At the EBU Connect conference earlier this month I experienced an excellent presentation by Patrick Damsted. It was a very good example of utilizing one of the most important advantages of doing a presentation. The fact that the presenter is there in person.

I have watched too many presentations where this advantage has been wasted. Presentations where a person goes on stage, reads through a bunch of bullet points and goes off stage.

Why bother? Why spend your money and time travelling to the venue at all? If you are there to read some bullet points I can give you some valuable advice: don’t go.

Email your bulletpoints to the audience and let them read through it themselves. It will be more efficient. People read faster than they speak. Even faster than you speak. You’ll save your money, your time, your jetlag and your disappointed family. Stay home.

So what did Patrick do?
First of all, the good people organizing the conference was very clever at connecting the right people the day before the conference started.

Because I was talking about future technologies in general at day 1 and Patrick did a presentation on digital video recorders at day 2 we sat down and went through our presentations. I did some adjustmants and found some references where I could inform the audience that they would learn more in Patrick’s presentation the next day.

Patrick also did some adjustments. Actually, he did some serious adjustments…

So he goes on stage, introducing himself. Then he says something like this:

“After listening to some of the very interesting presentations yesterday I decided to throw away my original presentation and make a new one.

I skipped the party last night and went to my hotel room. There I made a new presentation and you’ll have to accept what I was able to make with my camera phone and my Mac.”

At that point he actually got a short round of applause from the audience.

He starts his presentation, and a large part of the visuals are actually pictures taken in that hotel room.

Because most of the audience stay at the same hotel, have the same bag of office schwag and have the same conference programme in their hands we can know for sure that he made those slides right there at Hotel Croatia.

He used the traditional note papers from the hotel. Some postcards from the bag of conference sponsor goodies. The conference programme. Even the toilet paper in the hotel room. Of course he also kept some of his original slides in there, but the overall impression was of a truly personal presentation.

Tailored completely for that particular audience. Filled with references to the other presentations.

Because I had gone through his original presentation with him I could see that he had kept the main points, but by adjusting the presentation the way he did he really honoured the audience with a one of a kind, special act for those people, in that conference at that particular stage.

By doing that he made his own trip from Denmark and all the trips by the audience worth it.

And yes – without the excellent content, knowledge, confidence and general presentation skills this approach would not work at all. But that goes with all presentations. You should always start with hard research, practice and the ability to keep things simple. And of course, read Presentation Zen.

Related stories:
How to avoid making boring presentations
How to make illustrations even if you can’t draw

I really hate clipart. So much that I at some point decided to start making my own illustrations for my documents, presentations and my blog.

Now I get all these nice compliments about my childish drawings. They seem to work well in my presentations because they add a personal touch. Doing presentations is a personal thing. The fact that you, yes you is there to present. People tend to appreciate the fact that you have spent the extra time adding your own special finish to the slides.

One little problem when I started was of course that I can’t draw. I made my own small cartoons at the age of 14 but has not done much drawing since then.

So when I started my experiments I immediately realized that my drawings where identical to the ones I made at the age of 14.

With some tricks in photoshop I was able to give these childish drawings a slightly more professional look, and after a while I am now able to make my own illustrations so fast that it can compete with the work I have to do if I want to find decent clipart.

The illustration in the example in this article took exactly 33 minutes from my decision to make something to finished illustration.

This is what you need:
1. Some courage to expose your unprofessional drawings
2. A black pen and some white paper
3. A digital camera or a scanner
4. Photoshop or Photoshop Elements

The idea
Start by trying to figure out the simplest possible illustration for the point you want to make. The fact that I can’t draw helps me a lot. It forces me to keep things simple. Not having the skill to make advanced illustrations is actually a good advantage when you want to make simple things.

The drawing
Use a thin pen. 0,75 or 1 mm. Have fun. The simple idea that comes to your mind first is often the best one when making illustrations like these. Don’t be afraid to break all rules about perspective, depth, proportions and whatever difficult guidelines that you could think of.

Don’t get scared by the fact that your drawing will look unprofessional before you start your magic in photoshop.

Draw with a firm line and close all open gaps.

Closing the gaps is important for the work that you are going to do in photoshop.

Digitize it
Use a scanner, or a digital camera to get the illustration into your computer. If you use a digital camera you need an even lighting. Don’t use flash. Put your drawing near a window or under a soft light source. Using a digital camera will make the work in photoshop a bit more tricky, but with good lighting, a decent resolution and maybe a macro function on your camera it will do fine.

The photoshop work
First you want to separate your black lines from the white paper. Use the magic wand and select the white part of the picture. If you used a digital camera like I did in this example you might have to adjust the tolerance of the magic wand.

When you feel that you have a tolerance that selects the white part nicely you go to the “Select” menu in photoshop and choose “similar”. Photoshop will now select the parts of the white paper that was closed to your initial selection.

Now you have all the white areas selected. Go back to the “select” menu and choose Inverse. Now all your black lines are selected. Go to the edit menu and select copy. Then go back to the edit menu and select paste. (Or, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V).

Now you should have a new layer with your drawing on a transparent background. Turn off the original layer with your photo or scan and start working on that new layer.

Here you use the magic wand to select the parts that you want to fill with color. The process is simple and quite repetitive. Select area, find your colors, select the gradient tool, choose a gradient type and apply the gradient.

If you want to add shadows or other effects you have to copy the part you want the effect on to a new layer.

For this illustration I added a shadow on the person and some motion blur on the globe.

I have also had fun adding real photos or screenshots like the desert island in the TV and the screenshot from the Pirate Bay in the story about Bob the Millionaire. You find some more examples as well through this post.

Related story:
How to avoid making boring presentations

…and you can digg this story here.