Last week we delivered a presentation on creating powerful presentations (yes, very meta) at a customer success conference in Oakland, California. Senior Principal Geoff Amidei and Art Director Bree Sanchez presented our unique point of view on how storytelling techniques and graphic facilitation tools can aid in creating impactful presentations.

In a highly interactive 90-minute session, packed with insights, group activities and examples, Geoff and Bree focused on two big ideas for crafting successful presentations: explore stories before slides and get analog before you go digital.

When tasked (or inspired) to give a presentation, it’s common to jump straight to building your deck. You’re assigned a topic and then you dig through your hard drive looking for all previous presentations related to your topic, then open up all possible slide sources, and go nuts in slide sorter. You might get by with this. You might produce a presentation that is totally adequate but probably not awesome. Worst case, you create a FrankenDeck. We think there’s a better way.

If you start by thinking about the important points and the story you want to tell, and you take some time to sketch out your ideas, we believe you’ll achieve better results. Storyboarding is a super useful technique to do just that.

How does storyboarding work? In keeping with our theme of being meta, check out our storyboard on how to storyboard.

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