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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. Understanding how stories control our brains has been revolutionised by his books. 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’ve seen the work you’re doing for your clients and how their slides look after your team has worked on them. I can’t reach that level on my own, and I’d really appreciate your help — because I 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 need 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, they went wild — in the best possible way. We wanted to show that science doesn’t have to be 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 so-called stylescapes were created to give him an initial sense of how we could approach the material visually. He immediately connected with one of the concepts, 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 the entire presentation would look once completed. He immediately loved the direction, which gave us the green light to develop the remaining slides. And there were a lot.
Animations are there to support the idea and make it easy for the audience to understand the message that's being communicated. In this case they needed to work seamlessly 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 helps 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 — to be as small and light as possible. Something that becomes especially important when the presentation is delivered online.
The results
The masterclass Mr. Haven delivered was considered the best of the 4 at our conference. And the session he delivered was based on a shortened 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.
