The 5 Best Sites And Blogs on Communication and Design

Here’s a collection of the top web resources with the best content on communication, presentations and design. 

(1) Presentation Zen

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
— Garr Reynolds  

Without doubt, Presentation Zen is the presentation blog. Best-selling author and speaker Garr Reynolds delights the reader with tons of gems on presentation preparation, design and delivery: the three key elements that make a great presentation.   

Content-wise, Presentation Zen is the benchmark all other blogs should be measured against. If you find someone who writes about presentations without knowing Garr Reynolds, do yourself a favour by not listening to him.

@presentationzen

(2) Ethos3

“In 25 years looking at stuff like this, I have never encountered something like this. You guys really know your stuff.” 
— Guy Kawasaki on Ethos3 

Ethos3 is one of the world’s best presentation agencies. They do two things: presentation design and presentation training. His founder—Scott Schwertly—is author of the boook “How to be a Presentation God”. Ethos3’s blog is full of practical tips on how to become a better presenter. 

@Ethos3 

(3) Canva 

“The easiest to use design program in the world.”
— The Webbys 

I wrote about Canva already. Canva is an online service that makes design simple for everyone. What they have is not just a blog, it’s much more than that. It’s a Design School. Here you can find valuable tips on typography, colour, images, and design in general. They also provide great tutorials and teaching materials. On a scale from 1 to 10, the value you get from their articles is about 11.

@canva 

(4) TED

“Ideas worth spreading.”
— TED mantra  

Just in case you don’t know it (I doubt it), TED is an organisation whose aim is to spread great ideas. They do it in the form of short talks (18 minutes or less). It began as a Conference on Technology, Entertainment and Design (hence TED), and now covers any topic.  

TED Talks are viewed by millions of people every day. There must be a reason for that! Here are the three TED talks I like the most.

@TEDTalks

(5) Big Fish Presentations 

“Content is King, but design is its Queen.”
— Big Fish Presentations 

These guys are not as famous as Garr Reynolds or Nancy Duarte, but they also know their stuff. Their blog covers topics from presentation theory and design to public speaking. Definitely worth checking out. 

@BigFishPresCo 

Putting all together

• Speaking.Alltop 

Alltop.com was founded by Guy Kawasaki, hence it’s guarantee for greatness. It’s an aggregator of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. Which topics? Anything you can think of. Like presentations and public speaking? Check out speaking.alltop.com. More interested in design? There you go: design.alltop.com. It’s that easy. 

@alltop 

• Echo Story

Disclaimer: I created Echo Story

Echo Story is a weekly newsletter of what I find in business, communication and design, and human-interest topics and think is worth sharing. With Echo Story I help people find better content. The idea is similar to Alltop, but it only focuses on the three topics above. Talking about communication and design, if you don’t want to be bothered finding great content yourself, you can simply subscribe to receive the best of the best straight to your inbox. Once a week, for free. 

Here's what you missed last week. Sign up free if you like it: http://eepurl.com/bdIUb9 

If you know other sites and blogs that you think should make the list, please let me know. I’d love to add them to my favourites. 

This Company Is Making Design Amazingly Simple For Everyone

“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything”, said Steve Jobs during the introduction of the very first iPhone in 2007, a product that really changed everything. 
Recently, I’ve discovered a design tool that some of you will find just as revolutionary. Certainly I find it one of the best tools available today. Introducing Canva: a website that lets you create beautiful designs in less than a minute. 

In one of my previous articles I gave you my take on the (non) importance of software tools. I said that, especially when it comes to presentations, the tool doesn't matter. It doesn’t matter whether you use Keynote or PowerPoint. The key is the approach you follow, the message you want to convey and how your craft it. Ultimately, a great presentation is the result of an activity that starts before you even open up the software. That’s why I suggest that you start creating your presentation in an analog way. Close your laptop, take a pencil and sketch your ideas on a piece of paper. Use the software only to turn your ideas from an analog form (pencil and paper) to a digital one (PowerPoint or Keynote). You can never turn a bad presentation into a good one by using a tool rather than another one. 

I still have the same opinion. I still believe that analog is the right way to go. However, every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. In this article I’m going to give you 6 reasons why I fell in love with Canva. Six reasons why you might fall in love with it, too.

(Before starting, I’m not saying that Canva can turn a bad presentation into a good one. Never! But for certain design types, it’s simply a fantastic tool. Let’s see why)

(1) It makes graphic design simple for everyone

With the time it takes to boot Photoshop, you can create a beautiful design in Canva. Canva’s designers have already created a number of layouts you can use for each design type. Trust me, especially if you’re not a professional designer, this tool is going to blow your mind. Don’t trust me? Watch this short video guide to see how easy it is and what you can do with it.  

(2) It works perfectly with social media  

I fell in love with Canva also because it’s the first tool ever that combines two of my greatest passions: design and social media. You can create designs specifically tailored to social media. You can choose among Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, you name it. Here are my Facebook cover, Twitter header and Google+ cover. All made in Canva in less than a minute.

As you can see, you don’t have to worry about the dimensions of your image. Canva will automatically adjust it for that particular social media platform.

Here are two other examples of designs I made in Canva specifically tailored to social media.

Facebook post

Twitter post

By choosing a specific social media platform from the Canva's homepage, you can be sure your design will look great because the dimensions are exactly right for that platform.  

These are simple designs. But would you know how to create them in Photoshop? Would you be able to design them in a minute? If not, go and check out Canva. 

(3) It works perfectly with anything else 

Not only is the social media integration amazing, Canva also makes it super easy to create other designs, such as posters, business cards, email headers, Kindle covers, etc. 
One of the things I do is I help people find great content. I do it by sending a weekly newsletter of what I see in business, communication and design, and human-interest topics and think is worth sharing. Here’s my email header, made in Canva.

Remember, (1) I created it in about a minute, (2) the dimensions are exactly right for an email header, so I can be sure it'll look good.

(4) It comes with professional fonts

You can choose among several professional fonts. Things like Calibri are not contemplated. I’ve discovered fonts I didn’t know before: Raleway, Quattrocento, Roboto, Over the Rainbow, and many others. They are all included in Canva.  

(5) It educates people

Many websites today have a blog section. Canva is no exception. However, these guys went further. Their blog is not just blog, but rather a Design School. Every week they come up with practical articles that educate you and make you get better at design, even if you’re not a pro. Canva’s designers teach you how to effectively use fonts, colour, images, background, etc. They also give you the keys to good branding. 

I love this concept for two reasons:

• Design reason: it makes me get better at design 
• Business reason: it makes me appreciate their product even more because it teaches me how to use it effectively. It gives me practical advice on how to take full advantage of Canva. 

That’s what businesses should do: create a great product, and give something (for free) that makes that product even better. Something that makes users appreciate the product even more.

(6) It’s free

Unless you use the images included in their library, you’ll never pay a dime. You can always upload your own images for free and use them with the nice layouts already created by their designers. Compare that with Photoshop.

Because I think tools don’t matter much, I was skeptical when I first heard of Canva. Then I tried it and fell in love with it. Try it yourself and let me know what you think. 

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed it, share it. ☺

3 Tips For Achieving Unity In Your Design

“The whole must be greater than the sum of its parts.” If a design respects this rule, then it’s unified. 

The principle of unity is one of the most important design principles. A design is unified when all the elements work together to support the design as a whole. It is unified when the elements don’t compete with each other, but rather support each other towards the common goal of communicating a message. The elements of a design should look like they belong together, rather than being arbitrarily placed on a page, slide, website, etc.   

Why is unity important?

The principle of unity is important for two reasons:

• People naturally look for a connection between elements. They see the whole first and then the sum of its parts.
• The goal of a design is to communicate a single message. [Tweet this] The more your elements are unified, the more the viewer will perceive your message as a single message.

You can achieve unity by paying attention to your choices of images, colours and style. Here are three tips to create a unified presentation (these principles are also valid for documents, websites, leaflets, you name it).

(1) Use the same font

Better yet, use the same professional font. Calibri is not a professional font. Helvetica is a professional font. You could use two (at most three) fonts as long as there is a reason for it. If there is no reason, then stick to one font only. In the presentation below I used two fonts: Gotham and Over the Rainbow. The former as the main font and the latter to give some additional comments a “human” touch. The reason for a second font was that I wanted to distinguish the main content from the comments. 

(2) Give the same “tone” to images  

This presentation by Ethos3 is a perfect example of consistency in the use of imagery. As you can see, the designer applied the same greenish effect to each image.  

Extra tip: to achieve a similar effect in PowerPoint or Keynote you can simply place a coloured rectangle above each of your images and increase the transparency. It won’t be exactly the same effect as in the above deck, yet it’ll make your images look like they belong together. In the before-after slides below, you can see the original images on the left and the same images with a transparent blue shape placed above them on the right.     

(3) Create a colour pallet

Even better, derive a colour pallet from an image that best represents your message. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a professional designer to do this. Last year I wrote a super easy step-by-step guide on how to derive a colour pallet from an image and use it throughout a presentation. 

     

For every element you use in your design, ask yourself why. Why did I choose that font? Why did I choose three fonts? Why did I use this colour rather than that colour? Asking yourself why is the first step to achieving unity.
Ideally, the relationship between the elements of your design should be so well defined that whatever you change would make your design worse.

Thanks for reading! If you found some value in this article, I'd really appreciate you sharing it out to you network. 

7 Lessons From Guy Kawasaki They Won't Teach You At Business School

Chief Evangelist of Canva, a graphics-design online service. Executive fellow at the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley. Entrepreneur and former advisor to the Motorola business unit of Google and chief evangelist of Apple. Author of 13 books, including the best business book ever written: The Art of The Start, which has now been fully revised and expanded for the first time in a decade (available here from March). If you are an entrepreneur, or you want to become one, or you are simply interested in business and entrepreneurship, and you haven't read this book, go buy one! To give you and idea, here you can watch Guy presenting the book in 2006. Guy Kawasaki is one of the most enchanting business minds of our times. Because of his experience, he has so many valuable lessons to teach us. A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to meet him in London at an event organized by 3-beards.  

Here are 7 lessons I've learnt by reading his books and by following him online in the last years. 7 business lessons they won’t teach you at business school.  

(1) Make meaning 
The best reason to start a company is not to make money, but rather to make meaning. [Tweet this] There are three ways to make meaning:

• Increase the quality of life: Spotify lets you find your favourite music in a second. It increases your quality of live. 
• Right a wrong: Canva makes design simple for everyone. Why has Melanie Perkins started Canva? Because she thought that going through the pain of learning how to use Photoshop to create nice designs was wrong. Hence, she fixed that wrong.  
• Prevent the end of something good. You see something beautiful which is being ruined and you can't stand that. So you start up to prevent that.

If you start up solely to make money, you won’t make meaning and most probably you won’t make money either. But if your goal is to make meaning, you’ll eventually make money too. As Richard Branson says, "do good, have fun, and the money will come.”

(2) Make a mantra 
Do not make a mission statement for your organisation. Make a mantra instead. Let’s compare the two with an example. 

Here is (or was) Wendy’s mission statement: 
The mission of Wendy’s is to deliver superior quality products and services for our customers and communities, through leadership, innovation and partnerships.

As Guy puts it, “this is a useless kind of statement. It is too long, not unique, not memorable.” If you go to the Wendy’s website now, you’ll see at the top of the page four words: Quality is our recipe. That’s a mantra! In fact, that’s a great mantra. It explains every employee and every customer what  they stand for.

Another examples of good mantras:

• Spotify: Music for everyone 
• Canva: Democratize design  
• Nike: Just do it! 

(3) Jump to the next curve
“Don’t be content with doing things 10% or 15% better. Do things 10 times better”, Guy says.

Here are two examples:

• The laser printer: The printing business jumped to next curve when the laser printer was invented. At the time, a printer company wouldn’t be happy with simply introducing more typefaces. It would shake up the industry by jumping to the laser printer curve.  
• Amazon: Jeff Bezos didn’t go from 250,000 books in an analog book store to 300,000 books in an analog book store. It went to 2.5 million books in a digital book store. He jumped to the next curve.

(4) Don’t worry, be crappy 
Having the above in mind, you then need to get going and ship. Ship, learn, and test. Then repeat. Don’t wait for your product to be perfect, because it will never be. In fact, your product doesn't have to be perfect—it has to be better than before. “Lots of things made the first Macintosh in 1984 a piece of crap—but it was a revolutionary piece of crap”, Guy says. 

(5) Follow the 10/20/30 rule
The 10/20/30 rule is for presenters. It goes like this:

• You should be using no more than 10 slides in your presentation
• You should be able to deliver it in 20 minutes 
• You should not be using a font smaller than 30 points. Yes, 30 points!

Even though I don’t follow this rule strictly, I do like it. I don’t follow it strictly because I don't believe in a one-size-fits-all approach. However, the 10/20/30 rule does a great job at pointing out that when it comes to presentations, simplicity is king.   

(6) Hire better than yourself 
You must have heard this hundreds of times: "As an entrepreneur, you should hire A players." Guy goes a step further. He suggests that A players hire A+ players. You should hire better than yourself. As he goes, “B players hire C players, C players hire D players, and D players hire E players. If you start hiring B players, you’ll wake up one day being surrounded by Z players.”  

(7) Be a mensch 
This is my favourite. It’s not a lesson in business, but rather a lesson in life that you can apply in business. A mensch is someone who’s admired and trusted—someone whose opinion is sought. There is no higher praise than being recognised as a mensch. There are three ways to become one: 

• Help people who cannot help you: Help for the pleasure of helping.
• Do the right thing, the right way: This is about morality! There are certain "absolutes" in life we must always adhere to.  
• Pay back society: Entrepreneurs are blessed with the ability to create great things. Therefore, they have a moral obligation to pay back society. 

Ultimately, at the end of your life you'll not be judged by how many things you own—you'll be judged by the answer to this simple question: “Did you make the world a better place?”. [Tweet this]

The links in the above presentation work best if you open it directly in Slideshare.  

Thanks for reading! If you found some value in this article, I'd really appreciate you sharing it out to you network. 

Photo: Me and Guy Kawasaki in London

How to Make a Business Pitch the Pixar Way

Since Pixar made its first feature-lenght film in 1995—Toy Story—it has been capturing people’s imagination with incredible films like Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, and Up. Not only has Pixar become famous for making the first computer-animated film ever (Toy Story), but also for its brilliant storytelling techniques.

I’ve recently stumbled across this article highlighting the 22 rules of storytelling according to Pixar. The idea came from former Pixar story artist Emma Coats who tweeted about what she had learnt during her time working at the animation film studio.

Among many of the Emma’s gems for telling a great story, here’s to me the essence of Pixar's storytelling:

Once upon a time there was ______. Every day, ______. One day ______. Because of that, ______. Because of that, ______. Until finally ______.
 
Drawing from a Bloop Animations’s video examing Pixar's storytelling rules, Caroline Siede wrote that “all Pixar films (and most good films in general) center on a call to adventure that pulls a hero from his comfortable world to a new, unfamiliar one. In Toy Story, Woody must learn to live in a world in which he isn’t Andy’s favourite toy when Buzz arrives. In Finding Nemo, Marlin must cross an entire ocean to find his abducted son. […] Watching a character react, fight, and grow in his new surroundings is what makes these Pixar films so compelling.” 

As counterintuitive as this may seem, you can apply this storytelling formula to your business presentations too. In fact, not only is this something you can apply to business pitches, it's actually something you should do if you want to make them memorable.

If you think about it, this rule goes hand in hand with the old Aristotle’s three-act structure, a storytelling technique not only used in movies, but also in writing and in many other art forms built around a story. And a presentation is an art form built around a story. [Tweet this] The three-act structure splits a narrative into three parts:

• Set up
• Confrontation
• Resolution

Here's how Aristotle's three-act structure and Pixar's storytelling rule come together.

• Set up: Once upon a time there was ______. Every day, ______. One day ______.
• Confrontation: Because of that, ______. Because of that, ______.
• Resolution: Until finally ______.

Now let’s see how you can use Aristotle in your business pitch.

Set up

At the beginning of your presentation you should describe the world as it is without your idea, product, service, etc. (Once upon a time there was ______. Every day, ______). Your audience will be with you because you are describing something they are familiar with. Then, pose a problem that changes their perspective (One day ______). If you are pitching to a customer, highlight a problem they have that you can solve. By doing that, you are creating a gap in your customer’s mind between the world as it is today and the world as it could be tomorrow if there was a solution to their problem. This is your call to adventure that pulls your hero (your audience) from their comfortable world to a new, unfamiliar one.

Confrontation

During the second part of your pitch, you should be playing with the gap you’ve created previously. Give concrete examples of what your audience’s world looks like with such a problem and what it could look like if you had a solution (Because of that, ______. Because of that, ______). It’s crucial not to reveal your solution at this stage. Remember, Marlin had to cross an entire ocean to find Nemo. 

Resolution
 
Until finally ______. This is the right time to reveal your idea, product, or service. By going through the three steps, you’ve not only created a gap in people’s minds, but you’ve also built on a desire to see that gap being filled. Once you do fill it up with your solution, they will be more inclined to accept it.  

Like these ideas? Meet me over on Twitter or Google+ to start the conversation right now!

IMAGE: iMERICA