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A presentation people still talk about 3 years later
Kendall Haven is one of the most prolific researchers on the topic of storytelling. His books have revolutionized human understanding of how stories control our brains. As we wanted to bring the absolute best to our conference – Present to Succeed, we reached out to him to deliver both a masterclass and a session at the event.
After multiple calls and discussions, we won him over. But what happened next surprised us. During one of his calls, Mr. Haven said: "I have seen what you are doing for your customers and how their slides look when your team worked on them. I can't get to this level myself and I would appreciate any help from you because I truly don’t want to put your reputation on the line.” And that's how everything started...
Process
Mr. Haven doesn't run his own company, so there is no brand that we needed to adhere to. As a result, we had the ultimate freedom to approach the project from any angle we see fit. When we gave our team the green light to go, they went wild. And in a beautiful way as we really wanted to show that scientific doesn't mean boring.
Mood boarding
Design
Animation
Final touches
Mood boarding
After spending multiple hours in conversation with Mr. Haven during which we got immersed in the content he wanted to present, we started working on creating 3 different styles for him to choose from. These are the so called stylescapes and they were created to give him an initial idea how we can approach his material in terms of design. He loved one of the concepts immediately and from there, the real work began.
Once we had the design direction selected, our team moved to create the first few slides of the presentation and then presented them to Mr. Haven. This way we gave him an idea of how his whole presentation would look like once it's done. He simply loved how things are moving and that gave us green light to move on and work on all the remaining slides. And they were a lot.
Animations are there to support the message and make it easy for the audience to understand the message that's being communicated. In this case they needed to also work well in an online setting as Mr. Haven's masterclass and session were part of our online conference. Thus, the decision was taken to use very slight animation that simply help us present the information in bite-sized chunks.
After multiple sync meetings, the whole presentation was finalized, animated, tested for consistency and compressed with a specialized software, so that it’s a small and light as possible. Something that's of a huge importance when the delivery format is online.
The results
The masterclass Mr. Haven delivered was considered as the best one out of the 4 during our conference. And the session he delivered based on a shorten version of the complete slideshow - one that people still talk to us about when we meet them in a presentation skills class.
What 356labs did for my slides is something that made me work with them every time I have an important talk to deliver.
