hope this will enable me to post more frequently and easily and will thus make this blog of more value to you. I may still post longer, original posts here from time to time, but the majority of the posts will be links, pictures, presentations, and slides I find elsewhere. The interwebs can come up with much more awesome content that I’d ever be able to produce on my own. :^)

If you have any suggestions for how I can make this blog better I hope you’ll share them with me in the comments section below. Otherwise, I hope you’re enjoying the post so far and will continue to read my musings here.

After hearing a lot of talk about the new book from Mrs. Nancy Duarte, the author of Slide:ology, via the Duarte blog as well as Nancy’s Posterous, I was surprised today to see it in a recommended-for-you email from Amazon.com. Can’t wait til September!

I really enjoyed this presentation idea from Nolan Haims. Definitely going to start experimenting with this.

I’ve wanted to improve my drawing skills for several years. A few years ago I bought a copy of Betty Edwards’ book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and I’ve flipped through it a couple of times but I’ve just never sat down and done the exercises. A few months ago did the first exercise, but then got busy with this and that and never continued. But this weekend, for several reasons including a need to draw more frequently at work as well as an interest in story-boarding that has laid hold of me lately, I pulled the book out and I’m determined to get through it. It’s my hope that improving my drawing skills will help my confidence in the creative areas of my life as well as help me improve at using whiteboards during presentations.

I was kind of shocked by the results of today’s exercise. So much so that I feel compelled to share it with you in the hopes that it may inspire some of you to give drawing, and particularly Mrs. Edwards’ book, a try.

The exercise involved copying a line drawing of Igor Stravinsky done by Picasso in 1920. Here’s how mine turned out.

Piscasso’s Stravinsky

My Stravinsky

Given that this is one of my first attempts at drawing, I was pretty happy with the results. It’s certainly no where near perfect, but it’s much closer than I would have expected.

So how did this happen? The secret is…

The picture was upside down as I drew it.

This is what I saw as I drew.

This exercise was designed to demonstrate the differences between left-brained and right-brained seeing. Apparently what happens is that the visual, holistic right-brain is really good at perceiving shapes which is essential for drawing well. But the right brain gets tricked by the analytical, verbal, symbolic left brain when you’re looking at something. You see a nose and then try to draw a nose based on what you think a nose should look like not on what’s actually in front of you.

The picture in the book. I had never seen the picture right-side up before I started drawing.

According to Edwards, turning the picture upside down before you draw it forces you to see the picture exactly as it is without the pesky left-brain trying to understand the picture first. And you can see the results. I thought I couldn’t draw, but clearly that’s not the case. Instead, maybe the answer is that I just can’t see properly. The rest of the book is full of exercises that will hopefully help me learn to switch to “right-brain mode” at will and help me unlock my latent drawing skills.

I’m pretty excited about this. Here’s a skill I didn’t even I know I might have. I obviously don’t know how well the rest of the course works yet, but if you’ve ever wanted to draw but thought you didn’t have the natural skills, I’d recommend giving this book a chance.

Have any of you had similar experiences with drawing or other artistic skills you didn’t think you had? I’d love to hear about them.

I spent most of this weekend working on my presentation for the Atlassian Summit in a few weeks. Generally when I’m working on something I expand to fill whatever space I have, as you can see below.

I guess having everything spread out in front of me makes me feel better.

I had a really awesome time building these slides this weekend. Maybe that shows you just how sick I am. But I can’t emphasize enough the importance of what Garr Reynolds calls “going analog” before you ever power up your laptop. If you frequently find yourself opening PowerPoint and then staring at a blank slide for hours on end, this technique is for you.

You need to have a plan for your slides before you start building them and the best way to do that, I’ve found, is on paper. I just start writing, sketching, scribbling ideas down until I find a thread that I like. I then try to develop that idea until I have a really good outline of what I want to say and what images best support it. This drastically reduces the time I spend actually building the slides.

That’s it. Simple. Give this a shot next time you build a deck of slides. Your sketches don’t have to be anything more than scribbles (most of mine are positively awful), but you may find it amazing how much going through this process helps clarify what slides you need to build.

Close up of a (very) rough draft of my presentation.

A few weeks ago Mike Rohde, who did all the illustrations for Rework (which are now posted in 37 Signals’ Flickr gallery), attended South by Southwest and took notes.

He didn’t just take any notes, though. They’re some of the most incredible notes I’ve ever seen. Which got me to thinking. Why do I take such boring notes? My notes often look like bad PowerPoint: endless indented numbered lists. I can actually remember being taught in school that that is the “right way” to take notes.

I have a notebook that goes everywhere with me. To meetings, to classes, to lectures. And I’m constantly scribbling things in it. And yet, once I make these scribblings I rarely read back over them. On the rare occasion that I do actually read back over them, I’ve found that it’s pretty boring, which is probably why I avoid it. But in looking at Mike Rohde’s notes, it occurs to me that these are notes I would most likely enjoy going over and over and over.

In fact, I’m sure of it because it just so happens that Mike’s 2009 SXSW notes, which he calls Sketchnotes, have been converted into an iPhone app that I can’t put down. I didn’t think it would be an interesting app to have at first, but I changed my mind and I’m glad I did. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed it and gotten out of it.

So, inspired by Mike, it’s now my goal to try to make the notes I take to be less of an outline of everything that is said in a class, speech, sermon, etc. and be more visual, use more sketching, and only really capture the big main points that I want to remember. If I get really courageous maybe I’ll post some of my notes here in the future.

I’m glad Mike shared these and I hope you’ll enjoy looking over them as much as I have.

Just had the chance to read this post from a few days ago on Dan Roam’s Back of the Napkin blog.

In this video snippet, Dan gives a really good explanation of how simple visual communication is, how it helps us understand things more easily, and why understanding things makes us feel so good. And all in three minutes!

Convinced I’m gonna have to see Ron Galloway’s upcoming film as soon as I can.

When I was little I wanted nothing more than to be an astronaut. I had glow in the dark stars on my ceiling, a teddy bear named “Cub Canabearal” who wore a space suit, and more than anything I wanted to go to Space Camp. While we lived in Cullman, AL when I was in first grade, we took a trip up to Huntsville to go to the US Space and Rocket Center, the home of Space Camp. I can remember staring wild-eyed at the life-size Space Shuttle, getting vertigo during an IMAX movie, and queasy on the centrifuge. We walked by the area where Space Camp-ers were housed and I can remember wishing so much that I would get to go someday.

A few years later I learned that there was a height limit for astronauts of around six feet. Apparently the suits they wear aren’t one-size-fits-all. My dad is 6’5″ so I knew the chances of my coming in under 6 feet were slim. Whether or not that restriction was true, it was the first time I can remember ever thinking that my dream of being an astronaut ever seemed less than certain and I remember feeling really upset about it.

Eventually I got over it and moved on. I never went to Space Camp.

That little kid who wanted to be an astronaut didn’t die completely, though, and I never lost my interest in NASA and space travel. I have to admit that a few years ago as my wife and I were deciding whether to move to Birmingham, AL or Huntsville, a part of me leaned toward Huntsville for no other reason than that it meant some likelihood that I could work for NASA. Even if I didn’t get a job with NASA, I’d at least be able to drive by the Space and Rocket Center regularly and see the giant Saturn V rocket from the highway. Childish, maybe, but it’s the truth.

When I got a job working for NASA as a contractor in 2006 I was more than a little excited. I have a badge that says that I work for NASA! I have a desk at the Marshall Space Flight Center! My email address ends in “nasa.gov”. How cool is that?! Even though I don’t travel into space, the experience has still been the realization of a childhood dream.

For those of you who might not know, NASA’s been underfunded in recent years, and the President’s current proposed budget calls for the termination of the program I work for. It’s far from a done deal but it has many people (at NASA and elsewhere) worried about the future of the agency. The video below is of Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and excellent speaker responding to a student’s question after a recent lecture at the University of Buffalo.

Given the remarkable clarity and expert delivery of his answer, it amazes me to think that Dr. Tyson is answering this question on the spur of the moment. I hope to be able to speak as eloquently in an impromptu setting some day. But what’s more impressive to me is that Dr. Tyson realizes that there are very real, very human, and emotional elements (to NASA, but to so many other things, too) that get lost when we only think about our immediate problems.

…Pixar and infographics. A match made in heaven.

I discovered this infographic by JuanPabloBravo! the other day from @jeanlucr on Twitter and just have to share it. It compares the sizes of most of Pixar’s main characters. I wish I could print it out in one sheet and hang it on the wall in my cube at work, but it’ll probably still look good spread over multiple sheets.

I also enjoyed the same artist’s 50 Movie Cars infographic.