Thursday, February 8th, 2007

The Graphic Design Presentation

This afternoon I gave a graphic design presentation to a group of local high school students. I actually just finished, and I’m at home on a late lunch break typing this.

I’d say overall it went well, in the sense that I wasn’t mauled, mamed or otherwise disfigured. My timing was actually perfect, and I wrapped it up with a couple minutes left for questions before the bell rang. One of my biggest worries was that I wouldn’t have enough to talk about. What happens if I’m standing up there with ten minutes left and nothing to say?

Other than not getting beat up and having good timing, I’d say I really have no idea how it went. It certainly was not the best-case scenario, which would have been having an audience of kids who were all super excited about graphic design. It could have also been a lot worse - there weren’t many disruptions, and I did make a few kids chuckle.

I’d say my success can be measured by the number of design magazines left on the desks. At the beginning, I haded out 6 copies of the graphic design magazine HOW. I told the kids that they were more than welcome to keep the magazines and take them home. At the end of the presentaion when the lights came back up, there were only 4 left on the tables. That tells me that at least 2 kids might be interested in graphic design. With about 60 kids in the audience, 2 kids is roughly 3 percent. So I’d say on a scale of 1 to 100, my presentation was somewhere around 3.

That might not sound good, but I’m pretty sure most of the presentations I sat through in high school ranked somewhere below zero. I’ll take a 3 any day!

I made the above flyer to hand out to all the kids (click image for PDF version). It’s intentionally a mess. What I really wanted to do was drill home the point that I would not be presenting a PowerPoint slideshow with bulleted lists and charts & graphs.

The Presentation

I spent most of last night and all morning at work preparing my presentation. I created it using Apple’s Keynote program, which is like PowerPoint only much more ‘Apple.’

Rather than plugging in my laptop to the digital projector, I used my iPod. I have the universal dock which comes with a remote, and it can export video or photos to any device with a standard video-in port. So I exported the entire presentation as a series of photos, and I used the iPod photo slideshoe feature to flip through them like slides. All I had in my hand was the tiny Apple remote, and it worked incredibly well. The slides even cross-dissolved as I flipped through them, and it looked wonderful.

So that’s that. Lessons learned: preparation is imperitive when speaking in front of people. It also helped to pick a few kids in different places in the audience that I could look at while I talked, because looking at the group as a whole makes it very weird. Feels like you’re just talking past everybody or something. But I found a few kids who weren’t asleep or threatening me with obscene gestures (none were of course) and focued on them.

But I stand firm in my realization that I am not a good teacher.

RELATED TOPICS: graphic design, work

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