Process diagrams

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Del curso dictado por National Research Tomsk State University

Presentation skills: Designing Presentation Slides

74 calificaciones

National Research Tomsk State University

Presentation skills: Designing Presentation Slides

74 calificaciones

Curso 2 de 4 en Specialization Presentation Skills: Speechwriting, Slides and Delivery

“Powerpoint slides are like children: no matter how ugly they are, you’ll think they’re beautiful if they’re yours” — Scott Adams, author of the comic strip “Dilbert”. Due to this cause or another, it’s a huge stress to look at most Powerpoint slides. Depending on the “design” skills of the speaker and audience’s taste slides create different emotions from a slight annoyance to physical sickness. But that is not the worst thing. The worst thing is that instead of improving the presentation such slides confuse the audience, distract it and finally oblige the speaker to explain them rather than being quite self-explanatory. The goal of this course is to change that by equipping learners with a set of tools to create simple, clear and aesthetic slides which improve the presentation of the speaker. The course covers universal design principles, templates, colors, typefaces, slides’ typography, use of photos and pictograms, composition rules and ways to create clear and meaningful charts and diagrams. This course is not a PowerPoint fundamentals course. You should have a basic knowledge of either Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote software. Don’t meddle, make your slides matter.

De la lección

Part 4: Diagrams and data visualization

This week is about typography and photographic illustrations. Applying basic typography rules allows to make decent looking slides only with text. The same goes to tables. If that’s not enough there are icons — do’s and don’ts of them when you try to spruce up your text-only slides. And finally using photos and vector arts to create really gorgeous stunning slides. Basic rules on how to search them on photobanks, how to combine them with text, when icons should be used instead of photos and vice versa.

Types of diagrams6:58

Hierarchy diagrams4:27

Process diagrams6:47

Relationships diagrams6:52

Data visualizations3:25

Column and bar charts11:09

Line charts3:10

Closing remarks2:03

Conoce a los instructores

Alexei Kapterev
Lomonosov MSU BS

Process diagrams are different from

hierarchical diagrams in one important aspect.

Process diagrams have arrows.

Hierarchical diagrams have just boxes and connecting lines.

And we know that boxes are clearly more important than connecting lines.

But in process diagrams, it's not that obvious,

what's more important, boxes or arrows?

And sometimes arrows are more important.

But most of the time of course, boxes are more important.

And this is a constant problem and a constant annoyance.

What we need to do is to dim those errors, they need to just guide the eye,

they do not need to steal all the attention away from the text.

So this is what you get if you're using smart art.

This is more or less what you get, if you are trying to make this

customized design or maybe even something like this because

you are not constrained anymore with those circles.

And I think, by the way,

that those bright blue numbers are key in designing complex diagrams.

They're key in guiding the audience's attention.

I've stolen them from somebody and I encourage you to steal them from me.

I think they work really well.

Next thing, well, when we answered the question what's more important,

boxes or arrows, and the answer was boxes.

The answer is slightly misleading because what's

more important is no the boxes itself, rather it's the text inside the box ergo.

The box should not steal all attention away from the text and

those boxes are clearly way too bright.

We need to, well, let's just remove them altogether.

And so are the arrows, by the way,

so let's remove those things altogether let's fix typography.

Let's add some unobtrusive but visible illustrations that help to communicate

the idea that we're trying to communicate and let's add the arrow back.

And what we see as a result is a design that is not bright but

actually is much more clearer and much easier to comprehend and other example.

Once again this is a real life example and a there is too much blue and

[INAUDIBLE] office, and those punctured lines

are way too noisy and the question is whether we can do without them.

And the answer is yes, we can use just white space to separate those things,

and we can remove those punctured lines.

And we can probably remove all that blue fills and replace them with just borders.

And the result will be something like that.

And I think this is a much better idea.

The next question is whether we need those blue borders at all and

the answer is well in this case probably not.

The diagram is really easy, working without borders is probably fine.

And I think the end result is much better compared to what we had before.

It takes about the same amount of space but

it's much easier to understand, it's much easier to read.

So fills are fine but borders are better.

And the next question is can we do without borders?

Next example, well, this a really complicated diagram and

it's in Russian too, but just trust me, knowing the language doesn't really help.

So as a first step, I will remove almost everything including the text,

and what we see here are lots and lots of colored boxes, and

the first thing to do would be to make them slightly more even.

I don't know why this is such a problem.

The next thing.

Do we need them to be green, and red, and purple, and another shade of green?

And the answer is, probable, no.

All we need to do, we need to catch the eye somewhere,

and then we need to lead that eye with our arrows towards the end.

So we probably need to highlight the beginning and the end,

because this is what problems are.

So, one of those boxes could be big, red and bright.

But the rest probably shouldn't be.

Next, we add those connecting lines,

arrows and we see that it is becoming way too busy.

We need to somehow separate those connecting lines from the boxes.

And the easiest things to do would be to dim of course those connecting lines

are so much better.

Now they are unobtrusive,

they just lead the eye without drawing too much attention.

Then we can add the text back and we can properly align it to the left.

In this particular example because just way too much text.

And we can as a final touch, we can add names to

those columns because those meaningful names to meaningful columns.

Remember we need to have three sort of clear focus points.

And they think the end result is much better, than it was before.

This is what you can achieve with optimization.

Less connection lines, less fills.

The same amount of text actually, much lighter design, much easier on the eyes.

And a final example.

Is not like there's too much text here, but there's just way too much color.

Everything is blue round, dark blue, and green, and orange, and yellow.

And apparent the most important things are grey here,

I know it's Russian but you can actually fill this out for yourself.

Because the most important things here are marked with those bright yellow numbers.

Unfortunately, those bright yellow numbers

compete with the rest of the colored boxes.

So they don't seem all that bright in contrast.

So what we need to do, we need to dim move to background everything else.

And we need those gray boxes to really stand out.

And this, I think is a much better design which tells almost the same story.

And it tells it so much better than before.

To conclude, when you are designing a process diagram you know that you need to

create three to five focal points.

But with a process diagram you really need to really think about

the meaning of the diagram, what exactly we're trying to communicate.

What are those most important focal points?

It's easy with hierarchy, not so much with boxes diagrams and

you need to dim or remove everything else.

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