Last issue, we imposed some order on Jeffrey’s slidedeck, turning the first set into the second.

In the process, we improved readability but, almost more importantly, by placing design elements consistently from slide to slide, we made it easier for the audience to concentrate on what matters (the numbers and text) and ignore what doesn’t (where the numbers and text are located).

Does This Matter To Teaching?

I suspect a lot of teacher-readers are hopping past these design posts. This isn’t necessarily a mistake. There isn’t enough time in the day to chase all our interests and design might not ping loudly enough off your radar.

But, friend, design had better ping somewhere. Because these days, How Good Your Ideas Are has yielded some ground to How Good Your Ideas Look.

These moments break my heart at conferences: a speaker whose ideas are head, shoulders, knees, and toes above the rest but whose dress code, timid vocals, or sloppy PowerPoint put people off.

It Does.

This happens.

You have a great activity or handout (great content) but you package it with a lousy verbal introduction or a lousy handout design (lousy form) and it flops.

Here you can say, “my kids have some obligation to meet me part way on this one,” that they should lean in towards you, compensating for how your weak instructional design has leaned away from them. Maybe they should. Most won’t.

The Good Kind Of Worksheet

Here are three worksheets randomly selected from the pile I built last year:

They are tiny by intention. Their content is less important than what they look like.

The Other Kind Of Worksheet

Here’s the sort of worksheet I see floating around the department copier:

The Difference

With good worksheets, things that don’t matter become invisible. With bad worksheets things that don’t matter glare at you.

What doesn’t matter:

1. fonts
2. alignment
3. spacing
4. location
5. etc.

What does matter:

1. the task.
2. that’s all.

With the bad worksheet you can’t help but linger on everything that doesn’t matter. The awkward non-alignment of “name” and “date.” The varying spacing between lines. The second line of the second problem which hangs awkwardly.

None of those elements matter. Only the task matters but those sloppy elements have kept me from getting to it. The sloppiness is sloshing the pail, if you will.

With the first set of worksheets, things that don’t matter are kept constant. You’ve got space for a name .5 inches from the top of the page. The title of the worksheet is .25 inches off the left. A dividing line sits 1.26 inches from the top.

This is because I don’t care about any of these things. I don’t want my students to waste our time or their mental energy searching for the title or the name space or the first question.

I don’t want them pondering my font selection so I keep the font consistent (Block Berthold for title, Georgia for body text).

I keep alignment consistent. I use the “distribute space evenly” command constantly.

All of these efforts at a consistent template means we we get working on what matters quickly. We keep that pail full.

This school year, build your first worksheet with great intention. Make it something you can live with the entire year through. Then when you go to make a second worksheet, open your first one, save a copy, and find yourself changing only what’s important.

The most sophisticated (and highest ranking) designs used a single large image on each slide. Whether that image was a photo or even a lot of empty space (an image of nothingness) didn’t matter. A good image triggers reactions which profit the designer.

The problem then is how to fuse text to the images.

You all had plenty of solutions, some more successful than others:

Use a solid color field.

Use a semi-solid color field.

Use high-contrast areas of your photo.

Outline the text.

Drop shadow the text.

On his respectable third place finish, Jeffrey demures:

when you look at [my design] after seeing neil’s (or paul’s or ethan’s), it’s as if i did my design by mashing my fingers on the keyboard. just no finesse compared to his.

Jeffrey’s self-assessment is overly modest but I think he accurately surveys his wild successes and flopped ambitions. His running visual gag was my favorite. His was also far and away the funniest entry (though Paulo’s wins for glibness). In a field crowded with inspiration and feelgoodery, I appreciated the moxy it took to put Cambridge on a slide and ignore it for the sake of bridge jumping. If I were Chicago GSB, I’d stage Jeffrey’s interview at a downtown pub.

Two problems.

Anyway, sense of humor, sense of story, visual sense, all very much intact here. Fusing text to image, though, seems to overwhelm him.

In all fairness, his images – colorful pictures of Earth with varying contrast on hills, streets, oceans – are some of the most difficult to play with. He hedges his bets across drop shadows and outlines, spreading his losses evenly over the two of them.

The text also varies in location which means the audience has to process factors which don’t matter to Jeffrey.

Confronted with a new slide, we, the audience, have to process:

1. the geographic location (Colombus, Cambridge, etc.)
2. the number of times Jeffrey has done something (1 time, 2 times, etc.)
3. what that thing is (backing into a garage, etc.)

Which is pretty ambitious. Information density is high. Jeffrey helps us out by keeping a steady hierarchy: the cities are in one font style (white text, black outline), the number of times in another, and the activities in another.

He could’ve made life even easier for us, though, by orienting each of those elements consistently on each new slideConsider the easy readability of Neil’s slides, how they eliminate irrelevant factors by keeping all the important information in the same place every time.. Because, as is, we also have to process:

1. where the locations are oriented in the slides
2. where the quantities are oriented in the slides
3. where the activities are oriented in the slides

Jeffrey was a good enough sport to let me have a run at his project. Here are a couple solutions for his first three slides.

Use a solid color field.

Use a semi-solid color field.

Drop the color field but add a dark vignette for contrast.

There are other options, certainly, but we’ve made a good-faith attempt to solve two serious issues:

1. readability (the drop shadow / outline problem)
2. noise (the scattered placement of elements)

Along the way I think we’ve also enhanced Jeffrey’s “one, two, three” sequence, which wasn’t immediately obvious to me with the original.

I welcome other suggestions, a rebuttal from Jeffrey perhaps, and, especially, commentary from teachers uncertain how this relates at all to teaching. Odds are good, unfortunately, that they haven’t made it this far.

Neil bumped into a soft spot in our guidelines, using one of Keynote’s prefabricated templates to assist his design. After some deliberation – and on the recommendation of Neil, himself – we decided this wasn’t in the spirit of the competition.

This means:

1. Neil’s a real swell guy for bringing this to our attention.
2. Keynote comes stocked with some amazing prefab templates.
3. Ethan and Paul are entitled to the gift baskets described in the original first place announcement.
4. Among other recommendations, Jeffrey had the most unique visual hook of the remaining contestants.

This doesn’t mean:

1. Neil’s photography or writing is any less superb than we originally thought.

Thanks, apologies, it’s still been great.

Related:

1. The Contest Announcement
2. The Final Entries

Neil Winton. First place. Recipient of a gift basket including:

1. a subscription to Before & After magazine,
2. a blog-ready banner,

   <a href="/?p=333">
   <img src="/wp-content/uploads/designcomp1.jpg" width="150" height="114">
   </a>

   
3. an invitation to the judge’s panel of future design competitions.

The decision as explained by judge Dan Meyer:

In a project already tightly wound by constraints, Neil added several more. Each slide carries a photo along the top, broken at the bottom (same place same time every time) by a caption. He justifies each caption by a fixed gray line, sets each caption in the same font, begins each one with “I learned,” and ends each one with a year.

With all that, Neil has his design pinned down like a butterfly in a box. The effect is powerful and nevermore obvious than when you click through his slides quickly. With Neil’s presentation, you spend less and less time each slide figuring out where he’s stored his content (pictures at the top, captions at the bottom, the meat of the caption found just after “I learned”) and more time enjoying it.

It’s tempting to call his design “minimal.” It certainly looks simple. But deciding to constrain an already-constrained assignment is a thorny task, one which layers questions upon questions. By my eyes, Neil has answered all of them well, forming a tidy division between form and content then bringing them back together with a beautiful earthy color palette, winning a difficult competition by making it even more difficult.

The judges invite Neil to deliver an acceptance speech here, perhaps correcting our speculation and explaining his design. Congratulations are in order either way.

Related:

1. The Contest Announcement
2. The Final Entries

Announcement Schedule:

1. Second Place (tie): 09h00 PST
2. Second Place (tie): 12h00 PST
3. First Place: 15h00 PST

Ethan Bodnar. Tied for second place. The decision as explained by judge Dan Meyer:

Excepting his font selection, there isn’t much locking Ethan’s slides together. It’s tough to feel disappointed, though, when the individual slides demonstrate such tight, formal skill.

Ethan compresses a semester of design instruction into four slides.

The first two are photographic cannonballs, powerful images which slam right through my quality control checkpoints. With his final slide he conjures up the same effect, only by exclusion, using empty space to accentuate his lists of life-completed and life-to-come.

The third slide at first seems like Text Gone Wild! but it is by far my favorite. Ethan includes so much text and he imposes so much order to it (there’s some precision gridding at work here) the result is a text-heavy slide which (oddly) begs you not to read it but just to look at it.

Ethan’s point with slide three isn’t that, hey, I connect with artist Ben Frost. It’s that he connects with a lot of people – more artists than bloggers, more bloggers than authors. Ethan manipulates our perception of his work so precisely, which is a skill I can’t help but commend.

The judges invite Ethan to deliver an acceptance speech here, perhaps correcting our speculation and explaining his design. Congratulations are in order either way.

Related:

1. The Contest Announcement
2. The Final Entries

Announcement Schedule:

1. Second Place (tie): 09h00 PST
2. Second Place (tie): 12h00 PST
3. First Place: 15h00 PST

Paul Williams. Tied for second place. The decision as explained by judge Christian Long:

Given the wide open nature of the contest’s focus on topic, slide sets that immediately won you over at first glance set the bar for all other submissions. Paul William’s opening slide — “I wasn’t born perfect” — showcased 2 vital elements for the judges:

1. It was graphically sophisticated while
2. turning upside down the “highlight your strengths” tendency that most admission directors tend to be flooded by (reference to the U. of Chicago 4-slide project that Dan’s contest grew out of).

As a judge, I was pulled into Paul’s story from the get-go, loving his irony and design aesthetic. Simultaneously, we were pleased to see the ‘story’ Paul hinted at unfolding slide-by-slide while being playful about the slide layouts at each turn. When themes are maintained while offering slight variations in techniques, the audiences’ interest remains piqued and confirmed: a great combination.

After much discussion, the only constructive critique the judges would offer to Paul would be that the content only hinted at his real story (and risked being too anonymous for an admissions team to take seriously) and that the color scheme of the last slide did not match the previous 3. We would suggest that each slide’s content could be sharpened in terms of a tangible detail and that ‘red’ could show up in the final slide, while ‘green’ could play a subtle role in slides 1-3. Beyond that, this was a first-class example of intentional design with an eye on pulling the audience forward into the story.

The judges invite Paul to deliver an acceptance speech here, perhaps correcting our speculation and explaining his design. Congratulations are in order either way.

Related:

1. The Contest Announcement
2. The Final Entries

Announcement Schedule:

1. Second Place (tie): 09h00 PST
2. Second Place (tie): 12h00 PST
3. First Place: 15h00 PST

1. Second Place (tie): 09h00 PST
2. Second Place (tie): 12h00 PST
3. First Place: 15h00 PST

The work is good. Enjoy the work. The three of us certainly have.

Alice Mercer

Diane Cordell

Dave Stacey

Colette Cassinelli

John Pederson

Marcie Hull

Chris Duke

Ethan Bodner

Nancy Bosch

Glenn Moses

Carolyn Foote

Kevin Hodgson

Graham Wegner

Paul Williams

Tracy Rosen

Jeffrey Pierce

Gail Desler

Ms. H.

Paulo Ho

Neil Winton

Mindy Jurus

And the judges’ slides.

Christian Long

Scott McLeod

Dan Meyer

Here’s the current list. Add your name before 23h59 Pacific Standard Time tonight. We’ll announce winners Monday morning.

Alice Mercer
Diane Cordell
Dave Stacey
Colette Cassinelli
John Pederson
Marcie Hull
Chris Duke
Ethan Bodner
Nancy Bosch
Glenn Moses
Carolyn Foote
Kevin Hodgson
Graham Wegner
Paul Williams
Tracy Rosen
Jeffrey Pierce
Gail Desler
Ms. H.
Mr. H.
Neil Winton
Mindy Jurus

Alice Mercer
Diane Cordell
Dave Stacey
Colette Cassinelli
John Pederson
Marcie Hull
Chris Duke
Ethan Bodner
Nancy Bosch
Glenn Moses
Carolyn Foote
Kevin Hodgson
Graham Wegner
Paul Williams
Tracy Rosen
Jeffrey Pierce