# Visual Communication for Presentations Resource
This is just a humble supplemental resource based on some patterns I have noticed when supporting the design and implementation of visual communication for presentations.

## putting visual and oral communication together
Every single seemingly merely aesthetic choice you make plays a functional role in communication your ideas to your audience. You can read Meyer's Principles for Multimodal... for a more in depth explanation, but I'll cover the basics as well as some additional tips I've picked up along the way here.

1. **Your visuals are your support.** If you like a movie metaphor then you are the main character and they are the cast of supporting characters... or if you prefer theater, another way to think about your visuals is as if they are the "set" on your stage. You definitely dont want them to outshine you, or place you in the role of merely a "live voice over" to a video essay. There's a real balance to strike here because you want your visuals to be effective and augment your ideas but you also want to find moments to really draw the audience's attention back to you as the speaker. You might consider which moments in your talk are perhaps better with no visuals at all, with a simple dark screen behind you forcing the audience to really listen intently to you.

1. **Text should be more iconic.** If you've ever been to talk or lecture where the presenter puts up a slide with a bunch of text, and they are also speaking, you may have found yourself making the decision: "Do I read the text? Or do I listen to the speaker?" That's because humans are not very good at taking in two "textual" streams of information at once. So, if you have text on the screen, think of it playing more the same role of an icon or a graphic, like keywords or labels rather than paragraphs or bullet points. If you really need to include a large chunk of text, one move you can make is to then read aloud that text to bring those two textual streams together in the moment. Just be sure to time it so that you read aloud as soon as the text appears, and don't ad lib additional "oral text" in between the "visual text"

## graphic design in slides
- one thing you could consider is going with white text on a darker background instead of black text on a lighter, image-based background. the bonus of going with white text is that your words/ideas are the brightest thing on the screen

- establish a consistent location for the text from slide to slide.

## techical tips specific to Keynote
- For the majority of transition animations between slides, or even with elements in Keynote, try using the Dissolve animation, just because it tends to be a bit gentler and less distracting on the audience's eyes. Use those "fancier" animations sparsely and be very intetional about the purpose they are serving. For example, a flip animation could convey a translation as seen in the "MARY" example of Vanessa's Horizons talk.

- If you are trying to use the magic move transition, but it's just dissolving, I find that sometimes you need to duplicate the first slide and then copy in the additional visuals (and remove the extraneous ones) to that second slide if this issue arises.

- our learning lab undergraduate fellows created this playful [Keynote Guide for Scholars](/U7CwzoMHSECiZes14aqRdg) resource to cover the most common technical moves one might make when first creating their visuals.