Remember This?

My talk from the 2008 eTech Ohio conference was so well received I did it again this year. The content was copyright, but it was also “how to create a great presentation.”  So it was two presentations in one.

I went through the whole thing several times and replaced many of the pictures, re-shooting some of the pictures myself.  I left in a few pictures from last year hoping most people would not notice.

I was going over it before the conference using my Touch just like I did last year.  One of my kids asked to see it.  She went through the whole thing pointing out every picture I had used the year before.  She got to the picture above and I asked the context of the presentation at that point.

“It had something to do with free picture sites online.  If you can’t find free pictures you should go to jail for using copyrighted ones.”

That’s exactly correct.  A year after seeing this presentation, the picture “stuck” with her and she not only recognized it, but remembered why the picture was used.

If I had used a slide with text on it, would the message have stuck?  Probably not.  If all my slides were words, she would have probably gone through it and not noticed the parts that were the same.

One of the keynote speakers at eTech this year was Wesley Fryer.  The one point he made that stuck with me more than any other – the human brain processes pictures 60,000 times faster than text.  It made me think of Nancy Duarte’s point in Slide:ology page 140:

“Presentations are a ‘glance media’ — more closely related to billboards than other media…. Ask yourself whether your message can be processed effectively within three seconds. The audience should be able to quickly ascertain the meaning before turning their attention back to the presenter.”

How many of your slides could someone process in three seconds?  Let’s see… 45 minute presentation at three seconds per slide.  That’s 900 slides!  Sky McCloud does 200 slides in eight minutes.