Presentations are a key part of a design career and of academic courses, so getting comfortable and confident with them is a key skill. I felt for a first presentation in a long time, I performed reasonably well and I feel the feedback received was fair and useful. Timing is definitely an area for more practice, I have only ever worked with a minimum time before, but with maximum time limit’s the industry practice, I will need to work on this area.
I feel very fortunate to have been placed in a group with four other hardworking and dedicated individuals. During the whole process from selecting an idea, through doing research, creating slides and meeting up for practice, all members were in attendance at every meeting. This made the process a lot easier, as I never once doubted the work was going to be done, or that people would show up, which really kept stress levels to a minimum.
We all were on the same page from day one, selected a topic early and set to work, and I feel everyone pulled their weight equally, with a real democratic approach to decision making. I really enjoyed this and I feel our presentation came together with the minimum of fuss, with no need to chase people up, a huge credit to my teammates.
I really liked our slide design and felt it fitted with aesthetic of our topic The Modern Movement in America, really well. With each of us doing the title slide to our own section of the presentation, we were all able express our design skills and creativity. I have to give credit to Noah, who a well as doing the introduction, also designed the slide frames for the body slides, which gave our presentation its consistent feel, I feel this gave our presentation some extra professionalism and polish.
Here is the title slide I designed:
Having met up the day before and completed a couple of complete run-throughs of the presentation, I was confident we had the content ready to go. One thing that did come up in the practice session was we were coming in short of the ten-minute time limit. To address this I felt I had more content I could add, as well as everyone slowing down how quickly we spoke, we felt this would give us the extra time we needed. During the actual presentation, I felt we actually overcompensated, and this led to going over the time limit by one minute and fifteen seconds. I will admit I was not able to see a timer during my section of the presentation and I think this is definitely something I would change for any future presentation, as the importance of sticking to the defined time is essential.
On a personal level, I found looking down at a computer screen while presenting difficult, I found during practice runs I was missing some of my bullet points and therefore missing content. To combat this I decided to go back to a more traditional method of using flash cards, I thought using Sticky Notes might be a good option as I could stick them to my hand and discard each as soon as I had covered the content. As this was a late decision, I had not had time to fully practice with this set-up (I had really wanted to use the presentation view as it had a timer). I found during the presentation that while they did stick to my hand, and freed up my other hand for changing the slides, they were a bit challenging to discard, which affected my rhythm and probably added some time to my section. I definitely feel flash cards suit me as reminder notes, I just feel that maybe sticky notes were not the best option. For a shorter presentation like this, memorising my piece would be ideal, but with my Dyslexia effecting my working memory, I’m not sure if I would be able to.
I have included a picture of my flash cards below.
I was really impressed by everyone else in the group, they delivered their sections with confidence, I felt the content was great and we were all able to give a solid presentation on The Modern Movement in America, which I hope the rest of the class found informative and enjoyed.
Here is the link to our presentation on Google Slides:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19f0KvmUw37RYRi-e-roSL5mPjQ_JkNBn8fAshK5DhKA/edit#slide=id.g188ed073aef_1_11
I was really pleased to see that no other group had picked the same topic as us, as this meant I could learn about some of the other topics that we could have chosen. The other topics chosen were: The Bauhaus and New Typography, two on Design Systems of the Olympic Games and one on Postmodernism. I found them all very informative and knowing how challenging giving a presentation is, and the nerves in the room beforehand, I felt all the groups did an excellent job. I was really impressed by the slide design of all the groups, but I feel special mention must go to CSS, I felt combining Olympic pictograms into the letters of the slides words was inspired. I found each presentation interesting and definitely learned a lot of new information in a short period.