Michelle Poley Blogs Here
Here is a first and imperfect draft of a slide show I’m toying with to use as the ABOUT US statement on this website. Yes, a couple of the images need to be replaced because they’re overused. And yes, the narration is just a bit rough.
What do you think?
My favorite revenge movie (and gothic novel) has always been V for Vendetta. Of course, I’ve slightly edited its main tag line to reflect next week’s election day in the US. The 5th of November, in England, is Guy Fawkes Day, celebrated with bonfires and fireworks. This wordcloud map of the United States is the result of my idea to feed V’s rallying speech to London into www.wordclouds.com. I’m hoping it helps to fortify our resolve to vote. To vote for truth and reason and freedom and country. To vote because words do have meaning and that they can move us to our highest ideals.
Don’t forget. There’s nothing more important for you to do. Our future depends on it.
VOTE.
I had the occasion to watch this six-year old TED talk again last week.
First of all, this is not a normal TED talk. It's actually an interview with a remote controlled robot. The interviewer is Chris Anderson, creator of TED. The robot has a video screen and camera on its face and is being operated by Edward Snowden from his computer from an undisclosed location in rural Russia. It is his live feed displayed on the screen, and he can turn the robot to see the whole audience and everything else in the room. It's also 45 minutes long: VERY strange for a TED talk. But I remember this being in the news. No one knew where Ed Snowden was, and he turned up as a surprise guest at the Global TED conference, less than a year after his leaks of NSA classified material.
Even aside from the critically important and somehow-still-relevant topic, I think there are some VERY important presentation design points to be harvested.
1. The only slides used in this presentation were the ones that Snowden himself gave to the three journalists he leaked his NSA information to. They were produced by the NSA. And OH WOW they are terrible!!! Bad colors, crowded design, and so old-fashioned looking you'd think Power Point was around in the 1950s.
2. The slides looked even worse, of course, when they were displayed right behind this much more modern (although strange looking) robot that was carrying Ed Snowden's head and voice around. But that robot wasn't unnecessary. Everyone knew there was no way Snowden could show up in person in Vancouver. It was functional.
3. Most important: It was the critically current and important nature of the CONTENT of this presentation that took center stage. It’s even more critically important now, it seems, as we are fewer than 20 days away from Election Day in the US.
4. Both Anderson and Snowden were good-natured but deeply direct and honest. Anderson asked people in the audience to raise their hands if they thought Snowden to be a traitor. Then a hero. They both laughed and made it ok for the (smaller number of) people who said "traitor."
5. Neither of them were ever strident in their vocal quality, body language, or facial expression. Even though the information/content was extremely direct.
6. Just a final thought: I prefer the TedX stages' backdrops that have some kind of interesting design to just the red circle carpet and the big red TED blocks in the back of the stage. But I guess this is how you know this was BIG TED, the flagship.
If you haven’t seen it for a while, take a look. It’s a great presentation.
I am rebranding my training company’s website away from business writing and workplace communication skills toward personal development and the fostering of world peace, one person at a time. Yes, it sounds more dramatic, but communication skills will still have a lot to do with it. I’ve decided to make a slide show, narrated by me, to show the visitors to my website who I am and what I do. Here are some images I’ll probably be including. Other than the first one, I found these royalty and attribution-free at Pixabay.
What do you think?
My son took this a couple years ago in Rocky Mountain National Park. Mountains are a big theme here at Denali Training Solutions. It looks a little bleached out, though….
… So I tweaked all the settings at fotor.com. So easy! I’m a healthy color, my hair glows, and my image stands out in a three-dimensional way from the mountain backdrop. I give that web-based photo editor a 12/10 rating.
I’m REALLY opposed to a heavy-handed approach with human beings. (Or birds, for that matter.) I found this photo by searching for “violence” on Pixabay.
It’s SO much better to patiently nurture every soul that you are entrusted with. This came up along with the picture above under the heading “Maybe you’ll also like.”
It’s a great picture of a nurturing mom, but you know? It’s not quite emotional enough. It’s not quite BIG enough. (I searched for “chick.”)
So I cropped it. Now, it’s emotional. It was easy to do in Preview on my Macbook Pro.
I used to stay away from even remotely political issues in all my contracted training programs. But it’s 2020 now. I have no intention of coming out of this year the same way I came in. It’s time to heal this world, and maybe most especially to heal this country. But the only way to do that is one person at a time. Not through threats, not through shame. Through love, through learning, through life-affirming experience. If only there was some way to emphasize the message…. (This picture came up by searching for “racism.”)
There! That should do it! Once again, the editing tools in Preview come to the rescue. It is my intention that these particular pictures/slides will be moving very quickly, so the arrows are going to be helpful to focus my viewers’ attention.
I’m excited about putting this slide show/video/slam poetry reading (subject to change) together. I hope you’re excited too.
Here is a quick webinar I presented about how to say “No.”
You deserve to be in control of your own time and priorities — but this can be difficult in a world of competing work projects and personal relationships. The formula I present in this 20-minute video can help you say a “no” that is both warm and firm. Done right, it might even make the people you use it on come back just so you’ll say no to them again. (-;
Feel free to forward right to the 1:10 mark once you press PLAY if you want to bypass the silence while attendees arrived.
Graphic designers often talk about guidelines for visual appeal that they refer to as the CARP Principles. CARP, as you see here, is an acronym. The four words contained in it are Contrast, Alignment, Repetition, and Proximity. So, are these ideas just a matter of taste? Or could they save a life?
Contrast makes words and sentences easy to read and provides a powerful way to highlight something important on a viewers first glance. The lighter this typeface is, for example, the more effort is required to read the words against the eggshell white background of this blog page. Responsible communicators want their readers to use their mental energy on processing the ideas — not on deciphering the hard-to-read words on a page.
Alignment is another tool that helps readers mentally classify the information on a page at first glance. Things that fall into a predictable visual order must be related somehow, they think. Words or images that fall into line tend to convey ideas and feelings that also fall into line. By violating the expected rules of alignment, a creator can quickly draw attention to something that he or she wants to highlight.
Look at this screenshot of the main page of the Veterans Administration website. An organization that uses blue and white as its main color palette and yellow-gold as a highlight has placed a BRIGHT RED clickable box ABOVE the main webpage. A veteran in crisis will see it in the first seconds the page loads. By using the principles of Contrast and Alignment, the Veterans Administration has made its most urgent function — saving lives — easily accessible to all its webpage visitors. (Good job, VA!)
From www.va.gov.
Repetition, on the other hand, is an excellent tool for branding. And branding is an excellent tool for helping viewers (1) feel comfortable and (2) remember what they’ve seen. This principle covers a designer’s decisions to use the same family of typefaces, the same color palette, the same logo — even the same style of language in text. In a training program, it also refers to repeating key pieces of information a few times: first, in an overview; next, in detail; and finally, in a summary.
Proximity is about space. Viewers assume items that appear near each other are related, and a good designer takes advantage of this to help viewers and learners make important connections. A little further down on the main page of the Veterans Administration website, you can see these last two CARP principles used to full effect to help the pages’ visitors quickly and easily find what they need.
From the main page at www.va.gov.
CARP in Webinars: Webinars are a unique medium because they are accompanied by at least one live trainer, narrator, or speaker providing an audio presentation. A good script, as spoken by a human voice, can provide so much help to listeners, to viewers, and to learners. But people are people, and that means visual cues go a long way toward helping them grasp content more quickly. Which of these four design principles is the most obvious, the most quickly understood?
For me, it’s always been contrast.
This is why a one-line paragraph works to reclaim your reader’s attention in business writing. I mean, look at all the white space that surrounds that sentence above this paragraph, especially compared to the larger paragraphs above and below it. This is why the black box with the brightly colored words of CARP on the top of this blog post caught your eye.
And this is why a troubled veteran who needs urgent help can find it — and find it quickly — at the Veterans Administration website.
I've been working on a final project for my Digital Storytelling class for the past week and a half. It's been excruciating. I used this really beautiful timeline tool from Knight Lab to tell a story that has become urgent for me. See, I love football -- NFL football. I love cheering for my teams (the Saints, the Raiders, and new this year -- taking the place of the Seahawks -- the 49ers). It has been harder to do as years go by because the injuries and the CTE cases down the road are horrifying.
And, of course, the social justice issue.
I have a lot of friends my age who love football, too. Most of them -- like me -- are white. And about half of them have some very strong words for the players who have taken a knee through the National Anthem the past couple of years. They call it disrespectful to the flag and disrespectful to the military. They blame Colin Kaepernick for being the "instigator." They're with the President on this, and I am beside myself with an anger I'm proud to call righteous.
Some of them even stopped watching last year, using this "anti-American protest" as their excuse.
This timeline is for them. Kaepernick's protest was never about the flag or about the military. It has always been directly related to the disproportionate number of black men (and a few black women) killed by police -- and killed with almost total immunity. These are the killings that led up to Kaepernick's protest. Page after page, name after name, story after story -- the weight of building this nearly crushed me.
The good news is that it's not nearly as crushing to view as it was to build. So take your time. Watch the videos embedded here. Do your own research with this starting point. Just today, Richard Sherman (CB, 49ers) referred to the "plantation mentality" of Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys. And the President keeps tweeting.
This is nowhere near over.
TimelineJS Embed
#finalproject
SPOILER ALERT: If you have not watched Breaking Bad and hope to avoid plot details, please LEAVE THIS PAGE NOW. (-;
So.
It always seems like a good idea when I sit down to binge-watch the entirety of Breaking Bad again. And generally speaking, it is. I mean, it's an incredible piece of drama with some of the best writing and acting on television.
But every time I watch it (this was my fifth time) I'm done with the "protagonist" (anti-hero) Walter White sooner. It's just hideous, the monster he becomes. It's even more hideous how long I actually rooted for him the first time I watched.
So here are my thoughts on how his story follows (although in an inverse way) a traditional Hero's Journey. A couple pieces of public domain music can be heard in the background: "Rhapsody in Blue" (Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin, in an original 1924 recording) and Chopin's "Funeral March" (The Edison Concert Band, 1906). Both are available at the site publicdomainreview.org.
If you're a Breaking Bad fan, you'll notice that "Rhapsody in Blue" is one of the ONLY songs about "blue" that wasn't used in the show. (Quite an oversight, I think....)
I've also hacked into a cartoon from freecartoonwallpapers.com to provide the graphic of Walter's Anti Hero Journey. I'll post it here (below) in case you can't see it all as the cover of the Soundcloud podcast.
The Hero's Journey as it applies to Walter White. (Actually, it's an Anti-Hero's Journey.)
Hi gang -- I made this video for you!
Being a Traveling Trainer for the past 25+ years has brought so much good to my life. I've helped students all across the United States and Canada be more successful in their jobs -- sure, of course. (And this video includes some great shortcuts for helping you do that too.) But I've also met thousands of interesting (and good) people and seen hundreds of amazing places.
If you don't have time for the full video, I'd encourage you to watch the first 5 minutes (especially if you don't have a TSA Pre designation yet). And I'd ask you to start again at about 23:23 to see my favorite two tips and to hear a story about how Tony Bourdain changed my life -- and my kids' lives.
Enjoy (-:
