Introduction to Presentation Design & Persuasiveness

(gentle music) - So, let's talk really briefly about what presentation design is and why we want them to be persuasive. Well, presentation design is a specific niche of design that I've found myself in. I would say probably every designer and most non-designers create presentations and have presentation design as a part of what they do. I think it may be one of the most common forms of design, because non-designers often turn to their presentation tool to express themselves visually.

For most people, it's the only visual expression tool that comes with their computer. I like this particular niche of design because it's a fun combination of other time-based designs like video, audio, animation, storyboarding, where it's one idea that follows another in a particular order to tell a story. It's also got some fun constraints that remind me of, you know, graphic or brand designs like print design or marketing design. These are things where there's a constrained canvas size and you've got to design with that space.

So it's a nice combination of the two. We've got this constrained space, every slide's the same size, and then they come in order. I also like to relate it to web design, especially in the marketing field because websites function in a similar story arc to presentations. They have a little bit more, choose your own adventure where your audience can click around and experience different stories or different story arcs. It's a, you know, that choose your own adventure books were my favorite growing up, but it's similar.

And so we're gonna make presentations and you probably make lots of presentations already, and we want them to be persuasive. Well, what is persuasiveness? In so few words, it's making a compelling argument, right? Or convincing someone else of your ideas. I like to think of it as we have a vision and we're trying to get the other person to see our vision and then maybe agree with that vision or have an action. So for example, I might create a designer portfolio presentation for a job interview.

There's lots of people that are interviewing for jobs right now, and they want to tell a compelling story and that story is, I'm the right fit for this job, for this company, for your team, and you should hire me. So we wanna persuade them to hire us. And so we've just gotta compel them that you are the right choice. Another example that we're gonna talk about a lot, and I'm gonna do in my project is oftentimes in large organizations, you've got to express an idea that's in your head again, to someone on a different team, in a different organization and they might be in control of the budget for if your idea can come to life or not.

So you may have a feature or a product that you wanna build, and you need the resources, you need the team, you need the planning time, you need the budget, whatever it is and so you have to express the vision to someone else and convince them it's a good idea. And so that's what we're gonna work on. We're gonna work on taking a story and making it beautiful and concise and compelling. (gentle music)