Getting the Message Across by Stéphane Faroult

Author:Stéphane Faroult
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Apress, Berkeley, CA

I end up with a slide that is very legible, in spite of fancy fonts, and that anybody can see well, even from the last ranks. A slide you can talk on, and a good support to explain that this calculator was invented by a 19-year-old to help his father, a tax collector, in his job, and that he had it built by a local clockmaker.

How Far to Go

As a conclusion to this chapter, and before moving on to the dynamics of a presentation, I’d like to give a few elements of answer to a practical question: image editing may require some effort, is it worth it? The first thing to say is that the amount of time may vary widely, depending on what you do, and depending also on the image. Adding a soft lower edge to an image, which may look complicated when you discover it for the first time, is an easy operation that with a bit of practice you can perform in a couple of minutes or less. Background removal in Gimp can be easy with regular shapes, and rather tough with fluffy, curved shapes (a case that the PowerPoint tool cannot handle). A second thing to say is that finding the right image usually takes far more time than editing it (of course, these times add up).

Must we spend twenty minutes working on an image that will be displayed for twenty seconds? My touchstone is how many people will see the edited image. If your presentation is a one-time event before four people, it’s probably not worth your time, unless the outcome of your presentation will determine your professional activities for the next five years. If you expect your image to be seen over time by 1,000 people (not necessarily in a single presentation, good images deserve recycling), then twenty seconds time 1,000 amounts to five and one-half hours, and twenty minutes no longer seem shocking. I apply the same reasoning to some operations that you’ll see in the next chapters, which may be time consuming too.

My point of view is that details count in a presentation, and you’ll never get anything else than a mediocre result if you don’t pay attention to them. It’s better to show no image rather than a bad one.

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