Dapper Deck Design 2.0 - Visual Storytelling

Editor's Notes

1. Storytelling—it’s undeniably a buzzword these days. As business professionals, trying to create content for our companies that will then be relayed to our prospects or users, we’re all told that we need to be storytellers. People care more if it’s in a story! They connect! I don’t know about you, I think that’s easier said than done to a certain degree. (I don’t have time to develop characters and their backstory, a plot, and more…) That being said, I do believe that when you invite attendees to your presentation, you’re asking them to go on a journey with you. And aside from a short description and few agenda points, they don’t know what they’re in for. You’re asking them to climb this ladder, commit their time/resources, without knowing what’s on the other side or what they’re going to get out of it. What can you do to assure them that you’re someone to be trusted and that it will be a good use of their time? The answer is through strong visual design. And when things align right, your design will help tell your “story.”
2. Too often with our presentations we’re entirely reliant on the words of our story to communicate our message. This is such a missed opportunity! E.g. he was heartbroken.
3. What about this instead?
4. He was overjoyed.
5. How about this instead?
6. With the right visual design of your presentation, you can capture your audience and take them somewhere. Make it an experience and help your attendees engage with thoughtfully curating intentional design assets,
7. Shane Snow and Joe Lazauskas in partnership with Contently released an email series on storytelling recently and I’m in love with this point they made in their very first email. “Scientists have a saying: “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” When more of your brain is at work at a given point of time, the chances that your brain will remember the work it did increases exponentially.” By engaging your attendees’ minds in the form of visual and audio communication, the greater the chance they’ll remember the content.
8. Now, this isn’t to say that there’s a perfect visual for every scenario. Coming from someone that works in tech and often times has to create a visual aid to intangible assets, it’s not always an easy ask. But this is where you can take creative liberty and have some fun. A shortcut you can use to skirt these challenges is to focus on other pieces of the presentation. Such as the feeling you want to convey…
9. Is the current state of affairs a complete mess?
10. Are they about to go on an adventure with you?
11. What about awestruck or filled with wonder?
12. Defiant?
13. Nostalgic for the ways things once were?
14. Or how about curious for what’s to come?
15. Whatever you choose as your guide for design assets, just put some thought into it. Don’t grab the very first image that populates after your search. Be intentional and heck, maybe even a little picky about what makes it into your deck!
16. So here’s a quick agenda of what we’re talking about today. So we’ll do a quick recap of last year, but mainly today we’ll discuss the design assets you choose and how they play together to help you create your story.
17. The point of these dapper deck design presentations are really two things. 1) Design is important and 2) You can do it – you don’t need a degree. These are a mixture of my tactical approach and suggestions along with some strategy inspiration. I’m not a designer, I majored in business and emphasized in marketing. And despite my mom’s protests, all of the art I created in art class is pretty grotesque and my Instagram is nothing close to art-worthy. But that doesn’t mean we can’t see something and enjoy the way it was put together…and figure out a way to do it ourselves! So I realize that if you’re attending this session, you probably already believe that design is at least somewhat important. So I feel like I already have my people in the room! Speaking of which, I’d like t take a quick survey to see who we have in the room today. Can you raise your hand if you’re the one creating the decks for your presentations? Can you raise your hand if you aren’t, but someone on your team or in the company is creating your decks? And finally if you’re using a freelancer or third party to design your decks? Great! Well regardless if you’re elbow deep in the design or just overseeing the strategy, there should be some great takeaways for everyone here.
18. Last year’s presentation Dapper Deck Design 1.0 included some step by step tutorials - including how to make your slides bulletproof so the design doesn’t render differently for different attendees, a quick formula for designing your deck when you have no time or resources, and a step by step tutorial on how to design a slide. You can find that deck at bit.ly/dapperdeck!
19. Here’s an example of a slide I think we’ve all seen before. It’s the generic “title and content” option that PowerPoint gives you to work with. You insert title here and add some bullet points. I don’t know about you, but I see this and my eyes glaze over.
20. Really though, I believe people don’t attend webcasts in general to *read* a bunch of slides. If that were the case, wouldn’t they have just downloaded a whitepaper? You’re creating an experience for them by supplying both audio and visual. Make sure that you don’t lose your audience to reading! The text on your slides should enhance your presentation, but shouldn’t be the *entire* presentation.
21. So, raise your hand if I pulled up in this Ford Bronco pickup you’d be really excited to jump in and go for a ride with me? No?
22. How about now? Would this Bronco Pickup make you a little more excited? Would you feel a bit safer probably? This Bronco looks like the owner cares a great detail about the content. Like this Ford Bronco, The right presentation of your content matters. The visual presentation of your content builds credibility.
23. Let me show you how we do this at SendGrid… SendGrid’s webcast program has come a very long way.
24. One of the ways the program has majorly evolved is that we’ve spent the last few years figuring out how to incorporate visual stories to our content. Even if we can’t connect all the dots to create a full story around our content, we ask ourselves how can we make it more engaging. What metaphors or similes can we use? And it has made a significant difference!—since switching to ON24 and utilizing more intentional design SendGrid has experienced a 40% increase in registrants and 55% increase in attendees since 2014.
25. For example, we decided to put on an event about an aspect of our product, our parse webhook. We started with asking what will people will get out of using our Parse webhook? Well in a sense, they’ll become a kind of swiss-army knife that’s capable of more than the usual user. I learned that in baseball, there are players known as switchhitters who are capable of hitting both left and right handed. So we made our webcast about the parse webhook baseball themed. We had corny baseball jokes, kitschy baseball cards for our presenters, and we ran the bases with our content structure. This made for a far more engaging experience than just throwing some benefits on our corporate deck and reciting them to attendees. And It was also a lot more fun to create!
26. But the main point I want to re-iterate from last year is that you can do it! I’m not a designer. You’re not a designer. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to design things every day.
27. Speaking of not being a designer…everyone starts somewhere. Here’s the first deck that I ever put together for a webcast. It’s not pretty, but it’s where I started. Clearly I didn’t start with a natural ability, I just decided to work on it. Start small and work your way up!
28. So that’s enough of looking in the past and reviewing, let’s talk about the major design elements you can use to design your decks!
29. Let's dive in and discuss the fonts and images that you're choosing!
30. Fonts can set the scene/support your theme or your story. Or more specifically set the mood for your message.
31. I want to start with a quick mini lesson. There are actually more than just these two types of fonts Invision design course - Serif: The “feet” of a letter; sans serif literally means “without serif”
32. In web design, an easy combination for fonts is to use a nice serif font for your body text and sans-serif for headlines. But of course, the possibilities and combinations are endless—just make sure they have the right personality for your purposes.
33. Clean, minimalist, and sleek
34. Or more of an elegant and refined script
35. Handwritten and personal
36. Or just straight to the point.
37. Really, the fonts help communicate the mood of your message. Fonts can be pretty bold and exciting…especially if they’re says the right words. 
38. As you can tell this far in my presentation. I’m all about images. They provide energy, complexity, and beauty to slides and the great news is there are *so* many out there to choose from! I think it’s a shortcut to telling stories with your slides, without a ton of work on your part.
39. I have this theory that there are three levels of images in presentations. Spell, Tell, or Show.
40. Let’s walk through an example of each of the three in action. Saw we search for an image for teamwork.
41. Raise your hand if you’ve seen these guys before? Anyone? Spell it out for me. Yeah. These guys are a classic and quite the favorite. four blob people and putting together a puzzle as a team. Feels a little like your hitting them over the head with it.
42. Okay now we’re at tell. Is it a little corny and obvious still? Yes. Is it way better than the last one? You bet.
43. And finally we’re at show. We took the concept we wanted to explain and brought it to life with an example. Yes, it requires the audience to engage a bit more and connect the dots, but that’s the point! Neurons that fire together, wire together. So we’re asking more of the audience but I’m confident that they’ll rise to the occasion.
44. I’ve used images out of every one of these buckets, but when you can, try to elevate your choice to more of a ”show” image.
45. Finding the right image can be a challenge. Here’s a formula that I’m hoping will help.
46. How can you take your search one step further?
47. Ask, what would my keyword look like in action??
48. Will this feel like it belongs with the rest of the deck?
49. Traditional cubicle vs. more of a high tech open space format
50. I like the open space, but it’s the wrong colors. I’ve been using more warm, wood tones. So I add those to my search!
51. But the last image is lacking some energy! I need some people. So I add that to my search.
52. Here’s our winner! I found it using the right keywords (sometimes you don’t know what they are until you see your options at first, so be comfortable building them), the right colors, and the right energy (or vibe) with my people in the scene!
53. Often times with stock images of people you have two options…
54. Group engaged in a project.
55. Group engaged in….staring at you.
56. Let’s keep things comfortable and focused on the story you’re trying to tell! Not about making your attendees feel awkward.
57. So now that we’ve talked about fonts and images, let’s talk about how they play together to tell your story.
58. Arrange the elements in your presentation in a way that communicates importance.
59. Here we have a decent amount of text on the screen. And you can’t discern what’s more important than the next.
60. Now we’re in business! The size of the text now indicates what I should definitely be paying attention to.
61. If you’re also in a situation where you need to use a lot of text (I know, sometimes it’s unavoidable), then you can rely on color to draw attention to the most important information.
62. Speaking of color….I don’t want to spend a ton of time on it today, but it’s worth mentioning that….
63. Color matters in your presentation. And most importantly, you don’t want the colors you choose to clash.
64. Can take something that feels a bid meh, a bit drained…
65. To bam!
66. Now let’s discuss how we’re arranging those images and fonts.
67. When placing text, look for the least busy
68. Place on your slide
69. So instead of here
70. Go here
71. Those buildings are pretty busy.
72. Op, that’s better!
73. No. Literally there is whitespace available here.
74. Perfect!
75. Themes are really the ultimate shortcut to creating a story or making some energy happen where it may not naturally exist.
76. We’re talking about ways to pull together your data to make someone a better email marketer. How about a recipe book with vibrant images throughout?
77. You can pretty much make anything stellar. Put stellar in the name and all of a sudden, you’re in outer space!
78. Or if you’re holding an event that’s meant to welcome people, make it a natuitcal theme and welcome people aboard!
79. A theme doesn’t have to be literally about outerspace or a nautical journey. It can also just be a continuous element that you keep throughout your slides. A common thread. I put this deck together when I was a little short on time, but I was still happy with the end result because I felt like the common colorful ink drops had both an art and science “vibe” to it that stayed true to the content throughout the deck.
80. Here are some options for themes I’ve tried in the past and ones that I look forward to trying in the future!
81. So what hot takes do I hope you leave today’s presentation with?
82. If you’re not sure, do less. Don’t start trying to do everything. Choose to focus on one thing at a time.
83. Remember the spell, tell, show theory and try to up-level your images when you can!
84. Finding the right image can be a challenge. Here’s a formula that I’m hoping will help. Be prepared to build off of your original search.
85. As you know from today the actual design of your deck is the summation of many different factors.
86. It’s the right combination of those factors can create a feeling. So be intentional and decide ahead of time what you want your audience to think and feel. What impression do you want to leave them with?
87. You know your audience far better than I do. You know if they would go nuts over a dinosaur themed presentation or would absolutely hate it. You’re the expert of your own program and know what design elements will work best for you. You’re fully capable and in the driver seat—so own it!
88. At the very least, the right design elements can help engage your audience. But at the most, it will act as an ally to help you show your story and communicate your message.