A picture is worth a thousand words. It’s a theory we’ve hear several times but have never tested it to see if it was true. Nobody ever takes an excerpt of one-thousand words and replaces it with a single, stirring image that somehow manages to sum up the whole point. That’s because we have some sort of false notion that the word is king. But think about how many words have different meanings, or might sounds the same but in fact be two different words altogether. Words are tricky; pictures rarely are.
Enter Seth Godin
Presentation guru Seth Godin saw a different way. His “Godin Method” eschews the awkward words in favor of dynamic images that leave a lasting impression. Effective? Yes. Easy to pull off? Not always. You can’t just throw up a bunch of slides and expect it to make for an interesting presentation. It’ll start to feel more like a slideshow of pictures from your last vacation and your point will get lost in the middle somewhere. Each picture should represent an idea that you want to get across and should relate in a way that will help the audience to remember.
Pictures Tell a Story
If you need inspiration, pick up a couple of kids books. Notice how even without the use of words, you can tell what’s happening in the story? See how the road to granny’s house is so perfectly mapped out for you that you don’t even need reading comprehension to know the wolf is lurking along the way? That’s because the illustrators in children’s stories know to show everything that is going on for that particular page of text. If a new thread of plot comes along, say Red Riding Hood meeting the wolf, then a new page of illustration is needed. The same thing should be true for your Godin style presentation. If you have a new point to make or you need to expand on a concept further, then bring in a new slide with a new picture.
Sequential Art
An easy way to do a picture-centric slideshow is to get a bunch of pictures that go together in a sequence. Maybe start with pictures of children, moving on through the life cycle, ending your presentation with a cute elderly couple. Or use a race theme and have the first slide be the runners lining up and the last slide showing the victory of crossing the finish line. If you fill up your slideshow with a bunch of images that aren’t connected or are in stark contrast of one another, the point you are trying to make will seem unclear and random. Take a page from comic books and make the slides of your presentation flow into one another in order to show a bigger scope. If you are the type of person who usually goes for headings and subheading with bullet points, try to copy this style over to the Godin method. A “heading” picture might be a shot of a city, with the “subheading” being a look at a building in that city. The bullet points can be the different people living in that building. You can easily give a sense of “the big picture” and then bring it in to look at the details of your subject more closely. By now you have seen enough picture books, graphic novels, cartoons and movies to understand how a point is made visually. Help your audience get to granny’s house without the use of text, charts or quotes. Tell a story with your pictures and your point will come across loud and clear (and easy to understand.)
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