The jury's still out on whether creative professionals inherently love attention or despise it. Creating art, design or product for a living implies a desire to make something people will notice, and while there are those who never show their creations to anyone, they rarely make a career out of it. On the other hand, an artist, designer or illustrator is not the same as a performer: it's your work that's out there on display, not you, much as it might sometimes feel that way. This level of separation is attractive to many creative professionals, while others would rather be be right out there with their creation, describing it, talking it up, doing whatever it takes to make their willing audience love it with the same ardor they do.
It might be comforting to know that loving presenting doesn't necessarily make you good at it, nor does being ambivalent about it. Being a good designer is no sure indicator either: the brilliant creative who makes an ass of himself when put on the spot is practically a cliché. But whether you love the spotlight with all your heart or cower in the corner at the slightest hint of attention, chances are good you'll have to do some presenting in your creative career. And like most worthwhile skills, presenting is something that can be learned.
As creative professionals, we're often called on to show the results of our work in visual form. The mistake many of us make is assuming that a well executed visual can take the place of a well thought out presentation. It can't. When you're planning your presentation, think about it as a narrative arc: what story are you trying to tell, what's the beginning, middle and end, and why should anyone care?
"Presentation" is a pretty broad term. In the creative world, it often means pitching a concept to a client or another department in your own company, with the intention of winning a job, making a case for a specific creative decision, or informing them of a project's status. It can also mean a more general explanation of your own capabilities as a freelancer, consultancy or team. In both cases, you'll probably be showing some work, and you'll probably be talking to non-designers. With that in mind, we've put together a short list of tips to get you started on the right path. Most of them are pretty common sense, and revolve around a few basic themes: being prepared, telling a story, not being afraid to run the show. So here you are: 9 tips that can make the difference between crashing and burning, and soaring gracefully through one of life's more nervous situations.
1. You give the presentation, not your stuff.
Drawings, models, prototypes, movies, Powerpoint decks, sketches, renderings, and anything else you might bring to the table isn't what your audience really came to see. They came to see you; if they wanted to just look at sketches, they could have stayed at their desks and scrolled through a PDF. One of the fundamental rules of presenting is that people pay more attention to people than to things; that's why the ability to tell a story is so important.
As creative professionals, we're often called on to show the results of our work in visual form. The mistake many of us make is assuming that a well executed visual can take the place of a well thought out presentation. It can't. When you're planning your presentation, think about it as a narrative arc: what story are you trying to tell, what's the beginning, middle and end, and why should anyone care? Once you've got the story laid out, build a presentation to express it. The assets you assemble should support the story, so that when you get to that gorgeous rendering you spent 4 days on, your audience knows exactly why it's so great. You wouldn't create a design without solidifying the concept behind it first...why would you do that with a presentation?
2. Know who you're talking to.
Talking to marketers is different from talking to engineers. Talking to executives is different still. Before you commit time to creating a presentation, figure out what your audience wants to know. An ounce of empathy is worth about a ton of misplaced effort in this case. When the meeting is being set up, take 2 minutes to ask who will be in attendance, what their jobs are and how they're involved in the project. Then think about what you'd want to know if you were them, tailor your talk to address those concerns, and emphasize what you have to offer them.
When I was still freelancing in New York, I once flew out West to meet with the client--a metal detector company--of a studio I was working for. Knowing that all of the project engineers would be in attendance, and that several of them were working feverishly to develop an improved detection scheme, I made sure to mention my background as a physics teacher, and my deep interest in the science behind the project (which was true). Not only did the meeting go well, but I established a positive rapport with the engineers that lasted the entire 2-year duration of the project.
3. Control the environment.
Presenting in a familiar room is a great luxury. You know where the light switches are, where people will probably sit, and how to plug into the projector. If you're smart, you'll get there before everyone else and get things set up: pin up your images, set up your boards, lay out your models, hook up your laptop, test run your first few slides, then blank the screen so your audience sees you first of all. If it's feasible to stand at the front of the room, that's where you should be waiting. Remember, they're here to see you, so even if the second thing you do is turn off the lights and give a slide show, the first thing you do should be to stand proudly at the front and introduce it.
Going to foreign turf to give a presentation is becoming more and more the norm though, so chances are good you'll get there last, having walked or driven or flown all morning. So, in addition to finding out all you can about the space beforehand (corollary to tip #2), you should be ready to present in a tin shack with folding chairs if need be. That means having all your images, boards, pinups, etc. ready to go, as well as pins, tape, collapsible easels or whatever else you need to display them. If you're giving a slide show and you're not positive there will be a computer and projector ready and waiting for you, bring your own. Nothing wrong with looking over-prepared. Then walk in, set your stuff down, shake hands, and introduce yourself. Walk to the head of the room and take your time getting set up. The four minutes you take to get everything ready speak volumes, so make sure they say "I'm supposed to be here. I know what I'm doing."
4. Don't talk so much.
Being prepared and knowledgeable does not mean being long-winded. One of the great advantages to having some facility with visual communication is being able to use an image or an object in place of a lot of talking and hand-waving. If you're giving a slide show, limit yourself to a minute of talking per slide, and aim to average less than half that. Does this contradict Tip #1? Not really--telling a good story doesn't always mean saying a lot. The Triplets of Belleville has a fantastic narrative, and it's essentially dialog-free.
5. Plan ahead.
Winging it rarely works. You might think you're off the hook as a creative, that you can bring in your brilliant ideas and beautiful images, toss them casually on the table and sit back while the less creatively-gifted ooh, ahh and pelt you with money, but you can't, and they won't. Showing up unprepared to a presentation where you are the star doesn't express competence and nonchalance, it expresses arrogance and disorganization.
If it's just a status update, spend an hour or two the day before planning out your strategy and gathering your assets. If it's a client pitch, you should know 2 days ahead of time exactly what you're going to say. What do you do with the remaining 48 hours? The same as you do with your creative work: refine, refine, refine.
6. One thing at a time.
If your story needs a period of speechifying, go to a blank slide, turn the projector off, or stand in front of your pin-ups. Be the center of attention for a bit. What you want to avoid is obscuring your story by trying to push through conflicting media streams simultaneously. Humans are excellent at synthesizing information from multiple sources, but not so good at paying attention to two or three things at once. This is why it's often so excruciating to listen to a presenter read the text off of their projected slide: most people's brain's aren't really wired to listen well and read well simultaneously. So don't make them.
Similarly, there should be no superfluous images or text in a presentation. Too often, presenters feel like everything they say needs to include an image, even if it doesn't communicate anything. If you need to show some text, show it and talk about it, and don't feel like it needs decoration (save your efforts for formatting and font selection). If the text can be related to an image, go ahead and show them together, but make it clear how they're related. You know how to use captions and callouts, right? Then use them.
7. Get it in a can. Certain presentations you're going to give again and again. That's a good thing. If your job requires you to make the same client-pitch presentation 7 or 8 times a year, or you're called on to describe your firm's design research process every other week, you need a presentation template. Just as you might create an underlay for working out multiple sketch versions of a single illustration, or build a template that can be adjusted to fit a particular brochure layout or website, a presentation template can save you hours of work and improve your effectiveness. The advantages are similar: you can refine the template based on your experiences using it, making it cleaner and more compelling as well as more specific to your own strengths. A template-based presentation also gives you the sort of freedom a good underlay does, letting you try out various options and seeing how they look before going with the most appropriate.
The most obvious, and common, type of template is a Powerpoint or similar slide show, with spaces left for making it specific to a particular scenario. The template concept can be much broader though. If you use animations, a series of short video clips that are frequently useful can be compiled, then strung together to form the backbone of your show. Similarly, portfolio work that illustrates your strengths well should go in a file, complete with descriptive text and a layout coherent enough that they could be printed out and pinned up together, or projected in sequence, and look like they belong. If you don't have a really good-looking background layout, complete with frames, text blocks, callouts, a standardized color palette and the name of your company, department or yourself (if you're freelancing), then go make one now. If we had to re-invent the wheel every time we wanted to go somewhere, we wouldn't get there very fast.
8. Look the part. As a creative professional you're walking several fine lines. You're competent, but in a way that might be foreign to your audience. You take direction, but are stubbornly insistent on crucial details. You're rigorous but imaginative. Building credibility in the eyes of your audience means appearing to be all these things at once. The short form of the rule is to dress the way you usually dress, but a bit more professionally. The average designer, architect or illustrator has a decent understanding of color, pattern and stylistic trends, and this tends to play out in wardrobe selection.
The two mistakes creative professionals make when presenting are quashing that understanding in favor of looking completely "normal", or accentuating their "creativeness" to the point of parody. If you're presenting in distressed denim and a Very Cool T-shirt, most of your audience will be paying attention to your sloppy threads instead of you, regardless of how limited the print run on that shirt is. Conversely, if you have a boring suit that you only wear when you're presenting, your audience might wonder why they're paying someone who looks just like them to come up with new ideas--and you'll be 5% less comfortable if this is the only day all month you've worn a tie or heels. A button-up shirt and some decent jeans are the bare minimum for either gender, and no flip-flops. Nobody cares how comfy they are. (For a more detailed examination of how designers can dress for success, check out Robert Blinn's excellent piece from last month's Creative Seeds on interview attire; the rules are almost identical for presentations.)
9. Leave behind a good leave-behind. You've heard the advertising proverb that it takes 14 exposures to an idea before you remember it. Your presentation counts as one, so if you want to leave an impression, you need to leave something behind. Assuming your audience won't be taking notes, a few printed pages per person will do a lot to keep the magic alive. This doesn't need to be much, a simple Word document with some thumbnail images is usually plenty; enough to remind the audience what you talked about in a minute or two of light reading. If you can write a few paragraphs with some annotated images, that's fine, or an outline with bullet points (or numbered items....like this one). If you planned out your presentation as a narrative, the notes you used to do this often become an excellent leave-behind with just a little fleshing out and formatting. What you must never, ever do is print out your entire slide show and drop this airy tome on everyone's lap. It'll go straight to recycling in most cases.
