So, Krea’s kreator-in-chief Pravin Shekhar wanted us to convert his research paper into a Pecha Kucha style presentation which is to be presented at the ESOMAR Congress – Odyssey 2010 in Athens, Greece. Contrary to the usual informal tone of a Pecha Kucha, presenting a research paper in 6 minutes and 40 seconds is pretty serious business. There were some important lessons to be learned from this assignment. Here are a few challenges that we faced while making our virgin Pecha Kucha presentation.

Batman and Robin

Different people use presentations in different ways. Some people totally depend on a presentation while presenting an idea. In the words of Garr Reynolds, ‘it is like their security blanket’. Then there are people who treat the presentation as an accessory or a cue to their speech. Pravin is one such guy. He can speak effortlessly for 6 minutes and forty seconds(and perhaps for much more than that) and convey his ideas perfectly with or without a presentation. So in his case, the presentation had to be a visual key to his ideas. It had to be as engaging as the words he spoke and as charming as his personality. There was no space for a mismatch.

Big things in a small package:

One of the biggest challenges of this assignment was to condense the information of a research paper into a 20 slides presentation. We went through his research paper umpteen number of times to understand the scope and depth of his work, his ideas and tried to figure out the key messages that he wanted to convey to the audience. Our approach was to divide-and-eliminate: Divide the research paper into parts and eliminate the parts that were unimportant. After much deliberation we could come up with a storyboard that covered the core ideas of Pravin’s paper and conveyed that information in a logical manner.

A visual journey:

Presenting before a global audience, Pravin wanted his presentation to be a visual journey that highlights the various divides that exist in India. Thus all the images in the presentation had to be in the Indian context. Finding images thus became a daunting task as very few websites offer decent Indian stock images and so our options were pretty limited. After a lot of effort(during which Firefox crashed 17 times!) we found some great images that helped us create a stunning visual experience for Pravin’s audience.

The great tussle between text and images:

We come from a school of presentation design where images are given a free reign. We let our images do the talking, accompanied by little or no text. However in Pravin’s case, we had to convert a research paper into a presentation so sooner or later we had to make a choice between text or images as a means to convey the ideas. We chose the middle path. Half of the slides have less than Ten words on them. And yes, No Bullet Points!

All in all, we thoroughly enjoyed making our first Pecha Kucha presentation. It was challenging and it was fun. Pravin is going to deliver this presentation sometime later this month and we at Effect Works wish him the very best for his talk. We are also looking forward to participating in Volume 3 of Pecha Kucha Night Chennai, sometime in November this year. Good things are round the corner.

(Image courtesy: Felix Chandran)

Most of the people that we meet, believe that a presentation that is neatly styled – with a common template, nicely bulleted slides, one font size throughout the presentation – is an effective presentation. That may be true for a document, but for a presentation that isn’t always true. At Effect Works, we tend to take the middle path. One such example is the presentation redesign assignment for Holzwerk Interiors.

Holzwerk Interiors had a marketing presentation and they wanted us to revamp it. Holzwerk is a customized interiors company that creates innovative interiors for home and office. Their existing presentation had a common theme. Every slide had an embedded flash banner on the left to display their images. On the right hand side, of each slide, was a bulleted list.

Here are a few sample slides:

We replaced the flash slideshows with a single image of their work on every slide. The presentation thus effectively became a portfolio of their work, highlighting their best work. We also dumped all the bullet points on the presentation, each and every one of them. A bit of Presentation-fu here and there and the transformation was complete. Here is a little case study that we made for this assignment, check it out.

We at Effect Works had a brush with History when Maersk Training Centre approached us with an assignment to redesign their training material. Maersk Training Centre is a global provider of specialist learning to off-shore, maritime and wind-power industries. It is the principal education centre for AP Moller – Maersk personnel and now, as a worldwide concern, has opened its doors to all companies.

Denmark through the ages is a part of Maersk training material pertaining to Danish History. Our job was to redesign the presentation to make it more appealing and educative while keeping the style guidelines of Maersk intact.

Our approach, thus was to make the content richer. We added a lot of trivia to the existing content and backed up the text with meaningful imagery. A historical timeline, with slides overflowing with information that are distinguishable by color schemes, was prepared. We peppered the presentation with relevant images and engrossing stories.  What followed was a ready reckoner of Danish History. Check out the presentation on Slideshare and let us know how you find it.

Within hours of uploading it on Slideshare, Twitter Myths was selected as one of the Top Presentations of the Day. . In the next two days, Twitter Myths got over 2000 hits on Slideshare and was one of the most popular presentations on the website. As of this moment, Twitter Myths has had more than 6000 pageviews, 80 Likes on Facebook and 44 favorites on Slideshare.

Check out Twitter Myths on Slideshare and do share your thoughts on the topic with us. We’d love to hear from you. Also, Effect Works now has a Twitter profile of its own – Follow us @effectworks for tweets on presentation design, presentation tips and much more.

We looked at Slideshare’s contest as an opportunity, a chance to tell a story. A story about change or the need for change. We decided to select Mr. X to be the hero of our story. Mr. X is a stick figure, a stick figure who wants to ‘Save the Earth’.

Mr. X’s story and experiences teach us some valuable yet extremely simple lessons. Our intention with Mr. X was to keep the idea simple – You don’t need a superhero to save a planet.

It was one of the top 10 presentations in the ‘Creative/Offbeat’ category. Mr. X has since then been converted in corporate brochures for NGOs and Green businesses.Check out his story on Slideshare and do tell us how you feel about him and his mission.

At Effect Works, we help organizations and individuals communicate their ideas to the world. This blog is an effort to take our communication to the next level. We will use this space to share ideas about presentations and online branding. We’ll also showcase the work that we’ve done and the stories behind it.

We’ll be tweaking the Effect Works website and blog in the coming days, to liven up the time that you spend here. We welcome ideas and suggestions, criticism and comments. We are all ears.

Let the conversations begin!