Design your Presentation Content

Tips for organizing your presentation and displaying content:

Templates

• Download Storyboard Templates
• Download PowerPoint Templates

Advice

1. Don't leave your presentation to the last minute! Developing content for seven screens can be very time-consuming.
2. For text heavy presentations, we strongly recommend keeping the content on screens 1 and 7 mostly static and identical to each other.
   • Screens 1 and 7 on the far left and right edges can be difficult to see for people at the ends of tables who have to completely turn around to see the content behind them.
   • As such, we advise presenters to use those screens for things like an agenda, the names of presenters, affiliated organizations, logos, and other reference items that rarely change from slide to slide.
   • We also highly encourage this for technical reasons, especially if you are bringing in a remote participant through video conferencing. See explanation in PowerPoint Templates.
3. To avoid overwhelming the audience, use animations to only display 1 or 2 new screens at a time.
   • This draws the audience's attention to your current point without immediately distracting them from it with additional content.
   • Additionally, if you're displaying screens in one direction, say from left to right, it's a good idea to reverse that direction in the next slide so you don't have to stop presenting to walk all the way across the room.
   • For showing/visualizing impact, scale, magnitude, or immersion, start with the center screen and expand content simultaneously to left and right.
   • For synthesis/conclusion, start displaying content at the edges and bring it into the middle
   • Experiment with all of the above to achieve your desired impact.
4. For collaboration, we recommend using shared Google documents which can be displayed on any screens while being edited from any number of individual laptops.
5. For a collaborative shared environment accessible from individual laptops, we recommend using SAGE2
   • SAGE2 can be used for live content sharing and wireless manipulation from a laptop.
   • Ask Vis Space staff for a full introduction to SAGE2 or take a look at Using SAGE2.
6. If you have the time and skill, you can also build web pages using web technologies that can display your interactive content across any number of screens in a web browser window.