Designing Effective Presentations

Catalog description

This class focuses on how to build powerful, persuasive presentations as well as to provide advanced insight and practice in the fundamentals of professional writing. We study the genre of presentations to familiarize you with major applications--PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Slides--as well as basic presentation formats, including live group delivery; pre-recorded narration (for asynchronous presentations); and the recent trend of slides used on corporate and other websites to provide more detailed information about the organization or its products. We also explore different presentation subgenres, such as the Ted Talk, lightning talks, and Pecha Kucha (20 slides, 20 seconds each, auto-advance). Throughout, we focus on tailoring your presentation to target audiences and purposes as we explore and practice the design elements of building presentation: space, grids, choice of fonts, images, and animation. Finally and most importantly, we work on building a powerful message, teaching you how to develop ideas and translate content into a deck that exemplifies your understanding of information hierarchies and human cognition with the goal of engaging, informing, and persuading your audiences.