CEDO 530: Week 3 - Story & Design

Before I got to reading  the assigned chapter 6 of Presentation Zen I began to think about the book and what the author is saying. I got just as much from his introductory videos as I did from reading the book. That's good for the video presentation part. As for the book, I was beginning to to become annoyed with the ramblings and with Garr saying that it's not really Zen and Zen has nothing to do with this but if we think about it we can fit it in somehow.



It didn't seem as if he was following his own advice. I also began to think that Garr is using paragraphs and chapters as his bullet points, filing up space with words that many may not be paying attention to. In my opinion, he could have used bullet points in his book outlining the points he mentions in his video. Then he should have used the saved space to give/show more examples. Until chapter 6, this design book didn't have much in the way of practical graphic design using graphics. Graphic techniques are not always best explained with words.

CreditA picture is 

Finally in chapter 6, we get some before/after and exemplary examples. I think more of the same should have been included in some of the previous chapters as well.

Remixing my older slide show was fun but time consuming. It's easy to slap some nice images into a slide. It's harder to find just what you are looking for to convey the message & emotions you want. It's even more time consuming to plan everything and take the time to get all the details right, especially deciding on common elements and fonts to give continuity throughout the presentation. I could spend a couple of hours or more on just one slide getting everything perfect.

I'm getting to like the idea of Voicethread more and more as I work with it. The one thing I wish it had more of was the ability to link within the slides themselves. You can add a title to a slide and have that link to something but sometimes I'd like more.

Question: How are we to responsibly attribute the author/artists of material we use in something like Voicethread? Do we create a credit slide at the end? Do we create 10 credit pages if we have that many? How about something like Vuvox, where I made a show about me for a course in the beginning? Or Glogster?

By the way, if you haven't checked out Vuvox you should. It's a cross between Animoto and Glogster. The presentation auto scrolls right to left in a linear fashion, not slide-to-slide. You can also add audio but it doesn't have a stock sample selection like Animoto yet.

Speaking of Animoto, I've to work on mine yet. Better go.