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Episode #118: Stephy Lewis
167 Plays7 years ago
From chemist to artist to designer, Stephy Lewis used to be a total Adobe snob until she was thrust into the world of presentation design. Ever since, she’s been passionately evangelizing the field in an attempt to elevate our industry as high...
The post Episode #118: Stephy Lewis appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to Design and Presentations
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Vis podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. On this week's episode, I'm trying really not to laugh because my guest and I have already been having a good time just chatting about, well, many things. So I'm excited to have Stephanie Lewis on the show who is here to talk about design, presentations, PowerPoint,
Stephanie's Journey from Chemistry to Design
00:00:32
Speaker
all the good stuff, why design is not about
00:00:35
Speaker
pretty colors and pretty fonts. So we're just going to get right into it. So Stephanie, welcome to the show. Thanks, John. How are you? Oh, good. How are you? Good. Thanks. Just causing trouble right off the bat. I don't know what you're talking about.
00:00:50
Speaker
I'm going to take all the goodies I gave you. I want those pens back. So we're at Urban. Thanks for coming in. You just gave a nice talk to our team here. We have a little group on presentations. Some interesting questions that I think we're going to get into.
00:01:08
Speaker
Yes, there were some good ones. There were good ones, right?
The Role of Everyone as a Designer
00:01:12
Speaker
And they almost made you cry a little bit because we have a special email address that if you need something, you just email this magical email address and suddenly images show up at your doorstep. Yeah, I'm tempted to email it now that I've heard it several times over again.
00:01:27
Speaker
and see what happens. I forget stuff just to see what happens. Just see what happens. And maybe they won't notice. Maybe the people who run it won't notice that you're not at Urban and they'll just start sending you really cool stuff. That would be amazing. That's a good idea. Even if they just sent me ideas. Right?
Designing for User Experience and Clarity
00:01:41
Speaker
You should try this. That's genius. Why don't we start by having you introduce yourself for people and then let's talk about PowerPoint and design and slides.
00:01:54
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Well, you introduced me as Stephanie, which in the presentation community, everybody wants me as Stephanie. So, it might be a little weird about not actually know who I am. So, I'm Stephanie, also known as Stephanie. But yeah, I started out a long time ago. I was a chemist and then I was a designer and then someone forced me into presentation design and I didn't like it. I was not a happy camper and now I love it.
00:02:23
Speaker
and it's all I ever want to do. So now I've been doing it for quite some time now and I help make other people love it as well. It's really hard to do. Is it hard to get them to love how to make good slides or get them to love the whole process? It's getting them
Collaborative Presentation Design Challenges
00:02:41
Speaker
to appreciate PowerPoint and not hear that word and run away. Yeah. Like, oh, more bullet points. God, why?
00:02:53
Speaker
Like, that's not fair, right? To the tool, right? Because it's just a tool. Because, you know, those developers, they work pretty damn hard. They work pretty hard, right? And I can do so many cool things. There's so much you can do with it. And it's, you know, a lot of people lose their eye for design when they open
PowerPoint Features and Innovations
00:03:11
Speaker
the tool, which is really sad. Yeah.
00:03:13
Speaker
It's really funny because I find now that when I open InDesign, which used to be my favorite, I stall and I'm like, my eye for design. Don't lose your eye for design stuff just because you have to work in InDesign.
00:03:27
Speaker
So when people come into their crime that they have to use PowerPoint, do you have a line that you try to soften the blow that you're going to be using PowerPoint? Well, first I try to keep my eyes from rolling too hard. But I recognize, well, the first thing I say to them is I get it. I was you. Right. Because I really didn't want to do it. But I'm also a web designer. I do a lot of interactive things. And the nice thing I like about PowerPoint is that it can make things
00:03:56
Speaker
do things. I can present data. I can make an idea come to life in a presentation in ways that I can't do in print. So when I am able to communicate why I like it so much and this is what you can do with it or you can't do it here.
00:04:15
Speaker
Sometimes the wall cracks just a little bit and they're like, okay, I'll watch and see what happens in an hour. I might open it and not hate it. We'll see. As much. You know? Right. As much. And then you're also, I mean, definitely in the meeting we just had, you're also trying to knock down some of the walls of everyone is a designer in some respects.
00:04:37
Speaker
not all professional designers, which is the line, right? There's the spot. So maybe you could talk about just like a couple of the bigger points that you hit in the meeting today. Like what are the major things that you want people to take into account when they're making slides? Right. Well, yeah, everybody is a designer, whether you know it or not, because design isn't just about making it pretty. It's about making that piece of community, that concept or idea, it's about
00:05:07
Speaker
Finding how to connect that concept in your head to the audience's brain and get them to just really truly understand it even if it's just wanting to understand it or taking another level and get them to have some kind of emotional response to it. So whenever you open up something in PowerPoint that you're going to be presenting
00:05:30
Speaker
You're a designer because you have to think in ways that you wouldn't normally have to think, right? So, you know, when you're communicating, you have to be clear and concise and the same happens in visual communication. So even if you're not a professional designer, just remember to make your slides as clean as you can. Make them, even if there's a lot of content and you don't know how to get rid of it or you're not allowed to get rid of it or what have you, just make it clean.
00:05:58
Speaker
Align things, get a little breathing space around it. And it's been a lot. You also do web development. So it's the same or web design. So it's the same approach, right? It's not like packing the whole screen with like the dancing baby and all the bells and all the gifts, right? All the gifts and the sounds and everything. Yeah. And it's really funny because there's a lot of connection between user experience design, which goes into web design and user interface design.
00:06:26
Speaker
There are a lot of parallels there and in presentation design because there are a lot of the same goals. You have to make it clear and obvious and it's just all about the user experience.
00:06:41
Speaker
arguably some of the most intimate user experiences you're going to have because you're standing right there and you're watching them. You're the website, you're the one giving the information and you can see them react. So it's user experience on both ends. Right, but they can yell at you when you're standing. They can yell at you when you're standing. Or they could fall asleep, right? Yeah, or they can pull out their phones. Right, they can pull out their phones. You'll see Twitter later.
00:07:08
Speaker
Yeah, although sometimes so this is the other thing right sometimes they're on their phone for good reasons like sometimes they're tweeting your They're quoting you on Twitter, which is a good thing. It's a good thing. But the look in their eye right before they pull out their phone is completely different. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, you see the light bulb go off and their eyes get bigger or they're into this little boring tired slits. I'm gonna check Twitter.
00:07:30
Speaker
So, one of the questions you got in our little meeting before was, how do I take all the things you just taught me and how do I do it quickly? How do you do it quickly? Well, as providing you have that stuff ingrained in your head and you know what you should do, that's going to help a lot right there. Practice is going to help a lot, right? Repetitive doing it over and over. You know, doing it quickly, it depends on so many factors.
00:07:55
Speaker
and how quickly you have it and how well you know the content and what you know is supposed to be delivered. So you can just do quick cleanup. You can structure it cleanly and put some breathing room in.
00:08:05
Speaker
And that can take 30 seconds. But you can't expect high level design or anything in 30 seconds. But you did talk about, one of the things you did talk about, there's sort of like the overarching design themes or goals. And then there's sort of like this polished part where you did, you showed a couple of makeovers of like,
00:08:26
Speaker
You know, it's just like these little things that you do that you, you know, you made these, these big differences. The frustration I have with this, like, how do I do it quickly is like, well, I didn't ask you to write the report quickly. So, and I'm sure you run into this all the time. I'm like, I need to do a talk. I need it. I need the slides done in 10 minutes.
00:08:44
Speaker
How do you approach that with colleagues or clients? How do you get them to recognize that? A good presentation takes time to pull together. You just leave by example. It's frustrating at times because there's always going to be those first initial instances when they first come to you and say, I need this and I need you to do it quickly. There's no example. There was no meeting beforehand.
00:09:07
Speaker
You just have to be clear, okay, I understand what you need and I feel your pain and this is what I can do. If you want me to do this for future reference, this is what has to happen. So just inform them, give them the information that they need and then you've done your job and then you can only work with what you have. So you do your best in that moment and then try to push them to bring you in earlier.
00:09:33
Speaker
in the future, a nice kickoff. Hey, I know I have to give this talk in a month and I haven't written it yet, but let's sit down so you know what's coming. The other thing I wanted to ask you about was designing for someone else to give the talk. But how do you do that? If you don't know the speaker's style or are they comfortable with just using the notes pane? It's always a challenge because I used to have this one event every year.
00:10:01
Speaker
After a year, after at least one year, probably after two, we started getting our kickoffs for this ahead of time. And then finally I got them to have kickoffs when they were forming their ideas as opposed to after they have their ideas. So the trick is to getting that presentation designed so that it's connected with your audience is to sit with the presenter and learn their story and how they're hashing it out. And it really helps when you hear them not only tell you what the talk is about, but if you can have a working session with them,
00:10:32
Speaker
Very early on. Yeah, you can see them. Okay. Well, this will work. Oh, but this isn't what I'm exactly trying to say. Oh, wait, let's reform this. So if you can get in with the presenter and that's not always possible or the captain or someone who is familiar with what's going to happen. It's just a lot of communication. So much talking has to happen and
00:10:53
Speaker
A lot of the presentations I've designed for other people to give, I have known zero about the subject matter. Right. Right. Right. So I get these very detailed, high level retirement plan, asset allocation, all this blah, blah, blah from 10 years still didn't understand it. And they're giving detailed presentations that have to really hit the mark and make sense. But I'll tell you, nothing makes you learn a subject matter more.
00:11:23
Speaker
been sitting with the presenter and then going through it and having to define the presentation to connect with the audience. Because they have to explain it to you. Yeah, they have to explain it to me. And if I can understand it, then you know they're doing a great job. Right. And I worked with speakers who were really good at it. And it goes really fast. There are some that just drone on and you just laser focus. They're talking at you across the table. And I just remember this one meeting and as a senior executive, I'm sitting there.
00:11:46
Speaker
And he has this data-heavy slide deck and sits in front of me, and he's like, okay, I'm going to talk you through it. And he talked me through the whole thing, and there was so much vernacular in there that I was not familiar with, and so many acronyms, of course, that I didn't know, and he's going, and I'm literally not blinking for an hour, staring at him like, oh, I was so exhausted after this. You think you would, someone would recognize.
00:12:08
Speaker
So when you have these kickoff meetings, are part of your... So there's the content side. And obviously when you're talking about the content, like your wheels are probably turning of like, what's the right design for this? Do you also, I assume you also talk to them about like, what's their style? Well, to get their style, I observe them a lot because when they talk me through it, their style is just right there.
00:12:32
Speaker
whether they know it or not. I had some presenters who were just like, they were so fluid, nothing would phase them. They could have a car crash in front of them and they would be able to keep going with their talk and not lose a beat and explain it so clearly. I love them. And there were some who were just so technical and you know that in their past life they were a researcher and they just lived in numbers. So you kind of learn their style as you work with them. And it's kind of like this subconscious thing you soak up.
00:13:01
Speaker
The longer I have been a presentation designer, the more I think about how to help them reword their content, even if I'm just learning it for that time. So, you know, for a long time, I was just design. And then as I've gotten more proficient at it and worked at it longer, a bigger chunk of that has been, okay, I see what you're doing here. Can we just throw all that out and do this? And sometimes it works.
00:13:30
Speaker
And sometimes not someone. And sometimes it's like it's not the battle you're going to win. Yeah. Just don't fight it. Right. Right. Just give them what they want and try to make it the best you can. Yeah. So you're a PowerPoint. I love that. You're a PowerPoint lover. I am. Not a fighter. Exactly. I adore PowerPoint. Is there something about PowerPoint that you think sets it off from the multitude of other tools these days? I do.
00:13:58
Speaker
The rate lately at which they've been adding new features, now granted you're in a corporate environment, you're not going to see those features for maybe a very long time. They seem to be recognizing
00:14:11
Speaker
limitations of PowerPoint and the problems they've had in the past and are rectifying that and adding things. They see what their competition has been doing and they're like, well, okay, let's put that in there because it seems to make sense. They've got a little bit of Prezi stuff in there. They've got a little bit of the stuff from Keynote, you know, Morph and Zoom and all that stuff came from their competitors. Just because it is the industry standard because it's been on so many computers for so long.
00:14:38
Speaker
You know, I get asked to do something at Prezi, there's the internet limitation, you know, you don't present, there's no internet connection, you're kind of screwed. Keynote, I mean, it's pretty and all, but they don't update often. When they do, they haven't had any useful updates. There's a big update where they screwed a lot up. Which is surprising to me. They sort of seem to have just dropped. I feel like they came up.
00:15:04
Speaker
Prior to the 2016 release, and I want to talk about that in a second, but well maybe 2013 release. What were like the two biggest things about PowerPoint that drove you crazy?
00:15:14
Speaker
And maybe they still do. Maybe they still do. Well, because I worked with charts so much all the time, that was like I lived and breathed data. The thing that made me the angriest was I couldn't just nudge my chart. Just move it over. You couldn't just move it over because it would start selecting within the chart. So you had to select something else, pack it, move it, and then move that thing back or just have a fake box or whatever. That made me angry. Just fix it. They fixed that. That's a good one.
00:15:45
Speaker
So, what's your favorite thing in 2016? So, it's now mid-February. So, let's move this off. So, Morph is your favorite. Morph is still my favorite. Yeah. And I don't get to use it often because some of my companies on 2016, everybody else is on 2010. Okay. So, it'll default to a thing. So, for folks who don't know, can you talk a little bit about Morph and what it does and how you use it maybe? Yeah. Morph is where on one side you have an object in one spot.
00:16:12
Speaker
one dimension or shape and color or what have you. And you can on the next slide move it, change it, change the color, change the shape a little bit with some of the shapes.
00:16:25
Speaker
And then apply morph transition and it animates it for you. It puts all those motion tweens in there that if you were a flash person, you remember the days when that was, you know, okay, add motion tween, and then it would just change the shape for you in the color and make it smooth. Well, keynote users have had this for a while as a magic move, right? But now it's in PowerPoint.
00:16:43
Speaker
And that's why I almost switched to keynote. For that thing, right. But then it just sort of stalled out. So what do you use more for the most? I mean, I know you have this 2016, 2010 issue, but like when you're doing it for people 2016, what do you use it for? I use it constantly for things like big conferences where they have ballroom loops or things like that where they're just like
00:17:06
Speaker
this information about Wi-Fi connection and all this other stuff. So I use more heavily to do animations so that they look like they're really cool and not just some PowerPoint side. It makes it not feel like PowerPoint. You're not using blinds all the time? I like the glitter one. Now they have a glitter pen, right? We were just saying glitter pen. I mean, who doesn't want to have a glitter pen in PowerPoint? Do you know what I would love to happen in PowerPoint? I mean, many, many things. I'd like to ungroup my chart.
00:17:34
Speaker
Yes. I would like to be able to lock.
00:17:38
Speaker
an object, lock things down. That would be lovely. Right, that would be awesome. But with that pencil drawing, it's okay, that's nice and all, but what good's it going to do me if I can't replay how I draw it as an animation, right? That's how I think of it. I'm like, why draw this? I want it to come in and look like I'm drawing it live. Seems like that would be an easy thing to do. I'm not a developer. I'm not of a developer.
00:18:05
Speaker
So the other thing you were talking about this afternoon was the notes feature in PowerPoint, which I kind of feel like is underutilized. It is. And you know why I think it's underutilized a lot is because they have a notes page, they have a handouts page. Right, right, right. People think handouts, they think the handouts page is useless and they never use.
00:18:26
Speaker
Right, because it's just a slide in the lines. I've tried to fix that master and that's just it didn't work out so well and I hate it. I never use that, but the notes page is so versatile. You can bring your brand colors, you can format that color palette in there so it has all the custom colors in there.
00:18:45
Speaker
What I'm trying to push as a big movement is you can have a three in one deck. Like the biggest problem we always had was, okay, we have these on screen slides, but we need a handout to go with it. I've got to live in two separate documents of a PowerPoint and InDesign. Then we can update the InDesign. Then you have to cross update and there's so much opportunity for mistakes. But what you can do is that little note speaker notes area that's under your slide, you put your speaker notes right in there.
00:19:11
Speaker
And then you go over to the notes slide, and all anything you type there is automatically populated on your notes page underneath that image of the slide. But what you can do, and especially if you still want to have speaker prompts separate from your handout notes, right?
00:19:28
Speaker
You can take that auto populated box and kind of move it off to the pace board. All right. So, and just leave that there. I'm going to big fancy pink warnings. Those do not erase this. You know, you're going to screw everything up because then I'll try and force it back in. So you move that off to the side and then all that area underneath your slide on the notes page is fair game. That can be your handout. So you have,
00:19:50
Speaker
a chart and a thousand explanations about the data on the slide. Take all of that explanation stuff off and go over to your notes page and format it all nice and pretty right underneath the big hit chart. And then when you're speaking, you don't have that jumbled mess. You can still see your speaker prompts and then when you print your notes page,
00:20:14
Speaker
It's the handout with all the detail. Yeah, I don't get the sense people recognize that you can format the notes page. Yeah, like you can a Word document or I guess a PowerPoint slide, but it can be formatted. But then it also shows up as the regular notes page. Yeah, which is
00:20:30
Speaker
Kind of awesome, because then you do get the two-in-one. What happens when you add objects to that? Are you adding logos and colors? Whatever you want. I've added a chart. I've put additional charts underneath supporting data. I don't do this that often either, actually. If you add an additional chart or a logo, let's say, to the notes page, when you flip back to your presenter view and you're giving the talk, the added objects aren't there. It's just the text, whatever the text is.
00:20:58
Speaker
unless you've moved that text off to the faceboard. Right, right, right. If you've moved that off, so you really can have three in one. So then if you have the slide deck and you want to then print it out as handouts, you would go back into the notes view and swap those things out. Yeah. You good? Yeah, it's pretty good. What's like the number one thing you want people to do when they are designing their slides?
00:21:21
Speaker
I want them to rethink what they're saying because you think you need to say everything. You think you need to put all of the detail in because someone might have a question, you need it there, but you don't need it on the slide. You really don't and especially it goes to being afraid because you maybe don't know the content as much as you think you do.
00:21:44
Speaker
So people put it on there in a safety net. They know the content, but they don't know how to talk about the content, which is like two different things that people don't understand. Yeah. Yeah. So they really hone in on what the key takeaway, basically figure out every slide, ask yourself, why does the audience care? What's in it for them? Yeah. Why? Right. Right.
00:22:03
Speaker
get the cynic and put yourself in their shoes, answer their question, and that's what should be on the side. And that makes it a lot easier to design because you have one thing to design to. You have an opportunity to maybe animate the data in a way that focuses in on things. You have an opportunity to bring in an impactful image that'll evoke an emotional response with a whole amount of text. You know, you have so much more, so many more options if you really put the time in
00:22:30
Speaker
to figure out what that key takeaway is.
00:22:52
Speaker
which is dangerous on the Metro because you never know what's going to happen here. Well, thanks for coming down. I appreciate it. Thanks, John. Thanks, everyone, for tuning into this week's episode. If you have comments, questions, suggestions, slide remakes, or slide questions, email me, email Steffi, let us know what you need. So until next time, this has been the Policy Vis podcast. Thanks so much for listening.